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When my first husband announced he had fallen in love with another woman, I wanted to know all about her. Who was she? How did he meet her? How old was she? Etc.
He was happy to confide. She was 10 years younger than I, in her early twenties. She was blond and came from Normandy and had a little scar on her upper lip which just made her more attractive to him, he told me with his Russian sincerity. She felt very guilty about her liaison with him, which, of course, did not mean she refused to be with my husband whenever he desired.
He told me he was in love with both of us and could not decide. He kept coming and going for years, pulling at his thinning locks in despair. We kept a large photo of him on our piano in the living room in Paris wearing a hat with a wide brim.
Once, I thought I saw her in the street with him on a misty day in Paris near the Invalides where we were living at the time. I was with my young daughter who clutched onto my hand and said, “You went all white, Mummy!” and I turned and walked in the opposite direction. Did I really see them? I am no longer quite sure. I do know though that there was no direction I could go where I did not think I caught glimpses of her, this “other woman”: walking fast in her high heels, hurrying down the street, her long blond hair fanning out behind her, her little scar on her upper lip. Almost, I called out: Martine!
Why did I put up with this for many years, all the coming and going and the promises which were inevitably broken? I was young myself, in my early thirties and attractive, and there was no financial need for me to stay with this bright handsome man, though I had met him at 18 and felt that he had ushered me into life.
What was the source of this obsession, one might ask? What is the source of this sort of obsessive jealousy? What lies at the roots of such an unreasonable sort of love? What does this “other woman,” who crops up so frequently in our fantasies and our literature, represent? Freud would suggest of course that the origin of all of this lies in our childhood in the Oedipal story, the jealousy of the mother. It is within our unresolved love and hate for the mother that such obsessions lie. She is the source of our fantasies in such stories as “Rebecca” or in the mad wife in the attic in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre.
Yet we might also wonder if this ghost from the past is not also part of ourselves. Is not Bertha, the mad angry wife in the attic at Thornfield, whom Jane cannot initially dislodge from her marriage with Rochester, also part of Jane herself? Is she not that part she has had to disguise, to dissociate from herself? Are we not both the wife and the mistress at the same time?
