THE NEST
53
shares
(the term itself is inappropriate) is a multiplied mistake. Even
enjoyment with just a touch of collective character--say a society
of innocent gourmets-is heading for trouble, and guiltier concerts
are in the offing.
The sickness is in the surrender of principles. Can you count the
crimes of day-to-day promiscuity? Of those open but unmentioned
things
held back from the "common" life--of that itching, those
temptations which provoke domestic friction? Are any familiarities
barred in the family? And once in the family, out with the dirty
linen, as cleanliness is to be reserved for strangers. A man allows
himself any number of privacies in his private life,
his
private bath
(or his privy). What facilities can rival those of the home for free
concupiscence? The first thing a man does when he gets home is
undo the buttons which morality prescribes to keep his body in check.
The clothing for the home is the dishabille. And what opportunities
beckon in those wrappers that hide nothing, those half-open doors,
those glimpses, possibly accidental, of the rites of the washbasin or the
dressing-table; the domesticated man has a thousand excuses to enter
bedrooms and more intimate quarters that belong to somebody else.
The young girls painted by Greuze offer a sublime illustration of the
immodesty which domestic trust and simplicity encourage: the ero–
ticism of the unadjusted negligee, of full bosoms in bursting bodices,
transparent underwear, suspiciously moist skin, childish naked parts
trembling in tender embraces. That smoldering canvas
in
the Louvre:
two
friends
or "two sisters"? And of what do Greuze's mothers dream,
those women with swooning eyes, with breasts bared to children
visibly too big to be fed? Incest is first imagined or consummated,
of course,
in
the nest. The sexual initiation of children usually takes
place there, also. "Inside" there is no dressing up: father and son
learn to admire a ripening daughter or a sensuous new development
in a sister.
If
a family grows, and its shelter stays as it was, won't its
members be literally thrown on top of one another? Children, whether
they want to or not, assist at their parents' special game, distinguish
its echoes, and form collections of allusions to it. And, naturally, the
servants have their role: even though their presence counts for nothing,
they cannot refuse to participate. Children usually pick up the essen–
tial gestures of love from their nurses. One knows, for instance, that
old recipe of nurses for calming squalling babies: manipulate their
sexual organs. Freud and Havelock Ellis have shown that governesses,
exploiting the opportunities offered by bathing, undressing, or sleeping
together, can scarcely resist the temptation of the children entrusted
