Why do gifts want to be wrapped?
Isn’t it odd? We want to give the Jones family a bottle of wine, we are running out the door—but let’s cover the bottle, wrap it in paper, hide it in a bag, something, quick! Of course, we can’t find anything. We end up just bringing the bottle. But we are made sheepish by the fact—we might even apologize for it.
A Christmas tree with its presents revealed lacks something, and if this seems mind-numbingly obvious, it is no less mysterious for the fact. Why should a gift be wrapped? We have all heard why stockings are a Christmas tradition, but isn’t it marvelous how quickly a child takes to it, prior to knowing a thing about St. Nicholas? “We put the presents in a sock! Yes! Of course!”
To say we wrap our presents “for a surprise” must be correct. Even expected gifts are given as surprises. A father promises his son a bike for his birthday; his son anticipates the bike feverishly; still, the birthday comes, and what does the giver do with the gift? Hides it. What does the recipient do? Pretends to be surprised. Imagine the brat who doesn’t take part in this work of theater, who responds to the unveiled gift with: “I already knew you were going to give it to me.” Such a response may be amusing in the mouth of a precocious six-year-old—ever after, it is sociopathic.
My father gave the expected gift at the end of a treasure hunt—a series of riddles and answers that sent the kids careening around the house until we reached it: why? A treasure hunt ends in the discovery of the unexpected. It returns “surprise” to the unsurprising gift. It is an elaborate form of wrapping.
Wrapping a gift is a risk. It removes the recipient from the gift, precisely in order to better give it. The recipient cannot prepare for what lies hidden in a layer of paper, cannot dissimulate his reaction, must respond to it as it is unveiled—and so wrapping is brave, a ritual of putting one’s love to the test, saying, as it were: “I know you so well, and I love you so well, that I am willing to undergo a trial in proof it. Let me go about the world and select some part of it that will delight you. I’ll then cover it. You can uncover it in my presence. I’ll be at the mercy of your unfeigned reaction. I hope that you’ll like it.”
We know this, because we feign delight upon unwrapping the undesired gift. We understand wrapping as a trial of love, in which the gift-giver proves himself as loving, that is, as knowing and desiring what is good for the other person. And so we pretend he has passed the trial—“oh, how thoughtful”—even when he hasn’t.
And even when he hasn’t, he rather has, hasn’t he? Soldiers who throw themselves upon the enemy win our praise even when they fail to win a victory. The one who risks our surprise shows something of his love even when he fails to delight us. Indeed, wonder of wonders, failure in gift-giving is often a firmer sign of love than success. I am charmed by the friend who gives me the precise power-tool I have been coveting; I am even more charmed by the child who, in his absolute innocence as to my good, solemnly delivers from behind his back—a bit of mulch. The former knows me and risks proving it; the latter does not know me, and still risks proving that he does, in an overreaching enthusiasm that can only be ascribed to love.
Gifts arrive out of a mysterious horizon, impenetrable to either telescope or microscope—the intellect and will of our neighbor; our dear, inscrutable Other; a man who can be trusted but never anticipated; in whom we can hope but upon whom we can never presume; who we come to know but never know in advance. We are all of us mysterious to each other, and when we communicate at all, it is by way of gifts: the offering of some glimpse of a mysterious personality that escapes us both.
If the gift must be wrapped it is because the giver is wrapped, and in representing him, it must take on the form of a hidden interior, waiting to be revealed. When we unwrap a present we enact, as in a theater, what is true of every human encounter, which is fundamentally open to a surprise coming from the other.
Why are we male and female?
We are earnest to know the sex of newborns; so passionate, in fact, that we’ll investigate the womb to reveal its secret.
Obviously, it is a procreative reality that is mysterious, shrouded, and which we long to unwrap. The orientation of the unborn child towards an either male or female contribution in the “work of generation” is the basis and cause of its being unanticipatable, secret; of being possibly this—but possibly that.
But it would be silly to imagine that the question brought to bear on every bearing mother—“are you having a boy or a girl?”—were some didactic investigation into the unknown child’s future contribution to the survival of the species; a curiosity over gamete-production; a desire to know whether the child would have a greater or lesser propensity towards violent crime. The truth is more basic: we want to be surprised. However old ladies insist that the new mother simply must find out the gender in order to find out what color to paint the nursery, neither they, nor anyone asking the question, has any plan for what to do with the knowledge. They want to know for the reason that a child on Christmas Eve wants to know what’s under the tree. The either/or of sex makes the arrival of the child a surprise.
Imagine the impossible: a one-sex world, in which no one cried “it’s a boy” and no one asked whether it was or not. We might imagine that this world still produced unique, unrepeatable human beings—no mere instances of the species, these! Still, in the first encounter with the newborn, what would be lost? We would note distinguishing features, certainly—but newborns have so few of these, and all of them are destined for such rapid change that taking them as indicators of who and what this unique creature is would seem foolish—what, does he have a button nose? Is he 7.5, rather than 8.3 pounds? More or less hair? I think that, in such a world, the new father would be prone to say—with joy, certainly, but still—“here’s another!”
The baby, except for its sex, is the most anticipatable of human beings. Except for its sex, what the baby is and what they will do can be listed in a book—indeed, it is. Parents joke about the ease of a healthy newborn—that they eat, they sleep, they poop—and this is a way of marveling at their simplicity, their repeatability, their immensely common nature. Mothers can bond with each other over their babies in a way that they obviously cannot with regards to their adult children: they can presume to be having a relatively common experience only with the former.
The introduction of sex is the introduction the unanticipatable; it is a condition of the child which renders the child a surprise, not as to this or that feature (for a birthmark or an extra toe could be surprising) but as to the whole of them: not a part, but “it” is a girl—and who could have guessed?
The trouble with imagining a sexless world is that sex is the very reason why children arrive as gifts in the first place. To think of a one-sex world rids us, not merely of the child as a surprise, but of the wrapping which conditions it as such. If the Aristotelian definition holds true, that the male is the one who generates life outside of himself, and the female is the one who generates life within herself, then the distinction of male and female is what gives procreation its form as the concealing and revealing of a gift, an inner becoming outer.
The mother first wrapped the gift of the child with her body. When it is unwrapped, the first recipient of the child—father, midwife—is drawn to cry out its sex. This impulse, which would make sexual difference the first meaningful description of the child outside of the womb, is scoffed at by queer theorists as an eager, violent, imposition of an artificial construct. But this seems like a rather sour-faced interpretation of a nearly universal human custom. In fact, it is perfectly fitting: the first thing expressed, when unwrapping a gift, is the surprise. The first thing said, when the child is revealed, is the thing that cannot be known in advance. This is not a reduction of the child to their sex. Rather, the human person is a profound mystery of subjectivity, an hidden interiority, an unfathomable otherness, an unknown that must be revealed—and so sex, another unknown that must be revealed, is a fitting sign of the whole. “It’s a girl” and “it’s a boy” always mean “it’s a gift.”
The either/or of sexual difference places the parent in the position of the recipient of a reality that is impossible to anticipate, for the child can never be “another one,” but always this one. Any attempt to view the unborn child as “another child”—as an instance of a species or a repetition of a kind—must ignore the unknown of sex. For a human being is never simply individuated but always individuated as sexed. To say “it’s a boy” is to speak of the thing as concretely here, particular, unrepeatable; to wonder whether it is a girl is to wonder how the child is not just a child but this child. And, insofar as it is proper to the human person to be seen in their particularity rather than abstractedly, this movement is not a neutral one—it is no matter of indifference, to cease to consider “a” child and begin considering “this” child. It is a matter and a movement of love, by which one relates, properly, to the human person.
Sexual difference signifies the entire dimension of personal unrepeatability. Even the act of naming, the signifier of personal unrepeatability par excellence, waits on the revelation of sexual difference. “Not knowing the sex” puts the parents—and indeed, everyone—into the proper position with which to receive an unrepeatable other: that of the anticipation of a surprise.
Why are babies so genderless, so androgynous? Of course, every good mother and father will deny it—they see the “young lady” staring out of that bald head, that pudgy face. And this is precisely the point—the mother and the father are the first recipients of the baby as a gift. They know the baby’s secret—that it is a boy or a girl—and others must ask or guess at their peril.
Babies are, as it were, twice-wrapped, first in the womb, and then in the cherubic androgyny of infancy. The first is for the parents, who are surprised at the arrival of this child, as a gift that has been opened. The second is for the community, which does not simply see the girl or the boy in the baby except by presentation of the baby as a boy or a girl by the parents, who stick bows to their bald heads or otherwise answer the question. That is to say, by virtue of the concealed sex of the infant, one’s neighbors repeat, in their own mode, the original stance of the parent: they become the recipients of a gift, facing an unknown, and open to a surprise: “What a beautiful baby! Is it a boy or a girl?”
The parents, for their part, must present the child as a “boy” or a “girl,” which is, as we have established, to present the child as a gift and a surprise; a particular, concrete reality, to be met with love. If human children were obviously the male or the female of their kind, there would be no obligation. Because they are not so obvious, parents are obligated to exert a kind of metaphysical care of their children from the very beginning, to relay unto others the surprise; to tell others about the child in a way that presents their unanticipatable givenness; to demand from others the gaze of love that the baby evokes in them; to answer the question of sex. “It’s a girl” always seems to contain and suppress an additional “and I hope you’ll love her.”
And, by and large, we do. There is nothing so easy to love as a baby, because there is nothing so obviously revealed as a gift as a newborn child. This explains the prototypical bodily reactions we have to meeting babies. Making a surprised face, our mouths widened into a comic “o,” our eyebrows raised, our heads moving imperceptibly back from the baby we admire—we even indulge a little gasp while doing so. These motions mime surprise, as if spontaneously fulfilling an obligation to be shocked at the sight of a baby. Peek-a-boo has often been described from the perspective of child psychology, but it seems to me that it is as significant for the adults who play it. What is the game but a theater piece in which we conceal the baby from view, wrapping it with our hands, only to reveal it to ourselves? We say things like “where’s the baby? There he is!” and as much as we are delighting the child we are obviously delighting ourselves, taking up, in play, the relationship of the parent to the womb-wrapped child; reliving, in a game, what the unknown of sex first demands of us: openness to surprise.
A passage from the beginning of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield demonstrates this negatively, where an unwillingness to be surprised at the sex of the child functions as a kind of hatred of the particular child.
“You were speaking about it’s being a girl,” said Miss Betsey. “I have no doubt it will be a girl. I have a presentiment that it must be a girl. Now, child, from the moment of the birth of this girl—”
“Perhaps boy,” my mother took the liberty of putting in.
“I tell you I have a presentiment that it must be a girl,” returned Miss Betsey. “Don’t contradict. From the moment of this girl’s birth, child, I intend to be her friend. I intend to be her godmother, and I beg you’ll call her Betsey Trotwood Copperfield.”
Certainty is a blasphemy against sex; against the sacramental sign of the unanticipatable particularity of the human person. Miss Betsey’s refusal of surprise becomes, seamlessly, a denial of particularity: the child is described as another Miss Betsey. This refusal to love is made final when, despite her certainty, the witness to the unveiling of birth announces the sex:
“The baby,” said my aunt. “How is she?”
“Ma’am,” returned Mr. Chillip, “I apprehended you had known. It’s a boy.”
My aunt said never a word, but took her bonnet by the strings, in the manner of a sling, aimed a blow at Mr. Chillip’s head with it, put it on bent, walked out, and never came back.
The one who will not suffer the risk of sex ends up refusing to suffer the person at all. Dickens describes Miss Betsey disintegrating into an inhuman form—“she vanished like a discontented fairy, like one of those supernatural beings”—and it is fitting, for the one who would destroy the either/or of sex no longer discourses with human beings, no longer takes up the position of love in which the human person is revealed as a gift, as a new creation of God, as an unfathomable otherness, an unanticipatable concreteness, a particularity—a surprise.