Marcel Prévost

Marcel Prévost appears in The Second Sex both as an advocate of marital intimacy and as an observer of the young bride’s disorientation after marriage. His advice to husbands treats erotic understanding as part of conjugal life, while his account of a bride returning from her honeymoon shows how little the institution itself guarantees emotional security.

Marriage, Desire, and Conjugal Advice

Prévost is introduced among late-nineteenth-century French writers who sought more human means of securing conjugal happiness and attempted to reconcile eroticism with legitimate love. In his account of marriage, love between spouses becomes a legal duty; elsewhere, he advises a young husband to treat his wife like a mistress, presenting conjugal pleasure in discreetly sexual terms. These positions make marital affection something to be cultivated within marriage rather than assumed to follow automatically from the wedding vows.

The book places such advice alongside contemporary efforts to teach newly married couples how to accommodate one another, especially instruction directed at men on creating harmony with their wives. But it cautions that technical guidance cannot ensure desire: a husband may study manuals and still not know how to make his new wife love him. Prévost’s counsel belongs to this practical effort, while the broader argument stresses that a woman’s response depends on her whole psychological situation and that traditional marriage does not necessarily provide favorable conditions for female erotic life.

The Bride’s Return from the Honeymoon

In Lettres à Françoise mariée (Letters to Françoise, Married), Prévost describes a young woman’s distress when she returns from her honeymoon. Her memory turns to her mother’s apartment, which she had once considered old-fashioned and ridiculous. In retrospect, its familiar furnishings signify a protected home: a place where she had been cared for without self-interest and sheltered from danger. The newly established marital home, by contrast, feels improvised and unfinished; it is not yet the secure nest she had known. The contrast ends in a feeling of abandonment, as though she had been left in a desert.

The passage gives domestic space an emotional and relational meaning. The bride has not simply exchanged one set of rooms for another: she has left a home where care was already established and entered a marriage whose home must still be made. Prévost’s detailed contrast between the remembered apartment and the unfamiliar dwelling clarifies why the transition can produce distress even when the marriage has begun according to convention.

Significance in the Book’s Account of Marriage

The book uses Prévost’s description to connect the young bride’s post-honeymoon distress with longer depressions and other serious psychological difficulties. His account is therefore more than an illustration of homesickness: it helps disclose the vulnerability created when marriage abruptly removes a young woman from familiar protection without guaranteeing that the new household will offer comparable care. The bride’s sadness is situated within a social transition, not treated as proof that marriage naturally fulfills her.

Prévost’s role is consequently double. His marital advice participates in attempts to make conjugal love and pleasure workable, but his account of the bride’s return also reveals the gap between the ideal of marital happiness and the emotional conditions a woman may actually encounter. The home that is supposed to replace the maternal household begins, in his description, as a place still waiting to become a nest.