The dangerously unsurpassable pleasure of pleasing

Jezebela novel that Irène Némirovsky (kyiv, 1903-Auschwitz, 1942), published in 1936, begins with the trial of an older, "extremely wealthy" and pretentious woman, Gladys Eysenach, accused of murdering her lover of twenty years. Throughout the first chapter, which essentially serves as a prologue, we witness the reconstruction of the crime scene through the interrogation of the accused and a large gallery of witnesses. Written almost like a Hollywood screenplay—with sharp, snappy dialogue, secrets revealed, worldliness, mystery, and drama—this prologue unfolds before the reader all the ingredients of what appears to be a passionate melodrama. We discover, because she herself has confessed, that the wealthy, elegant, and cosmopolitan Eysenach did indeed commit the crime. And we believe we also know her motivations: jealousy, spite, and mad love. However, after the prologue, the novel flashes back and proceeds to reconstruct the protagonist's life from her earliest youth. What we end up discovering is far worse than we imagined.

If we didn't know the author of the novel was a woman, there are passages that might lead us to think that Jezebel It is the psychological portrait of a female protagonist crafted by a misogynistic male writer, who has accumulated a long list of romantic wounds and emotional grievances. By this I mean that the character of Gladys Eysenach exhibits many of the negative characteristics that male fear, insecurity, ignorance, and frustration have projected, wholesale and over the years, onto women: she is capricious, she is flirtatious in a selfish and fickle way, she is vain, she is vain. A first-rate writer

A contemporary view of the novel might suggest that Némirovsky makes her protagonist the way she is to denounce the distortions inflicted on women by patriarchal society, but this would be a pure anachronism. Gladys Eysenach is the way she is because one day, as a young woman, she discovers the unsurpassed "voluptuousness" of pleasing men, and from then on, she is hooked. Némirovsky, a first-rate writer, insists many times throughout the novel: "How pleasant it was, to see a man at her feet... Was there anything better in the world, apart from the birth of that womanly power...?" Or also: "She was surrounded by men in love, and as accustomed to oaths, pleas, and tears as a drunkard is to wine; she was not satiated, but that sweet poison was necessary to her as if it were the only food that could sustain her." I could continue transcribing dozens of equivalent phrases.

In any case, it would be a mistake – also anachronistic – to cross it out Jezebel of misogyny. Némirovsky doesn't paint a portrait of femininity and its role in the world. She portrays a specific woman and recounts her experience of the world. Furthermore, if Jezebel Had it been written by a misogynistic male, the tragedy of Gladys Eysenach would be caused by her vanity, by her obsession with being young and beautiful, and by her insatiable need to please, but Némirovsky, lucid, makes it be caused by her inability to accept that hers happens and time passes, seductresses diminish and one day they will disappear.