The Drama of Hardness & Softness in Women—a consideration of Balzac’s novel “Eugenie Grandet”
“Hardness and softness do become one in art, but they are used against
each other in ordinary life.” — Eli Siegel
I once felt that the way I went from sweetness to brittle hardness, from toughness to soothing tenderness, made no sense. I know the tremendous relief and gratitude of learning from Aesthetic Realism that this painful rift can end. Eli Siegel understood and explained a fundamental debate that goes in every self, between our hope to like the world honestly, see it with meaning; and the hope to have contempt—to get an “addition to self through the lessening of something else.” Aesthetic Realism taught me that a woman will feel integrated and will increasingly like how hardness and softness are in her, when her purpose in everything she does is to like the world and be fair to it.
Growing up in Springfield, Missouri I wanted to be a kind person. Although I did nice things for people, it was often out of obligation and the hope of being liked and praised. In my high school yearbook, a classmate wrote “You’re the sweetest person I ever met, stay as sweet as you are.” Yet in a photograph a girlfriend took of me glaring into the camera with a stony face, it was clear something else was going on.
In Eli Siegel’s essay “Medusa is a Nice Girl,”—Medusa is the snake haired woman in Greek mythology whose looks turn men into stone—he describes a fight that can be in any girl and was raging in me. He writes:
“A girl often gets a feeling that is so hard it frightens her, and she can get a look in her face that frightened the one who sees it. The possibility of sweetness and hardness, or unappealingness and forbiddingness is there within a girl: the two are large forces from the beginning.”
The Fight in Me about Hardness and Softness
As a child I would explore the pasture behind our house looking for arrowheads and interesting rocks. Sometimes finding a fossil, it would fill me with wonder to think about how a little leaf or insect, alive millions of years ago became imprinted into stone. I also liked taking tap dance lessons and doing the “shuffle, hop, step” routine—the same foot that softly brushed the floor, came down hard on the ball of the foot. The soft shuffle and the hard tap served one purpose in a dance, and I felt proud as I used my feet to be exact. This, I learned years later from Aesthetic Realism, represented the desire in me to see the world with form and meaning, to like it. But the same feet I used on behalf of respect in dance, I also used to angrily put the world in its place with contempt. Though I could be sweet and polite, I threw tantrums when I didn’t get my way, once kicking the car window so hard it broke.
After school I sometimes went to work with my mother, a nurse who took care of elderly persons in a nursing home. On weekends we often went to rodeos, where my father, a cowboy, rode in various events. From very early I felt the way my parents would go from being affectionate with each other to being angry and coldly distant was painful and foolish, and I was scornful of them both. In my mind, I came to feel I needed to harden myself and not let things get to me. My mother remembered me, at the age of five, saying that I didn’t need her anymore and that I didn’t like to be held or hugged by my family. I needed to know what Mr. Siegel explains in his essay:
“A girl sees herself as not caring enough for other people, as too concentratedly involved in her own feelings and hopes….” [He continues] Hardness and softness do become one in art, but they are used against each other in ordinary life…. A girl is not hard for the same reason she is soft. She is soft in order to be liked; she is hard in order to protect herself.”
I wanted to be liked! I thought my statuesque manner of walking, which I practiced assiduously in front of the mirror, would impress the popular clique of girls I wanted to belong to. But I hated the way I insincerely arranged myself, changing my opinions depending on who I was with. I was often agitated, sometimes soothing myself by eating a package of cookies. With boys and later men, though outwardly I tried to seem soft and yielding, inwardly I felt rigid and unmoved. When one high school boyfriend told me that I was a tease, I felt cheap; and when another said I “kissed liked a dead fish,” I was devastated.
By the age of thirteen I was beginning to feel I was incapable of being deeply affected by anything or anyone, including a man I hoped to care for. Meanwhile, I had a growing interest in sculpture, and began studying art after high school. In the years that followed I gave and got much pain in love, including in a marriage that ended in divorce.
In my first Aesthetic Realism consultation which I had by telephone from Missouri, I heard questions that understood me so deeply and began to change the direction of my life. My consultants asked, “Do you want things to affect you, but do you also feel there has been a barrier, a padding between yourself and the outside world? With all of your cheerfulness have you worried about some lack of feeling in yourself?” Hearing this question, my heart began beating with new hope. “Yes, that bothers me a lot,” I said.
I was given the beginning Aesthetic Realism assignment to write one thing I liked in the outside world each day. Once when I wrote about an autumn day that was both cool and crisp and sunny, my consultants asked, “Are those opposites you are trying to put together in yourself?” Yes, they were.
And when I was assigned to write a soliloquy of my mother and father at the age of 18, I began to see them for the first time as people in their own right, with hopes and fears, longings and disappointments. This made for a new respect and care for them. As my mother saw how I was becoming less selfish, needing and welcoming her perception and criticism, she joined me in the study Aesthetic Realism, and I love her for it. The thick padding that I thought would be wrapped around me forever began to drop away, and I was affected by the world in new exciting ways, through books, art, music. Colors looked brighter; sounds were more vivid. I began to feel really hopeful about love.
The Drama of Hardness and Softness in a French Novel
Eugenie Grandet, the 1833 novel by the great French author Honoré de Balzac, shows the fierce mix up in his title character Eugenie between hardness and softness. Through the knowledge of Aesthetic Realism, we can learn from choices she makes that harden her to the world and people.
For twenty-three years Eugenie Grandet has lived a sheltered life in a small French village with her parents. Her father, Monsieur Grandet, has amassed a fortune, and is a ruthless miser. As he scrimps on expenses—allowing a fire only during the coldest winter months, rationing candles and flour enough for one loaf of bread a day—he is obsessed with gold, which he has in vast quantities. The only two things in the world that mean anything to him are his money and Eugenie, his sole heiress. Every year on her birthday he gives his daughter a gift of gold coins which she keeps in a little velvet bag.
Eugenie, naïve and accepting of her father’s ways, spends most of her time with her mother laboring to mend the household linen and to knit sleeves and stockings to keep them warm in winter. But what is going on in her mind? I have seen that when a young woman seems to be acquiescent and yielding, she is likely inwardly angry. Mr. Siegel explains in his essay: “And if a girl can be angry,” “she can want to maintain herself against what is inimical.”
One evening Eugenie’s cousin Charles arrives unexpectedly from Paris, he becomes the bright spot in what Balzac calls her “monotonous existence”. Charles is handsome and gallant. Balzac’s prose is a beautiful oneness of hardness and softness, keenness and compassion. Eugenie, he writes: “had never in her life seen such a paragon of beauty, so wonderfully dressed…. [And he continues:] Into a girl’s innocent heart and uneventful life there comes a day marked with delight, when the sun’s rays seem to shine into her very soul…, when her heart beats more quickly and her quickened brain, ceases to think at all, but all ideas are dissolved in a feeling of undefined longing….”
Charles does represent a sight of a wider world to Eugenie—of Parisian excitement and elegance, and she is smitten by him. But Charles, we learn, is a spoiled dandy, raised in privilege and excess. He sees himself as a cut above his country cousin and the next morning at breakfast seeing the house in daylight asks: “‘Do you always live here’… finding the room even more hideous… than it had seemed by candlelight the evening before.”
When Charles learns that his father has become bankrupt and committed suicide, Eugenie is sympathetic and gives her cousin “the most loving and tender solicitude.” When a woman’s desire to have a man runs ahead of her desire to know him, it is sure to make for disaster. In his book James and the Children, Eli Siegel explains:
“If we are not interested in the feelings of others, in the feelings walking about as people walk, sitting as people sit, lying down as people lie down—we may be either deceived by them or be cruel to them.”
Eugenie is deceived. While Charles seems utterly shaken by his father’s death, she does not see that he is more devastated by the fact that he is now penniless. Balzac hints that she has some criticism of Charles but swiftly tries to make excuses, endowing the “man of her choice” with only fine qualities. With flattering and calculating self-pity, Charles writes a letter to his lover, Annette, in Paris telling her that he can no longer maintain his extravagant lifestyle and must say goodbye. Eugenie finds the letter while Charles is sleeping, and we see through Balzac’s keen observation that something other than benevolent softness is driving Eugenie— “Must I give him up already?” she thinks.
When Eugenie realizes that Charles needs money to pay many debts “feminine pity,” Balzac writes, “that most insidious emotion, takes possession of her heart.” Eugenie gives Charles all her gold. At first, he refuses, but finally accepts. Balzac writes: “He took her hand and kissed it. “You are an angel, [he said] What can a question of money ever be between us two.”
Balzac tells us that from this point on Charles begins to wear his “mourning more lightly.” Charles and Eugenie now spend many tender moments together. And when he leaves France for the East Indies to work, they swear their love to each other forever. Eugenie has made the mistake of women throughout time. She is using a man to be less interested in the world.
Like Eugenie, I once felt that a sign of how much I loved a man was in how much I was consumed in my thoughts about him. Once in a typing class I completely missed the lesson as I typed over and over my boyfriend’s name. My consultants asked me: “Do you think in your doings with men you have wanted to mold them?” Yes, I said; and they asked, “Do you want to have the same purpose with a man as you do as a sculptor with a piece of stone—to bring out beauty and strength?”
In the novel, though seven years go by with no word from Charles, Eugenie remains devoted. But Charles has not been pining for her. He has been making a fortune in the African slave trade.
Balzac keenly reveals to us the disaster taking place in Eugenie as she, absorbed in her obsession with a man whom she does not know, hardens and dulls herself to the world around her, welcoming contempt. Her father dies; she inherits the Grandet fortune, and eligible men greedy for her money, flatter and pay homage to her nightly with the hope of having her hand in marriage. But writes Balzac, she: “made up her mind to turn an impenetrable face to the world.” [and] “let no trace of the bitter storm in her heart appear on her calm face. Her unhappiness was concealed beneath a mask of politeness.”
And even as Eugenie consents to marry a man of the village she does so only on the condition that she remain a virgin. Balzac writes: She “kept her soul unspotted by contact with the world, [and had] all an old maid’s rigidity.” In his essay Mr. Siegel explains “When we are angry, with the desire to maintain ourselves, rigidity is employed.”
What I Learned from Aesthetic Realism about Hardness and Softness in Myself
Like Eugenie Grandet, I wanted a man to adore me while I remained aloof and intact. In an early consultation I was asked: “Have you had a “caressing” attitude and a “fist” attitude? Have you been unkind with both ways?” I had! While I thought I could charm my way with any man, I got hurt and angry if I didn’t succeed in the getting the adoration I wanted. Once, when having dinner with friends in a restaurant, I politely excused myself, drove home, called a man I had been seeing, cursed him out then returned to dinner, feeling victorious. But I was so ashamed that I didn’t want to leave the house for days and could not look this man in the eye the next time I saw him.
My gratitude to Aesthetic Realism is unbounded for enabling me, increasingly with every year, to feel that I can have a good effect on a man and that a man can add to me. When I began to know Jaime Torres, a podiatrist originally from Puerto Rico who was studying Aesthetic Realism, I respected him for his passionate feeling that ethics be the basis of health care in our nation. But more than I knew, I was in a debate between wanting to care for a man and also wanting to keep myself to myself. Although I felt I was just yearning to be asked out, somehow it didn’t happen.
In a consultation I spoke about my distress. My consultants asked me “Do you like to intimidate men.” Yes, I think I do, I answered. And they continued, “Does every man you know, know it?” This was a surprise, but I saw that it was true and was inspired to change. Jaime had noticed and was critical of what he described as my ‘I don’t need anyone, I’m happy the way I am,’ attitude. And he encouraged me to like the world in new ways—through learning about the land, culture and music of his native Puerto Rico, and through the Spanish language. Through knowing and being close to him I have more feeling about other people, including the students I teach.
I am glad to say that Jaime and I are now happily married. Together we have the great good fortune to be studying in Aesthetic Realism classes taught by the Chairman of Education Ellen Reiss, whom I love for her great kindness. In a class discussion several years ago, Miss Reiss asked me: “Do you think you are married to an art situation?”: and she encouraged me to study the opposites in Jaime as a means of knowing him more deeply and seeing how he is related to all people and the culture of the world. I saw, and happily continue to see, how he is a relation of surface and depth, humor and seriousness, logic and emotion, liveliness and thoughtfulness.
We are both in the midst of this most romantic study and our lives are so rich. I have seen that good will—which Mr. Siegel said is the “tempered oneness of criticism and caress, “exactness and devotion”—is the one purpose that will have us honestly proud of how hardness and softness are in us. Every woman needs to know this!
—For Further Reading—
“Medusa Is a Nice Girl” by Eli Siegel