Yet the fact remains: much of the interest in Madame Curie stems from her having been a woman in the man’s world of physics and chemistry. The interest naturally increases as women claim their place in that world; with this interest comes anger, sometimes righteous, sometimes self-righteous, that difficulties should still stand in the way. A president of Harvard can get it in the neck for suggesting that women don’t have the almost maniacal resolve it takes to become first-rate scientific researchers — that they are prone to distraction by such career-killers as motherhood. So Marie Curie’s singularity cannot but be enveloped in the sociology of science, which is to say these days, feminist politics.
The sociology is important, as long as one remembers the singularity. For Marie Curie did have the almost maniacal resolve to do great scientific work. The work mattered as much to her as it does to most any outstanding scientist; yet can one really say it was everything? She passionately loved her husband and, after his premature death, loved another scientist of immense talent, perhaps of genius; she had the highest patriotic feeling for her native Poland and her adopted France, and risked her life in wartime; she raised two daughters, one, Irène, a Nobel Prize laureate in chemistry, the other, Ève, an accomplished writer, most notably as her mother’s biographer.
Madame Curie’s life reads almost like a comic-book adventure version of feminine heroism: the honest-to-goodness exploits of the original Wonder Woman; the one and only real deal; accept no imitations. Of course, imitation is precisely what such a life tends to inspire in the most zealous and worthy admirers. Madame Curie, however, explicitly warned such aspirants to scientific immortality that the way was unspeakably lonesome and hard, as her daughter Ève Curie records her saying in the 1937 biography Madame Curie. “Madame Curie avoided even that element of vanity that might most easily have been forgiven her: to let herself be cited as an example to other women. ‘It isn’t necessary to lead such an anti-natural existence as mine,’ she sometimes said to calm her overmilitant admirers. ‘I have given a great deal of time to science because I wanted to, because I loved research.... What I want for women and young girls is a simple family life and some work that will interest them.’” Better for gifted women to find some smaller work they enjoy doing and fit it into a life of traditional completeness. But hadn’t Madame Curie herself done it all, and on the titanic scale that launched so many dreamers toward the most earnest fantasies, and in many cases the most heartening achievements? How could she warn others off the path she had traveled? Despite her professions that she had taken the course right for her, did she really regret having traveled it?
One can only say that her intensity was preternatural. She could not have lived otherwise than she did: like a demon’s pitchfork or an angel’s whisper, the need to know, and to be known for knowing — though only among those who mattered, the serious ones like her, for she despised celebrity — drove her on relentlessly. Hardship and ill fortune accompanied her all her days. There seemed to be no ordeal she could not power her way through. Her indomitable will served her voracious intelligence. But for every accomplishment, for every distinction, for every rare joy, she paid and paid. Interludes of happiness brightened the prevailing emotional murk, but the murk did prevail. Episodes of major depression began in childhood and became a fixture. At various times in her life she thought seriously of suicide.
Love could be lost, and forever; children failed to fill the void; only work provided reliable solace and meaning. So she worked. She worked doggedly, devotedly, brilliantly. Scientific work was not simply diversion from the pains of living; it was a way of life, like Socratic philosophy, from which Madame Curie appeared to have acquired the guiding principle: “Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.” Whether the unforeseen consequences of her work still sustain that sublime credo is a question as yet unresolved.
by Algis Valiunas, The New Atlantis | Read more:
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