WE WANT TO BE HAPPY—BUT DO WE ALSO WANT NOT TO BE?
by Leila Rosen
with a discussion of Madama Loisel, from Guy de
Maupassant’s short story “The Necklace”
I once thought real
happiness was just not in the cards for me. How could it be when everyone around
me was a fake, my family was annoying and ordinary, no one treated me with the
honor and deference I felt were my due—and anyway, I reasoned at the advanced
age of 19, the chances of anyone feeling happy in this world for more than
brief moment were a zillion to one.
How
I saw happiness changed when I began to study Aesthetic Realism. First, I
learned that whether or not I was happy didn’t depend on circumstances—on what
I had or didn’t have, or on how other people treated me—but rather on how I
saw the world. Happiness, explained
Eli Siegel, is “going to come by a person’s being able to say: ‘I’ve honestly
looked at the world in relation to myself, and I like the relation.’”
And
I was amazed to read this, in Mr. Siegel’s “Questions for Everyone”: “Does
something in me want to be unhappy?” Why would anyone want to feel
unhappy?—but somehow, I felt this described me. With the next question, I began
to learn why: “Do I feel more important when I’m unhappy?” The answer was
“YES!”
With this began the most important, liberating, joy-giving
education of my life! “Happiness,” said Mr. Siegel, “can be defined as the
state of being able to say truly you like the world.” We like the world, I
learned, when we feel reality’s opposites are together well. I felt this, for
instance, as I stood on the shore at Coney Island—looking out at the vast
expanse of ocean, as the waves rose and fell, were powerful and yet sent forth
a delicate spray. In high school, I was excited to see, through the lens of a
microscope, tiny beings in a drop of ordinary pond water, and to learn how the
soprano part I sang blended and contrasted with the lower parts, making for the
rich, haunting harmony in a 16th century madrigal. In these
instances, I experienced the central thing in happiness, because I felt—though
I couldn’t put it clearly—at one with the world outside of me.
Meanwhile,
the other feeling I described, that I’d never be happy, was with me a lot of the time, and I
had no idea why. Mr. Siegel explained:
While the self wants to be happy—that is, be at one with
the world—
it
also has a certain satisfaction in not being at one with the world, because
[that might mean] you give up some of yourself for the world to take. Since we
often are in a mood to have all of ourselves to ourselves, and we don’t want to
give up any of it and so lose our ‘independence,’ this also means we don’t want
to be happy.
This explains why, as I
said in my first Aesthetic Realism consultation, I had trouble giving
sustained attention to things: my studies, other people, books, even a sweater
I was knitting. I learned that being able to say about one thing after another
“It’s not that important”—had with it the triumph of feeling I was superior to
the mundane world, and I had myself, undiluted.
One
form this superiority took was feeling I should be treated with kid gloves,
because I was more sensitive than other people, more easily hurt. I often felt
left out. When I overheard members of my girl scout troop talking about a
rehearsal for our show, I grew suspicious: Why wasn’t I invited? I sulked,
finally forcing my mother to take me. As it turned out, only a few people were
needed for the rehearsal. I was mortified; then I milked even this for another
reason to be unhappy.
Seeing
this tendency in me, my consultants once asked, “What is the great insult to you that you get from everyone?” I
said, “I think it's that they see me as a little kid.” They disagreed, saying
“It’s that they're not you. That's the way we're insulted by every other human
being. They're not us, and they seem to think they're important anyway.” [LR] This was true! I took it as an
affront that I wasn’t the first thing on other people’s minds. Yet when people did
show interest in or concern about me, I felt they were butting in and wouldn’t
leave me alone. No matter how you sliced it, I was going to be unhappy. Class
Chairman Ellen Reiss once asked me if I’d felt I was “Picked-out-for-disaster
Rosen.” Yes—and that I’m no longer driven by this feeling is a cause of
tremendous gratitude for what I’ve learned!
II.
My
Education about Happiness and Unhappiness Continues
“Is our desire to be happy
all that it should be?,” asked Mr. Siegel. “It isn’t; we can be pretty sure of
that. Because to desire to be happy is an art, it’s a philosophy, it’s a big
thing.”
I’m
glad I can study how I’ve wanted to be happy and also not to be—and it’s
a live subject. For instance, speaking with my husband, jazz pianist and music
teacher
How
might a person use occurrences like these not to be unhappy? The answer,
Aesthetic Realism teaches, is to be found in aesthetics—in how opposites are
present; and the central opposites are always self and world. For example: rain, weather as such, and time
are big aspects of the world we meet all the time. A person could have a good
time thinking about what rain is, and how it affects other things, such as
roads, cars, grass, the colors of things, one’s own feelings. And we could ask:
“What is my attitude to time? How do other people see it?” Though one might
still be late, the state of mind making for this kind of thought has much more
respect in it, and it would make for greater ease and pleasure.
I’m
so glad I can learn about the moment by moment fight between wanting to be
happy through liking reality and wanting to have the pleasure of contempt by
finding reasons to be displeased. That I have a marriage in which my husband
and I can be friendly critics of each other as to this is cause for tremendous
gratitude.
III. What
Did She Think Would Make Her Happy?
I’ll speak now about the
main character in one of the most famous short stories ever written, read by
millions of people—including high school students like those I teach: “The
Necklace,” by Guy De Maupassant. As I do, I’ll be quoting from an Aesthetic
Realism class in which Ellen Reiss discussed this story, showing it has
centrally to do with the matter of what we think will make us happy—and how we
also arrange not to be. The story begins:
She
was one of those pretty and charming girls who are sometimes, as if by a
mistake of destiny, born into a family of clerks. She had no dowry, no
expectations, no means of being known, understood, loved, wedded by any rich
and distinguished man; and she let herself be married to a little clerk at the
Ministry of Public Instruction.
What
this woman, Mathilde Loisel, feels is related to what I once felt: doomed to be
unhappy because she was born, as she saw it, into the wrong family, and that
“she had really fallen from her proper station.” Yet right away, we also have
the thing that will make us happy: the aesthetic way of dealing with the
world, which is in the style of Guy De Maupassant. There is in the sound of
these opening sentences, Ms. Reiss explained, “a sweet ripplingness,” and then
“a let-down.” His description of the ordinariness, even dullness, of French
middle-class life has drama. For example:
She
suffered ceaselessly, feeling herself born for all the delicacies and all the
luxuries. She suffered from the poverty of her dwelling, from the wretched look
of the walls, from the worn-out chairs, from the ugliness of the curtains. All those
things, of which another woman of her rank would never even have been
conscious, tortured her and made her angry....She thought of...silent
antechambers hung with Oriental tapestry, lit by tall bronze
candelabra,...of...delicate furniture carrying priceless curiosities....She had
no dresses, no jewels, nothing. And she loved nothing but that; she felt made
for that.
Said Ms. Reiss,”Everyone is
something like this lady. We have a notion: If I had this [or that], I would be
pleased....There’s a desire to be happy through owning the world.”
Of
course, there’s nothing wrong with wanting a nice home, or wanting to improve
one’s situation in life—yet we should ask: Why do we want these? Is it
to feel we’re getting along well with things, with reality, or to feel we
should be in a position to look down on the lesser, more commonplace beings of
this world? Mme. Loisel feels the latter, and we see in this passage that she
feels humiliated in not having what she thinks she needs to be happy:
When
she sat down to dinner, before the round table covered with a tablecloth three
days old, opposite her husband, who uncovered the soup tureen and declared with
an enchanted air, “Ah, the good
pot-au-feu! I don't know anything better than that,” she thought...of delicious
dishes served on marvelous plates, and of the whispered gallantries which you
listen to with a sphinx-like smile, while you are eating the pink flesh of a
trout or the wings of a quail.
In her picture of what will
make her happy, Mme. Loisel is arranging to be unhappy. Here,
she’s like many people: she cannot take pleasure in ordinary things, like good
home-cooked food, and sees her husband as a fool for doing so; she cannot see
everyday reality as having wonder. Asked Ms. Reiss,
Are
we interested in seeing what the world is? Is that going to make us happy? Or
is having it present us with certain things, give us the goodies...going to
make us happy? What is it that will hold up?
And
she explained how the art of Maupassant is a criticism of how Mme. Loisel sees:
“The style here is a relation of richness and a certain bluntness. There’s
terrific economy.” Yet, she explained, in this rather short story, “you feel
there’s abundance.”
One
evening, Mme. Loisel’s husband comes home with something he thinks will make
her happy: an invitation to a ball at the palace of the Ministry of Public
Instruction. Yet,
Instead
of being delighted,...she threw the invitation on the table with disdain,
murmuring:
“What
do you want me to do with that?”
“But, my dear, I thought you would be glad.
You never go out, and this is such a fine opportunity. I had awful trouble to
get it. Everyone wants to go; it is very select, and they are not giving many
invitations to clerks. The whole official world will be there.”
She
looked at him with an irritated eye, and she said, impatiently:
“And what do you want me to put on my back?”
Flustered
at seeing her burst into tears, he asks: “What’s the matter?”
By a violent effort, she had conquered her
grief, and she replied, with a calm voice, while she wiped her wet cheeks:
“Nothing. Only I have no dress, and
therefore I can't go to this ball. Give your card to some colleague whose wife
is better equipped than I.”
Mme. Loisel is quite mean
as she makes the mistake of many wives—blaming a husband for her unhappiness
and punishing him. Cowed by her, he agrees that she should have a new dress,
though it will cost all that he has saved for another purpose. But she’s still miserable:
she has no jewels. Her husband suggests she wear flowers: “It's very stylish at
this time of the year. For ten francs you can get two or three magnificent
roses.” “She was not convinced. ‘No; there's nothing more humiliating than to
look poor among other women who are rich.’”
“The
idea that one’s ability to like the world depends on being made supreme in it
is here,” said Ellen Reiss, and she asked, “What is it a child coming into this
world is born for? Is it to see meaning in the world, or to dazzle the world?”
Mme. Loisel thinks it’s the second, and so she agrees when her husband says she
might ask to borrow some jewels from her rich friend, Mme. Forestier, whom she
rarely visited “because she suffered so much” by the contrast between their situations.
Generously, her friend shows her a box full of gold, pearls and precious
stones, saying, “Choose, my dear.” Yet,
despite their beauty, she still asked, “Haven't you any more?”
All
of a sudden she discovered, in a black satin box, a superb necklace of
diamonds, and her heart began to beat with an immoderate desire. Her hands
trembled as she took it. She fastened it around her throat, outside her
high-necked dress, and remained lost in ecstasy at the sight of herself.
Then she asked, hesitating, filled with
anguish:
“Can you lend me that, only that?”
And she does. Mme. Loisel
has now within her grasp what she thinks will make her happy. At the ball, she
dazzles many men.
She danced with intoxication, with passion,
made drunk by pleasure, forgetting all, in the triumph of her beauty, in the
glory of her success, in a sort of cloud of happiness composed of all this
homage, of all this admiration, of all these awakened desires, and of that
sense of complete victory which is so sweet to woman's heart.
This is a description of a
certain notion of happiness. Mr. Siegel writes:
The
feeling of being agog in an honest fashion belongs to happiness. There is a desire to be gloriously dizzy and
exaltingly abandoned. But that...is not going to be got by shortcuts....There
is no porch climbing to happiness.” [TRO 1011]
And so, as they leave the
ball at 4 a.m. and return home, she feels “All was ended for her. And as to
him, he reflected that he must be at the Ministry at ten o'clock.” Inside their
apartment,
She removed the wraps, which covered her
shoulders, before the glass, so as once more to see herself in all her glory.
But suddenly she uttered a cry. She had no longer the necklace around her neck!
Her husband, already half undressed,
demanded:
“What is the matter with you?”
She turned madly toward him:
“I have—I have—I've lost Mme. Forestier's
necklace.”
Her husband goes back over
their route, trying to find it.
He went to Police Headquarters, to the
newspaper offices, to offer a reward; he went to the cab companies—everywhere,
in fact, whither he was urged by the least suspicion of hope.
She waited all day, in the same condition
of mad fear before this terrible calamity.
Loisel returned at night with a hollow,
pale face; he had discovered nothing.
Rather
than admit they have lost the necklace, they decide they must replace it, no
matter how much it costs—hoping Mme. Forestier won’t notice.
They
went from jeweler to jeweler, searching for a necklace like the other,...sick
both of them with chagrin and with anguish. [At last] they found...a string of
diamonds which seemed to them exactly like the one they looked for. It was
worth forty thousand francs. They could have it for thirty-six.
Spending all their savings,
entering into “ruinous obligations,” borrowing from usurers. M. Loisel
“compromised all the rest of his life” to pay for this diamond necklace. To
their relief, Mme. Forestier doesn’t notice the substitution.
Maupassant describes in vivid
prose the change that takes place in Mme. Loisel as she now, because of her own
conceit, must live “the horrible existence of the needy.”
She took her part...with heroism. That
dreadful debt must be paid. She would pay it....She came to know what heavy
housework meant and the odious cares of the kitchen. She washed the dishes,
using her rosy nails on the greasy pots and pans. She washed the dirty
linen...; she carried the slops down to the street every morning, and carried
up the water, stopping for breath at every landing. And, dressed like a woman
of the people, she went to the fruiterer, the grocer, the butcher, her basket
on her arm, bargaining, insulted, defending her miserable money sou by sou.
After 10 years, they paid
off everything. And though Mme. Loisel now looked old, “with frowsy hair,
skirts askew, and red hands,” we can see that her idea of what would make her
important and happy has not essentially changed.
Sometimes,...she
sat down near the window, and she thought of that gay evening of long ago, of
that ball where she had been so beautiful and so feted.
One day while taking a
walk, she sees Mme. Forestier and decides to tell her the truth about the
necklace. She greets her old friend, who doesn’t recognize her and is shocked
to see how she’s changed.
“Yes, I have had days hard enough, since I
have seen you, days wretched enough—and that because of you!”
“Of me! How so?”
“Do you remember that diamond necklace
which you lent me to wear at the ministerial ball?”
“Yes. Well?”
“Well, I lost it.”
“What do you mean? You brought it back.”
“I brought you back another just like it. And
for this we have been ten years paying. You can understand that it was not easy
for us, us who had nothing. At last it is ended, and I am very glad.”
Mme. Loisel’s pride here is
of two kinds, representing two ideas of what will make her happy: one, the
justice of being able to meet an obligation justly; and two, being able to be
superior—here, by feeling she’d successfully fooled Mme. Forestier. But had
she?
Mme. Forestier had stopped.
“You say that you bought a necklace of
diamonds to replace mine?”
“Yes. You never noticed it, then! They were
very like.”
And
she smiled with a joy which was proud and naive at once.
Mme.
Forestier, strongly moved, took her two hands.
“Oh, my poor Mathilde! Why, my necklace was
paste. It was worth at most five hundred francs!”
The deep theme of this
story, said Ms. Reiss, is: “If we go after substitutes for liking the world
through being fair to it as we see it, are we asking for disaster for
ourselves?”
The great news is: People can learn to have the happiness
that comes from seeing the world truly and liking it. “In happiness,” said Mr.
Siegel,
there
is the wonderful and the ordinary. Every person has to feel that his feet are
on the ground if he is to be happy; every person has to feel there is something
wonderful about the ground and it isn’t just ground....Aesthetic Realism does
think that happiness is the most wonderful thing in the world, and yet it is a
study.
That study can enable women
and men everywhere to have real, lasting happiness!
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