Literary Theory and Criticism

Search

 ABOUT MCQS LIBRARY

HOM E › F EM INIS M › SI MONE DE B EA U VOI R A ND T H E SECO ND S EX

Simone de Beauvoir and The Second Sex

BY NA SR U LLAH MA MB RO L on MA Y 6 , 20 1 6 • ( 5 )

Simone de Beauvoir‘s The Second Sex (1949) can be said to have

inaugurated the second wave of feminism, with its central argument that
throughout history, across cultures, woman has always occupied a
secondary position in relation to man, being relegated to the position of
the “other”, that which is adjectival to the substantial subjectivity and the
existential activity of man. Whereas man has been enabled to transcend
and control his environment, always furthering the domain of his physical
and intellectual conquests, woman has remained imprisoned within ”
immanence” remaining a slave within the circle of duties imposed by her
maternal and reproductive functions. In highlighting this subordination,
the book explains ,1 in characteristic existentialist fashion how the
“essence” of woman was in fact created — at economic, social, political,
religious levels by historical developments representing the interests of
men. This idea resounds in de Beauvoir’s famous statement: “One is not
born, but rather becomes a woman.” In uenced by Sartrean existentialism,
Marxism, Psychoanaysis and Hegel, she argued that the objecti cation of
woman permeates human history and informs the whole of Western
philosophical thought.

In her renowned introduction to The Second Sex, de Beauvoir points out the
fundamental asymmetry of the terms “masculine” and “feminine.”
Masculinity is considered to be the “absolute human type,” the norm or
standard of humanity. A man does not typically preface his opinions with
the statement “I am a man,” whereas a woman’s views are often held to be
grounded in her femininity rather than in any objective perception of
things. A man “thinks of his body as a direct and normal connection with
the world, which he believes he apprehends objectively, whereas he regards
the body of woman as a hindrance, a prison . . . Woman has ovaries, a
uterus; these peculiarities imprison her in her subjectivity, circumscribe
her within the limits of her own nature” (SS, xv). De Beauvoir quotes
Aristotle as saying that the “female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of
qualities,” and St. Thomas as stating that the female nature is “af icted
with a natural defectiveness” (SS, xvi). Summarizing these long traditions
of thought, de Beauvoir states: “Thus humanity is male and man de nes
woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an
autonomous being . . . she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to
the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other” (SS,
xvi). De Beauvoir’s Hegelian terminology highlights the fact that man’s
relegation of woman to the status of “other” violates the principle of
mutual recognition, thereby threatening the very status that man has for
so long jealously accorded to himself, to his own subjectivity. And yet, as
de Beauvoir points out (drawing on both Hegel and Lévi-Strauss),
“otherness” is a “fundamental category of human thought,” as primordial
as consciousness itself. Consciousness always entails positing a duality of
Self and Other: indeed, no group “ever sets itself up as the One without at
once setting up the Other over against itself ” (SS, xvi–xvii). Our very part
viii: the twentieth century conception of our identity entails consciousness
of what we are not, of what stands beyond us and perhaps opposed to us.

The problem with demoting another consciousness or group to the status

of “other” is that this other consciousness or ego “sets up a reciprocal
claim”: from its perspective, we are the stranger, the other. Interaction
with other individuals, peoples, nations, and classes forces us to
acknowledge the relativity of the notion of otherness. But this relativity
and reciprocity, in the case of women, has not been recognized (SS, xvii).
Woman’s otherness seems to be absolute because, unlike the subordination
of other oppressed groups such as Jews and black Americans, her
subordination was not the result of a historical event or social change but
is partly rooted in her anatomy and physiology. Also in contrast with these
other groups, women have never formed a minority and they have never
achieved cohesion as a group, since they have always lived dispersed
among males: if they belong to the middle class, they identify with the
males of that class rather than with working-class women; white women
feel allegiance to white men rather than to black women (SS, xviii–xix).
The “division of the sexes,” de Beauvoir points out, “is a biological fact,
not an event in human history . . . she is the Other in a totality of which the
two components are necessary to one another.” Indeed, woman has no
autonomous history (SS, xix).
Another contributing factor to women’s subordination is her own
reluctance to forego the traditional advantages conferred on them by their
protective male superiors: if man supports woman nancially and assumes
responsibility for de ning her existence and purpose, then she can evade
both economic risk and the metaphysical “risk” of a freedom in which she
must work out her own purposes (SS, xxi).

Men, of course, have had their own reasons for perpetuating such a duality
of Self and Other: “Legislators, priests, philosophers, writers, and
scientists have striven to show that the subordinate position of woman is
willed in heaven and advantageous on earth” (SS, xxii). A long line of
thinkers, stretching from Plato and Aristotle through Augustine and
Aquinas into modern bourgeois philosophers, has insisted on stabilizing
woman as an object, on dooming her to immanence, to a life of subjection
to given conditions, on barring her from property rights, education, and
the professions (SS, xviii). As well as procuring the obvious economic and
political bene ts of such subordination, men have reaped enormous
psychological reassurance: their hostility toward women conceals a
fundamental desire for self-justi cation, as well as a fundamental
insecurity (SS, xxii). While de Beauvoir acknowledges that by the
eighteenth century certain male thinkers such as Diderot and John Stuart
Mill began to champion the cause of women, she also notes that, in
contradiction of its ostensible disposition toward democracy, the bourgeois
class “clung to the old morality that found the guarantee of private
property in the solidity of the family.” Woman’s liberation was thwarted all
the more harshly as her entry into the industrial workforce furnished an
economic basis for her claims to equality (SS, xxii–xxiii).
From her own perspective of “existentialist ethics,” as informed by
Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty, de Beauvoir rejects all attempts to
stabilize the condition of women under the pretext that happiness consists
in stagnation and stasis. Every human subject, she insists, must engage in
exploits or projects that serve as a mode of transcendence, as a means of
rising above and controlling the conditions into which one is born (SS,
xxvii). In the rst part of her book, de Beauvoir examines the feminist
criticism views of women advanced by biology, psychology, and historical
materialism, in an endeavor to show how the concept of the feminine has
been fashioned and to consider why woman has been de ned as the other.
Regarding the data afforded by biology, she acknowledges that a
physiological burden is imposed on woman by her reproductive function.
She points out, however – anticipating the manifold importance
subsequently placed on the concept of the “body” by feminists – that the
body is not a thing but a situation (SS, 30–31). Human beings achieve self-
de nition only as part of a larger, social framework, and the so-called facts
of biology must be viewed in the light of economic, social, and moral
of biology must be viewed in the light of economic, social, and moral
circumstances: the bene ts or disadvantages attaching to these facts are
dependent upon the arbitration of social norms. For example, if violence is
morally or legally forbidden, man’s superior physical strength is not an
intrinsic asset (SS, 32–33).

In the conclusion to her book, de Beauvoir argues that the age-old con ict
between the sexes no longer takes the form of woman attempting to hold
back man in her own prison of immanence, but rather in her own effort to
emerge into the light of transcendence. Woman’s situation will be
transformed primarily by a change in her economic condition; but this
change must also generate moral, social, cultural, and psychological
transformations. If girls were brought up to expect the same free and
assured future as boys, even the meanings of the Oedipus and castration
complexes would be modi ed, and the “child would perceive around her an
androgynous world and not a masculine world” (SS, 683). Moreover, if she
were brought up to understand, rather than inhibit, her own sexuality,
eroticism and love would take on the nature of free transcendence rather
than resignation: the notions of dominance and submission, victory and
defeat, in sexual relations might give way before the idea of exchange (SS,
685). De Beauvoir is con dent that women will arrive at “complete
economic and social equality, which will bring about an inner
metamorphosis” (SS, 686). And both man and woman will exist both for
self and for the other: “mutually recognizing each other as subject, each
will yet remain for the other an other.” In this recognition, in this
reciprocity, will “the slavery of half of humanity” be abolished (SS, 688).

Share this:

 Facebook  WhatsApp  Twitter  Email  Pocket  LinkedIn

 Reddit  Tumblr  Pinterest 59  Telegram  More

Like this:

Loading...
‹ Mary Wollstonecraft’s Contribution to Feminism The Feminist Dictum “the Personal is the Political” ›

Categories: Feminism , Literary Criticism , Literary Theory

RE LAT ED A RT I CLE S

Chaos Theory, Complexity Theory and Literary Criticism

5 replies

Trackbacks

1. Second Wave Feminism – Literary Theory and Criticism Notes

2. Key Theories of Martin Heidegger – Literary Theory and Criticism Notes

3. Postmodernism and Feminism – Literary Theory and Criticism Notes

4. Dalit Feminism: Issues, Factors and Concerns – Literary Theory and Criticism Notes

5. Girlhood Studies – Literary Theory and Criticism

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Blog Stats
18,814,169 Views

Articles/Ebooks/Lectures

Search

Scholarly Articles

Select Category

Categories

African Literature (3) American Literature (38) British Literature (202) Cultural
Studies (20) Drama Criticism (129) Feminism (45) Linguistics (15) Literary
Criticism (61) Literary Theory (62) Literature (1116) Modernism
(38) Novel Analysis (266) Philosophy (77) Poetry (93)
Postcolonialism (26) Postmodernism (27) Romanticism (19) Short Story
(532) Theatre Studies (2) Uncategorized (38)

Archives
 Select Month

Top Articles

Structuralism

Trauma Studies

Homi Bhabha's Concept of Hybridity

Deconstruction

Marxism and Literary Theory

Postmodernism

Analysis of John Milton's Paradise Lost

Postcolonialism

Analysis of Stuart Hall’s Encoding/Decoding

Ecocriticism: An Essay