Sphinx

The Sphinx is a figure through which men imagine woman as secret, contradictory, and resistant to definition. In this account, the Sphinx’s power lies less in what she reveals than in the uncertainty projected onto her: mystery makes the woman appear desirable as the Other, while competing ideals divide her into angel and devil, innocence and vice.

The Sphinx and the Feminine Mystery

The Sphinx becomes a fashionable image in the grand epoch of Femininity, amid corsets, the works of Paul Bourget and Henry Bataille, and the French cancan. Comedies, poems, and songs repeat the question, “Who are you, where do you come from, strange sphinx?” The riddle expresses a masculine desire to treat woman as an enigma whose hidden identity sustains fascination. The account emphasizes that this mystery is not simply an intrinsic quality: men preserve it by urging women to retain long dresses, petticoats, veils, long gloves, and high boots. Clothing that accentuates difference makes woman more desirable to men seeking to possess her precisely as the Other.

The Sphinx condenses femininity’s apparent contradictions. Men prize caprice, deception, evasion, and even perversity when these qualities make a woman unpredictable and difficult to know. Such traits let her answer contradictory masculine desires, like Maya, a figure of innumerable metamorphoses. Mystery therefore works as a relational construction: what men cannot settle about woman becomes part of what they desire in her.

The Young Woman as Enigma

The Sphinx is commonly represented as a young woman. Virginity becomes one of the secrets that men, particularly libertines, find most disconcerting: they imagine purity as a promise of license while wondering what perversities may lie beneath innocence. The young girl occupies an unsettled threshold, described as close to animal and plant life yet already compliant with social rites, neither child nor adult. Her timid femininity evokes not outright fear but a mild unrest, making her a privileged figure of the feminine mystery.

The account contrasts this once-worshipped “real young lady,” whose prestige has faded, with the prostitute Maya, who retains considerable cultural force. The contrast shows that the mystery does not depend on a single feminine ideal. It can attach both to the apparently untouched girl and to a woman imagined as having crossed the boundaries of respectable morality.

Maya and the Uncontained Feminine

In Gantillon’s successful play, Maya is a prostitute whose character permits a wide play of vices and virtues. To the timorous puritan, she embodies evil, shame, disease, and damnation: she belongs to no man, gives herself to many, and lives by her trade. Her independence recalls the fearsome power attributed to primitive Goddess Mothers and marks a femininity that masculine society has not sanctified. In this vision, the man who approaches her cannot imagine that he possesses her; instead, he feels surrendered to the flesh and its demons, experiencing sex as humiliation or stain.

A man unafraid of the flesh can read the same figure in the opposite way. Maya then embodies an exalted, generous affirmation of femininity, undiminished by morality. Through her body, a man may imagine recovering the magical powers once associated with woman’s kinship to the stars and sea. The prostitute’s marginal position in a hypocritically moral society also gives her the force of a challenger to official virtue. Her association with sin can even approach sanctity: the account invokes Christ’s favor toward Mary Magdalene and presents the outcast woman’s humiliation as a route by which the lowly may be exalted.

Masculine Desire and Contradictory Meanings

The Sphinx and Maya reveal how the same figure can serve opposed masculine fantasies. A woman who is secret and difficult to possess may be adored as a distant princess; a woman who belongs to no man may inspire either disgust or fascination as an emblem of unrestrained femininity. The shifting judgments do not resolve the feminine mystery. They show how men make woman carry the values and anti-values through which they interpret life, turning uncertainty into both a source of enchantment and a screen for contradictory desires.