Le drame du mariage, c’est qu’il mutile la femme

“Le drame du mariage, c’est qu’il mutile la femme” is the proposition at the center of Claire Farel’s critique of marriage: its harm lies not simply in failing to guarantee happiness, but in confining women to repetition and routine. The novel gives that argument consequences beyond the page. When Claire reads from her work at a Jewish school, the sentence becomes a flashpoint over feminism, religious authority, and the risks of speaking publicly about women’s roles.

The claim and its setting

At a literary meeting organized by Adam Wizman for the students at the Jewish school where he taught French, Claire read from her own book and from Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. Adam had invited her after writing several letters over six months. Knowing that Claire hesitated partly because the school was religious, he stressed that he wanted his students to encounter major feminist writing, including the work of de Beauvoir, on whom Claire had written a book.

The line that provoked controversy appeared in a passage about marriage: its tragedy, Claire argued, was not that it failed to provide the happiness it promised—happiness could not be guaranteed—but that it mutilated women by condemning them to repetition and routine. The statement frames marriage as a structure that can diminish women’s lives, rather than as an arrangement whose value can be measured only by whether it makes them happy.

The school controversy

The school’s response revealed how sharply the claim collided with its community’s expectations. Two students told their parents that the essayist had discussed women’s place and marriage in terms contrary to what the Torah taught. The school’s leadership told Adam that the parents were shocked. Although most parents welcomed Claire’s visit enthusiastically and were open-minded, a minority pressed the administration, fearing the influence she might have on their daughters.

A petition followed, and Adam received a warning. The novel presents the beginning of Adam and Claire’s relationship under this sign of threat: not only personal risk, but a clash between feminist criticism and a religiously conservative setting in which marriage was held sacred and everyday life was shaped by religious precepts and rigorously assigned roles. The dispute makes the sentence an action within the story. A literary argument about women’s lives unsettles the school’s boundaries over what its students should hear.

Adam’s marriage and religious practice

The sentence’s significance deepens through Adam’s own experience of marriage. After returning from an unsuccessful period living in Israel, he taught French at a Jewish school and lived within a close-knit family and communal world. His wife, Valérie Berdah, became increasingly observant and began using the name Sarah. She changed her clothing, wore a headscarf, and sought stricter observance of dietary rules, Shabbat, and the laws of family purity.

Those laws shaped the couple’s physical life: during the prescribed period around menstruation, Sarah could not touch Adam, and she slept on a mattress on the floor. Adam could not bear the sight of his wife nearly on the ground. For almost twenty years he had remained faithful to a partner who supported his work and cared for their children, and he celebrated her at her request in the traditional Friday-evening song “The Virtuous Woman.” Yet at forty-two, he felt he was living with a stranger. His account complicates any simple opposition between religious observance and personal choice: Sarah’s practice had its own convictions and forms, while Adam experienced their shared life as one without desire or a future.

Desire, obligation, and separation

Adam’s relationship with Claire made the costs of that life newly visible to him. Their passion drew him away from the placidity of his marriage, but he initially refused to leave his family. He described the weight of Jewish identity as a force holding him back: he feared abandoning his home, losing daily contact with his daughters, and becoming an outcast from his community. The novel connects this reluctance to a history of transmission and survival, intensified for Adam by antisemitic violence and the January 2015 killings at Charlie Hebdo and the Hyper Cacher de la porte de Vincennes. For three days after those attacks, he stayed home with his wife and daughters behind closed shutters; shared vulnerability bound the family even as his marriage was failing.

After a year, Adam finally told his family he was leaving and contemplated the religious divorce Sarah would need if she wanted to rebuild her life. He and Claire eventually separated from their former spouses and built an intense, secluded life together. For a short time, they spent days in their apartment making love, believing themselves to share an experience of unmatched intensity. The arrangement did not remain sealed from family life: Adam’s daughter Mila arrived with a suitcase after rejecting the religious controls imposed on her in Brooklyn. Claire tolerated Mila’s presence but did not try to form an affectionate bond with her, exposing the distance between the lovers’ private ideal of intimacy and the obligations and tensions of daily life.

A recurring measure of women’s lives

The novel returns to Claire’s claim through contrasting forms of religious and domestic experience. At Adam and Claire’s home, Jewish customs remained part of their everyday life: Claire accepted major celebrations and the consumption of kosher food out of respect for Adam, without being portrayed as having been forced to convert. A mezuzah on the apartment door prompts Alexandre to joke that an alarm would offer better protection. The small object turns religious belonging into a visible household practice, while the couple’s differences remain a source of tension as well as attachment.

Mila’s history shows another consequence of family and communal pressures. After the Toulouse school attack, her mother’s religious turn, and the family’s move to Israel—which proved unsuccessful—Mila felt increasingly unsettled and abandoned. At the trial, a psychologist testified that Mila had liked her father’s new partner, Claire, while resenting her for breaking up the family. Mila’s mother later lived in Brooklyn with a new husband and their young son, while Mila had little contact with her and carried guilt over leaving for France. These details do not simply illustrate Claire’s sentence, but they give it a broader context: women’s lives are shaped by marriage and religious expectations in distinct ways, and the novel does not reduce those experiences to one voice or one outcome. The phrase’s force lies in its collision with lived arrangements—who bears their rules, who can leave, and what remains after a family is remade.