Gender Disgussed

26     As Ninette Bailey and Stuart Zane Charmé have both demonstrated, this binary distribution or split between privileged virility and deprivileged/negativized femininity is representative of Sartre's work as a whole. It also structures his first major philosophical treatise, L'être et le néant, published in the same year as Les mouches (1943), in which Sartre establishes his famous distinction between être-en-soi, which stands for inanimate objects, non-human nature, whose being coincides with itself, and être-pour-soi, human consciousness.

27     L'être et le néant and Les mouches clearly complement each other. What separates and distances Orestes from (devalued, feminized) nature or pure existence is his consciousness, which includes his alienation from and dismissal of divine authority. Orestes's murder of his mother, a crime against nature, further reinforces his alienation from nature: "Etranger à moi-même, je sais. Hors nature, contre nature, sans excuse, sans autre recours qu'en moi." (Les mouches 235) What Jupiter offers in Sartre's play is a return to the en-soi of unconscious nature. He tries to persuade Orestes to leave Argos by illuminating a stone (177).[9]The stone imagery is also used in Sartre's <em>Le sursis</em> (<em>The Reprieve</em>). Cf. <em>Les chemins de la liberté II: Le sursis</em> 285, and <em>Réflexions sur la question juive</em> 21. Leaving Argos would deter Orestes from finding his human essence (consciousness) and instead lead him back to mere existence (en-soi), to the massiveness of an object in non-human nature, a stone. Contrary to Orestes, at the end of the play Electra chooses to return to the unreflective state of en-soi, the state in which the people of Argos find themselves throughout the play. The female protagonist, like many of the other female characters in Sartre's dramas[10]Cf. Léni in <em>Les séquestrés d'Altona</em>, Estelle or Inès in <em>Huis clos</em>, Jessica in <em>Les mains sales</em>, Lizzie in <em>La putain respectueuse</em> and Catherine in <em>Le diable et le bon dieu</em>., comes to represent what Sartre (in L'être et le néant) criticizes as bad faith (mauvaise foi), dishonesty, self-deception.

28     In the section "Les conduites de mauvaise foi" of L'être et le néant, Sartre poses the question "Que doit être l'homme en son être, s'il doit pouvoir être de mauvaise foi?" When he starts to answer this question in the next paragraph, his first sentence reads: "Voici, par exemple, une femme [. . .]" (94). On the following page, he predictably concludes: "Nous dirons que cette femme est de mauvaise foi" (95). "Man," on the other hand, is associated with candor, sincerity, with the opposite of bad faith: "Si l'homme est ce qu'il est, la mauvaise foi est à tout jamais impossible et la franchise cesse d'être son ideal pour devenir son être" (98).

29     Another example Sartre gives of bad faith is a homosexual, also repeatedly referred to as "un pédéraste" (103-105). Sartre's homophobia becomes obvious in passages such as the following: "L'homosexuel reconnaît ses fautes [my emphasis], mais il lutte de toutes ses forces contre l'écrasante perspective que ses erreurs [my emphasis] lui constituent un destin" (104). With regard to "the homosexual," Sartre's appeal for sincerity is couched in the following terms: "Péché avoué est à moitié pardonné" (104; my emphasis). And he refers to the homosexual as "[le] coupable" (105), the guilty one.

30     At the end of Les mouches, Electra falls prey to bad faith. Like Daniel in Le sursis or the Autodidact and the bourgeois in La nausée, she accepts the calm and permanency of an object, delivered from freedom, responsibility and existential anxiety. She uses her submission to God (Jupiter) as an escape from the human condition.