“A wife is what her husband makes her”

“A wife is what her husband makes her” is Balzac’s maxim, but Simone de Beauvoir cites it only to expose its inadequacy. In her account of marital power, a husband may claim authority and try to mold his wife, yet her inward convictions and habits resist that design; the saying’s neat image of male authorship cannot contain the woman who continues to think and act on her own terms.

The maxim and its reversal

De Beauvoir presents the saying as an overconfident claim about what marriage permits a husband to do. She notes that Balzac himself contradicts it a few pages later, making the maxim unstable even within its author’s work. The husband who imagines he can easily make his wife bend mistakes the appearance of agreement for genuine transformation.

Submission and resistance

A wife may concede to masculine authority in abstraction and logic, while resisting in matters of ideas and habits to which she is deeply attached. De Beauvoir locates this tenacity in the force of childhood and youth: the wife remains more closely confined within her personal history than the man, and what she acquired in those formative periods is not easily lost. A husband may impose a political opinion, but fail to change her religious convictions or shake her superstitions.

Jean Barois illustrates the gap between presumed influence and actual change. He believes he has shaped the devout woman sharing his life, only to find that her inherited beliefs and worldview remain intact. Her resistance is not necessarily a reasoned counterargument; it can persist beneath opinions she has learned and principles she repeats, preserving a perspective of her own.

Forms of counter-authority

The passage describes resistance taking different forms. A wife may cling to the authority of her mother, father, brother, confessor, or sister when one of them seems superior to her husband, using that authority to oppose him. She may instead contradict and insult him systematically, seeking to instill an inferiority complex; if she has the capacity, she can outshine him and claim moral authority by imposing her own advice and directives.

The contest may also move between domains. A wife unable to challenge her husband’s intellectual superiority may retaliate sexually, while sexual disappointment or the desire for revenge can lead her to embrace values that are not his. The maxim’s decisive irony is therefore that marriage does not make the wife a passive product of her husband: the attempt to rule her can call forth forms of opposition that unsettle his assumed sovereignty.