THE FEMALE BODY AND THE MALE MIND: RECONSIDERING SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
Baruch, Elaine Hoffman
Forty years ago Simone de Beauvoir sat in front of a blank sheet of paper at the Cafe des Deux Magots, on the Boulevard St. Germain in Paris, wanting to write about herself: I realized that the...
...Bourgeois as much as bohemian, soulmates who lived apart, they speak to the modern desire for primacy of the couple and multiple sexual experience at the same time...
...you should look into it further...
...Yet it is—perhaps the greatest of our time...
...No longer the transcendent being, he is man crumbling...
...Perhaps...
...Despite her dislike, Beauvoir's picture of myth is so rich, so subtle compared with later ideological attacks on sexual "stereotypes," that one wonders if her conscious denial of unconscious sources should be taken seriously...
...She does not consider domestic labor to be work, nor does she recognize the fact that most men work—outside the home— in alienating jobs, which indeed is the case today with most women...
...Like Sartre, she always wanted another's gaze on her— neither ever escaped the need for a mirror...
...Life with Sartre EVEN PEOPLE WHO HAVE NOT READ BEAUVOIR know of her involvement with Sartre...
...But if Beauvoir in The Second Sex asked in effect, "Why can't a woman be more like a man...
...He too was a prisoner of gender...
...This feminism stresses sexual difference but transvaluates it, attributing positive values to traditionally female feelings and behavior (what had been disparaged by the general culture before...
...But the choice was deliberate...
...358...
...Despite these surprises, the novel remains rooted in the bourgeois rather than an avant-garde tradition...
...The politicized figures are all men, the apolitical ones—women...
...The need for others to mirror one's activity in order to give it meaning is a principle of existentialist thought...
...Nonetheless, it is the female body, particularly the mother's body, that Beauvoir (and dualists, in general) sees as particularly loathsome...
...Actually Sartre seems to bear all his physical limitations with a stoic's calm, but Beauvoir does not admire him for this...
...By gender, I mean here what society does with sexual difference...
...John Donne in the seventeenth century said, "The body makes the mind...
...viscosity is bad...
...And although The Second Sex is doubtless the germinal book for what is called liberal feminism, Beauvoir never accepted any other form...
...but she also points ahead in some startling ways to a revisionist psychoanalysis that might be called feminist...
...Nonetheless, The Second Sex is a child of its times...
...he is a fraud," she had written in The Second Sex...
...Notwithstanding Beauvoir's male-identified biology and value system—what is human is male—we must still call her conclusions feminist, an ascription she did not accept until decades later...
...Yet she suffers all kinds of somatic ailments over his affairs and laments the signs of age in her mirror more than the most despondent hausfrau— although it is perhaps unfair to attribute this disgust to sexual vulnerability alone: "I loathe my appearance now: the eyebrows slipping down toward the eyes, the bags underneath, the excessive fullness of the cheeks, and that air of sadness around the mouth that wrinkles always bring...
...Only in the early 1970s did she proclaim herself a feminist, a quarter of a century after writing The Second Sex...
...Her friend Albert Camus threw the book across the floor, saying it made men look ridiculous...
...In the materialism section, however, she does temper her negativism on women's biology: if a woman "procreates voluntarily and if society comes to her aid during pregnancy and is concerned with child welfare, the burdens of maternity are light and can be easily offset by suitable adjustments in working conditions...
...As a professed socialist, Beauvoir perhaps saw an emphasis on fantasy and feeling as bourgeois or regressive, "a way of returning women to their subordinate ideological place within the dominant culture," as Cora Kaplan puts it in another context...
...Divested of all his strength and even shame, the philosopher has mental lapses, he overturns his soup, fouls his clothes...
...A fallen god is not a man...
...The male is the one with a little tube between his legs...
...In 1954, Beauvoir received the Prix Goncourt for her novel The Mandarins, an extraordinary evocation of the life of postwar intellectuals of the left in France and to some extent a roman a clef...
...Sartre's was a huge affair...
...It is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch...
...It's simply that in her writings soul has been transformed into mind...
...One suspects that it is more her sense of betrayal that he is no longer a hero...
...In any conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, Beauvoir opted for the latter, even after she became aware of and denounced the Stalinist labor camps...
...The conversations and particularly the commentary present the male in all his Otherness (a theme taken up in a different way in her book The Coming of Age...
...At first I thought I could dispose of that pretty quickly...
...Her great guilt is revealed in her account of her mother's last days, A Very Easy Death...
...The problem that forerunners, the avantgarde, face is that they are always criticized later for not having been avant enough...
...Nor does she question the male valorization of hunting and war...
...In The Second Sex, Beauvoir spoke at length of women as economic parasites, forced to live vicariously...
...In her life, she took (or thought she took) the greatest risks of all...
...Wollstonecraft too had argued that women were constructed by the social order, but in relation to her lover Gilbert Imlay if not to her later husband, William Godwin, Wollstonecraft was a romantic victim, subject to betrayal by her feelings...
...It is primarily because they are biological mothers that women are alternately exalted and degraded...
...Beauvoir's life too revealed a dramatic fissure—between the theory of sexual equality and the practice of an eroticized subordination in her relation with Sartre...
...It is for Sartre, at least in his earlier work, that anatomy is destiny...
...Like Sartre, Beauvoir sought to create herself...
...But if sexual difference isn't all-determining for women, there is another category that is— or has been...
...Brilliant as The Second Sex is in its description of women's position in a phallocratic world, it may now also be seen as bound by the ropes of white, Western, middle-class culture...
...So Beauvoir insists despite her negative view of female biology...
...The amorous act is the castration of the man...
...What Beauvoir and Sartre refuse to acknowledge is the value of the body...
...What contemporary feminism wants is achievement and intersubjectivity— a blend Beauvoir tried to have in her own life...
...Ambiguity may be the one clear mark of Beauvoir's thought and feeling at the end...
...Truth," Michel Foucault has argued, "is produced through discourse, and its production is imbued with relations of power...
...Beauvoir had refused Sartre's early offer of marriage: "I chose what was the hardest course for me at that moment in order to safeguard the future...
...In contrast, some feminist theorists are now turning to psychoanalysis to show how the body influences the mind and how what appears to be rational is in fact fueled by desire that is often repressed...
...As a theoretician, Beauvoir took great risks...
...She loved her for her nurturing, but hated her repression of Simone the child...
...but as with her male contemporaries, echoes of Victorian courtship sound in Beauvoir's description of the romance between the "wholly alive" sperm and the "stationary" egg which "passively awaits fertilization...
...357 Yet in examining Sartre and Beauvoir's dualisms, one is struck by the primacy in their metaphors of things and ultimately of bodies...
...It was, in a sense, Jean-Paul Sartre's baby...
...Perhaps, considering the engagement of her own life, at least after World War II...
...Beauvoir's historical overview of the respective functions of the two sexes in reproduction notes many of the follies of the past, such as the Aristotelian notion that the fetus is produced by the union of sperm and menstrual blood...
...The public was not pleased by Beauvoir's discovery that "this world was a masculine world," and that her "childhood had been nourished by myths forged by men...
...2 Recent scientific developments cast ironic light on Beauvoir's idea of reproduction as forced labor...
...Unlike feminists of the 1970s who would seek to minimize biological differences, Beauvoir sees them as crucial...
...Perhaps because of her rejection of the unconscious, she never fully recognizes that her obsession with death might stem from her anger turned inwards on the self...
...Many feminists now see as liberating what Beauvoir saw as oppressive: motherhood, for example, the nurturing of life as a conscious act that involves risk and choice—and growth...
...Here she sounds very much like the American feminists of the 1970s...
...Still, The Second Sex remains an extraordinary achievement for that necessary phase of feminism which holds that women can—and should—do everything that men do...
...And metaphor can perhaps be changed whereas fact cannot...
...Perhaps because The Second Sex was written before the legalization of contraception and abortion in France (brought about in large measure through her efforts in such organizations as ChoisirChoice), she sees women's "enslavement by reproduction" as the main sexual differentiator: "the individuality of the female is opposed by the interest of the species...
...But they hardly fit the romantic or even existential definition of love, which posits an absolute love that allows room for no other...
...Beauvoir's 354 contribution to humanism and feminism was to urge upon women such achievement rather than self-sacrifice...
...Despite her talk of autonomy, she does not escape her dependence on the patriarchal order, and never suggests a system to replace it...
...She made herself a satellite, not because she was a woman, she said, but because of Sartre's philosophical and political superiority...
...2 Toward a Feminist Psychoanalysis MANY =tics CLAIM THAT in The Second Sex Beauvoir rejects psychoanalysis in her treatment of the woman as Other...
...It does not seem that Sartre was so careful about his balancing act...
...Thousands upon thousands attended...
...But man is not happy with his body either, according to Beauvoir, since it too is subject to change and death...
...She was constantly watched, as was Sartre, though he with greater indulgence...
...Beauvoir too had adopted Sylvie le Bon in what she described as a freely chosen relationship...
...Because of their overvaluation of intellect, he says, men constantly look to different women to replenish their emotional resources...
...Sartre, at least at the end of his life, 356 was asking, "Why can't a man be more like a woman...
...No wonder he needed so many of them...
...But it may well be that Simone de Beauvoir made the greater contribution...
...Precisely what Beauvoir saw as the major barrier keeping women from full participation in humanity, this third group of feminists sees as a bridge to a greater humanity...
...Because they go so far, we are angry that they are not gods...
...Algren belonged to another continent, Lanzmann to another generation...
...What she does reject is the traditional reading of Freud...
...But such myths reveal the place of woman in the imagination even more than in social reality...
...3 Perhaps new is the wrong word since debates about this issue had been going on in the 1920s and 1930s, but certainly Beauvoir is in the vanguard of current thinking on it...
...In herself woman appeals to a flesh which is to transform her into a fullness of being by penetration and dissolution," writes Sartre in Being and Nothingness, a statement which assumes that a man is complete in himself and that he has no envy of the specifically feminine jouissance or orgasm...
...Yet in the Adieux he reveals that he dislikes the term "adult male" because it distinguishes between the sexes in an odious, comic fashion...
...The Second Sex, never seeing relatedness, community, and cooperation as positive values, presents individual achievement as the supreme goal of human existence...
...Books brought them together at the Sorbonne, where they both took advanced degrees in philosophy...
...Current feminist theoreticians believe that the examination of women's lives, with their invisible and unpaid labor, both in the household and as reproducers of the work force, brings one to deeper insights into materiality than Marx's analysis of the (male) proletariat...
...These are ideas that some Scandinavian countries have tried to introduce into policy, with varying degrees of success...
...I should base the notion of woman as other and the Manichean argument it entails not on an idealistic and a priori struggle of 353 consciences, but on the facts of supply and demand...
...Should reproduction ex utero ever become a reality, it would be potentially liberating only in a nonpatriarchal society...
...What she does do in The Second Sex is try to account for women's position as Other through theories of biology, psychoanalysis, and economics...
...In Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, her autobiographical Bildungsroman, she describes him as fulfilling her adolescent fantasy: "Sartre corresponded exactly to the dreamcompanion I had longed for since I was fifteen: he was the double in whom I found all my burning aspiration raised to the pitch of incandescence...
...that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills," wrote Beauvoir in the 1940s, expressing a worldview that she never substantially changed...
...Seeking utopia in such countries as Russia, Cuba, China, they were repeatedly disillusioned...
...Neither could practice what they theorized...
...One wonders why all the painful details are necessary...
...Unlike men, who represent consciousness and activity in the world (what Beauvoir calls transcendence or the pour-soi, for-itself), 351 women represent being (immanence or the ensoi, in-itself) and are therefore aligned with nature...
...The translator, H.M...
...It is pervaded by the hierarchical dualism that has marked most of the thinking of Western male culture, which has placed mind above body, man above woman, and culture above nature, a dualism that current feminists are attacking...
...In contrast, the male body does not impede movement towards transcendence, for it does not have to be "sacrificed" to the species in pregnancy and childbirth...
...The reasons are complex and overdetermined, and I can only suggest some of them...
...Interestingly enough, in The 355 Second Sex, Beauvoir claimed that an authentic love should assume "the contingence of the other," should recognize his lacks and limitations, and not be idolatrous...
...For her, culture is unrelievedly male...
...Their lives seized the imagination of an age, whether as role models for modernism or as unofficial political and intellectual ambassadors in their travels around the world...
...As for the content," she later wrote in Force of Circumstance, "I should take a more materialist position today in the first volume...
...But Beauvoir and Sartre never connect the roots of this idea to the psychoanalytical account of the mirror stage of development, in which the infant starts responding to the mother's face...
...In relation to men, she said, all women are the Other...
...I knew Sartre did not want marriage...
...It is the latter that women envy...
...Ironically, considering Beauvoir's criticism, it is Freud's theory that is more emancipating for women than Sartre's...
...It was Sartre who set the terms of their nonmarriage pact, which included "perfect honesty about everything," an honesty that he perhaps desired as much for exhibitionistic gratification as for a means of control...
...A problem that Beauvoir did not confront, given her dualistic system, is who will be the Other once women have equality...
...She does, however, anticipate the new geography of female sexuality that dismisses Freud's phallocentric view of the little girl as an homme manqui with a stunted penis, and that grants her organs of her own...
...Part of the new feminism, however, would like a merger of social and psychoanalytic theory to explain women's placement—or displacement—in the world...
...This admission, which implies a fear of women's sexual demands or at least of female sexuality, throws new light on Sartre's emphasis on holes and viscosity in his descriptions of the female sex organ in his earlier work, descriptions that Beauvoir often echoes...
...They might conceivably even disappear if reproduction is ever taken out of the body...
...Her dualism appears there as well...
...You have no dowries," Beauvoir's father kept saying to his daughters...
...Her picture of Sartre's last years in Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre is problematic at best...
...It remains for a new theorist of Beauvoir's stature to explore the place of women in this new world, and to point the way to further crossings of the gender line into new landscapes of the human...
...Whereas Sartre felt that all people could be the Other in relation to others, Beauvoir's brilliance lay in showing that these were divisions that actually marked relations between the two sexes...
...She succeeded in making her life an exemplum but not always in the way she would have liked...
...Germain in Paris, wanting to write about herself: I realized that the first question to come up was: What has it meant to me to be a woman...
...It is some of the complexities in her work and her life that I would like to explore here...
...Perhaps Beauvoir writes so well about this subject because in some sense she was betrayed too...
...66 . . [I] t is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal...
...I treat it here because I think it affected his philosophy and in turn that of Beauvoir...
...Beauvoir presents a clearly defined world of supposed reason, truth, and objectivity as one side of her polarized view and insists that women engage in it and gain all the rewards that men have had previously...
...This is not, he implies, a good division...
...Yet there is nothing natural in this opposition, according to Beauvoir...
...Still it was the incestuous daughter who inherited all of Sartre's unpublished papers while Beauvoir, Sartre's "one special reader" for whom he wrote, had no access to them...
...The fear, of course, is also a wish even less acknowledged...
...It's not just the hierarchy of the terms that they are questioning but the concept of dualism itself...
...In a sense Beauvoir's recognition that this is "a masculine world" exposes a similar "truth...
...Holes are bad...
...it is as if she were possessed by foreign forces—alienated...
...For what Sartre sees as literal truth, Freud sees as metaphor...
...One is not born but rather one becomes a woman...
...Though she doesn't use the term, Beauvoir might have said, "Gender is destiny...
...Beauvoir's description (in a later chapter) of how pregnancy transforms—indeed distorts— the body could scarcely be outdone by the most virulent misogynist and is one reason why the current generation of feminists does not always find her sympathetic: Ensnared by nature, the pregnant woman is plant and animal, a stock-pile of colloids, an incubator, an egg...
...Sartre's sisterlike mother, in contrast, promised her son that his reward for the same activity would be the adulation of women...
...In the end, he adopted a young woman, Arlette Elkahim...
...And so her book The Second Sex was born...
...This is one of her major blind spots...
...Unlike Freud but rather like Melanie Klein, Beauvoir recognizes the strength of the preOedipal period, which is only now receiving widespread attention...
...We might go further and say that Beauvoir is a prisoner of gender also—masculine gender...
...Perhaps because of her antipsychoanalytical bias, Beauvoir doesn't refer to a major reason for female as well as male disgust at the female body that is now being treated at length by such French women analysts as Julia Kristeva: the fear of being engulfed, swallowed up by the "primitive" mother, that dangerous, powerful, overwhelming figure of our infancy...
...Beauvoir saw the novel as a public, rather than as an experimental, genre that aims at credibility, unlike autobiography, where one can be singular, eccentric...
...3 Still, Beauvoir does deny one of the central credos of psychoanalysis, whether traditional or revisionist—the importance of the unconscious— because she feels that such a concept limits choice...
...They reject the body in general, but the mother's above all...
...Notes l As skeptical as Ruth Herschberger was in this country, in a delightful book called Adam's Rib (New York: Pellegrini and Cudahy, 1948...
...The frailties of biology are handi352 caps that must be overcome—like congenital asthma, I suppose (or perhaps like what Sartre calls the facticity of situation...
...At one time he could make her feel as secure as the idea of God did when she was a child, but at the end of his life he suffers a de-idealization and deidolization at Beauvoir's pen, in part at least because the body has taken over the mind...
...There is an extraordinary statement by Sartre in the Adieux on his sexuality...
...One might think that her awareness of such past distortions would make her skeptical of male-oriented descriptions of biology...
...The myths may change or diminish in force as men share in child-rearing tasks and as women enter the public world...
...Discerning "Truth" Through Biology HER FIRST AND ARGUABLY MOST PROMINENT chapter is "The Data of Biology...
...She later gave up her hopes for worldwide revolution, urging women to fight for their rights independently...
...If the symbolic nature of funerals is any evidence, the public agreed...
...For despite what she sees as the hindrances of female biology, she urges women to struggle for transcendence, for a place in the public world...
...Anne speaks in the first person, and is, perhaps revealingly, a psychoanalyst...
...As a novelist, she didn't...
...For Beauvoir in her early emancipation from her family, when she went off to the university, happiness meant a closed door...
...You girls will never marry...
...They will not go away unless attention is paid to their invisible dwelling place...
...While some of these passages might bear witness that Sartre lacked mature genitality, they also reveal a desire for androgyny— a desire for transcendence of dualism perhaps...
...Had Sartre come to these conclusions sooner, his (and Beauvoir's) existential psychoanalysis might have been quite different...
...In English the paperback runs to some seven hundred pages, a marvelous source of literary criticism, analysis of myth, physiological, psychological, economic, and social commentary on women...
...Autobiography objectified becomes theory...
...In what may be the most intellectual euphemism for infidelity on record, the two pledged an "essential love" to each other but allowed for "contingent" loves with others...
...She describes lucidly the difficulties that little boys face in having to turn away from the mother as the first object of identification...
...But however nave their expectations, they always supported the downtrodden, whether in colonies far away or the working classes at home...
...The mind, for them, is paramount...
...I was a poor, neurotic girl, repressed, frustrated, and cheated by life, a virago, a woman who'd never been made love to properly, envious, embittered, and bursting with inferiority complexes with regard to men, while with regard to women I was eaten to the bone by resentment...
...But while Beauvoir viewed science and technology as potential liberators of women, these new techniques may lead to some new "enslavements," such as the exploitation of poor, minority, and Third-World women for surrogacy...
...She is eons away from the current attempt to transcend binary polarization...
...It appears in volume one, entitled "Facts and Myths": significantly, Beauvoir places biology in the category of facts, unlike some feminist scientists today who see traditional biology itself, at least the branch that treats of sexual differences, as part of patriarchal mythology...
...She was labeled "unsatisfied, frigid, priapic, nymphomaniac, lesbian, a hundred times aborted," as she tells us in her autobiographical Force of Circumstance...
...Those who cannot imagine this do not comprehend feminism as a philosophical and political movement...
...But Sartre had wanted to marry Arlette, one of his mistresses...
...I should have been quite happy naked in bed with a naked woman, caressing and kissing her, but without going as far as the sexual act...
...I could not want it all by myself...
...Not anatomy but culture confers privilege—or denies it...
...Existentialism posits a philosophical division between Subject and Other, similar in some ways to Hegel's paradigm of master-slave...
...she scares children proud of their young, straight bodies and makes young people titter contemptuously because she is a human being, a conscious and free individual, who has become life's passive instrument...
...Beauvoir argues that the ways of a society cannot be deduced from biology, but what she doesn't recognize sufficiently is that biological "facts" can be deduced from the ways of a society...
...Though proud of her intellect, he viewed Beauvoir's life of hard study as a punishment, necessary because she was doomed to be alone...
...They cannot be used in "bad faith" as excuses to avoid freedom...
...In bondage to the mother, it is her body they both reject...
...When she wrote The Second Sex, Beauvoir believed that socialism would end the inequality of women...
...You'll have to work for a living...
...Nor is it merely centuries of Catholic repulsion for things of the flesh...
...The primacy of the physical is something that transcends sex...
...But Beauvoir is not interested in this mediation...
...In large part, Sartre and Beauvoir's physical experiences influenced their philosophy...
...They did not need children...
...Yet The Mandarins is remarkably powerful with intensely alive if humorless characters, a lyrical rendering of nature, and a fascinating experiment with point of view...
...But by now it is not only women who reject this view...
...For me," I said to Sartre, "you might almost say it just hasn't counted...
...It was in the 1970s also that Beauvoir would argue that she was less fearful of maternity than of marriage and the family as enslaving institutions...
...Many feminist scientists today, such as Ruth Hubbard, fear that male-dominated technology will soon deprive women of the right to conceive in the natural way at all...
...Sartre, only a little less than Abelard, was the tutor/lover...
...Because of her university training and her great gifts, however, she is able to transform her hurts into metaphysical despair over death, political outrage—or into fiction...
...They were so busy shaping themselves—and others...
...In this last sense, men can mother also, and are doing so increasingly...
...Beauvoir does not consider these aspects in either The Second Sex or her later work...
...For this reason, she was opposed to Betty Friedan's idea of wages for housework...
...Within a few pages, she forcibly illustrates the distinctions between the penis as vulnerable biological organ and what Jacques Lacan and his disciples would refer to as the phallus, the always erect symbol of male privilege within the patriarchal order...
...The new reproductive technology with its use of in vitro fertilization (fertilization in a petri dish) and surrogate mothers (women who contribute their ova and/or their uterine environment for the creation and gestation of fetuses meant to be reared by others after birth) would seem to offer women greater choice and control over having children...
...We can agree with Beauvoir that there is no fixed human nature—actually what she believes is that there is no fixed woman's nature—and still question her conclusion that "perhaps the myth of woman will some day be extinguished...
...All the same, you weren't brought up in the same way as a boy would have been...
...What Sartre reveals in Adieux is men's emotional parasitism...
...There is a third and perhaps major direction in feminism that Beauvoir was also unsympathetic to at the end of her life, one which seeks to transcend dualist oppositions altogether...
...But I don't think that it is simply Sartre's influence that causes Beauvoir in "The Second Sex" to describe the female sex organ as "carnivorous plant," "bog," "suction, humus, pitch and glue . . . insinuating and viscous...
...The American edition of The Second Sex is not quite the whole story...
...Not surprisingly, considering its attack on religion and the traditional family, the Pope banned it...
...this too was a foreignness that kept a balance in our relationship...
...But when published in France, it was viewed as illegitimate...
...Still, she writes with some unconscious irony: "It is in itself splendid that we were able to live our lives in harmony for so long...
...In the physical deterioration of both Sartre and Beauvoir at the end of their lives, they reveal what Donne also implies: That far more important than sexual difference are the vulnerabilities that all of us share as part of the human condition...
...Like Haase and Abelard, theirs was one of the great academic romances...
...As a member of the existentialist movement that grew up around Sartre in the 1940s, Beauvoir was nurtured on such heady concepts as engagement, freedom, transcendence...
...Despite her weighty evidence, it is comforting that she finds none of these sufficient...
...The journal Questions F'tninistes, founded in the late 1970s under the general editorship of Beauvoir, has condemned this approach, seeing it as a tool for patriarchy rather than liberation...
...The book received highly mixed reviews in this country, in part for its anti-Americanism, also revealed in Beauvoir's travel journal Day by Day...
...She is as much an illustration of the "woman in love" described in The Second Sex as a representative of freedom...
...I had never had any feeling of inferiority, no one had ever said to me: "You think that way because you're a woman...
...One strong current of feminism that Beauvoir dismisses is sometimes called cultural feminism...
...Parshley, omitted large chunks—mainly those having to do with women in history, the drudgery of housework, and the nineteenth-century feminist movement...
...But unlike contemporary theorists, she does not go on to connect this forced separation with the masculine formation of a dualistic worldview that reduces women to objects...
...She too had other lovers, chosen perhaps more in retaliation than in freedom: Nelson Algren, the author of The Man With the Golden Arm, who figures in The Mandarins, and the journalist Claude Lanzmann...
...my femininity had never been irksome to me in any way...
...Not only would reproduction ex utero release women from their "enslavement" to the species, it would also modify if not eliminate the entire mythology of women to which Beauvoir is so opposed...
...Beauvoir's relation to her mother was particularly ambivalent...
...Sartre, who fantasized himself as the "writer-knight" in his autobiography, Les Mots, became Beauvoir's rescuer...
...It is significant that she doesn't see the risk of life in childbirth as a transcendent act...
...Beauvoir would probably plead honesty...
...Did Beauvoir accept these conditions because she was the essential one...
...Still, there is enough...
...Should we fault Beauvoir for this split...
...Though some critics have praised the book for its truthfulness, it is less a depiction of the vulnerabilities of a great man in old age than a quiet revenge...
...For myself, I needed some sort of distance if I were to give my heart sincerely, for there could be no question of trying to duplicate the understanding I had with Sartre...
...Also, her denial of the unconscious sometimes causes Beauvoir to see the myths of women, for example, those of the Virgin Mary and the temptress, as mere mystifications and devices for control...
...In existential psychoanalysis, unlike Freud's, things possess objective qualities of being...
...ALTHOUGH IT IS PRIMARILY FOR THE SECOND SEX that Beauvoir will be remembered, her accomplishments as a novelist are also noteworthy...
...In that sense she bears some similarity to Mary Wollstonecraft, the eighteenth-century author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman...
...In France writers such as Helene Cixous advocate an ecriture feminine, a style of writing that cultivates difference, as if to capture the fluidity of the female body, with its experience of blood, milk, and cycles...
...In some way he turned Beauvoir into the mother—and the sister...
...In all fairness to Sartre, he did not think such a love could exist...
...Unlike the so-called material feminists early in this century and Dolores Hayden today, whose architectural plans seek to eliminate the split between home and work, Beauvoir wanted women out of the house altogether and in public life...
...It was so crowded, people were pushed onto the grave site...
...It is not feeling or body but mind and intellect that she exalts...
...Most of the book is written in the third person, except for the treatment of Anne, in some ways the character closest to Beauvoir...
...Although science has been remarkably successful in discovering empirical "truths" that do not threaten the power structure, such as the presence of abnormal cells, it has been far less so in dealing with those parts of the body that have symbolic value...
...Such technology even points ahead to the possibility of removing reproduction from the body altogether, a prospect that would no doubt have been welcomed by Beauvoir...
...Confined by their body in childhood, they seek to escape it through thought...
...Beauvoir's greatness as a theorist was to show us the anatomy of sexism, to expose with relentless precision the oppression of women in a "masculine world," thereby implying that with equality women could do whatever men could...
...But as long as women bear children and there is an incest barrier, women will remain objects of mystery for men and to some extent for women as well...
...I was more a masturbator of women than a copulator...
...In contrast, Beauvoir's was a quiet affair, so quiet, I've been told, that her loyal feminist following was at one point locked outside the cemetery gates...
...They may not go away even then, but we will understand them better...
...They feel that bearing and nurturing a child can help to eliminate the split between nature and culture, body and mind, feeling and action, change and stasis...
...For all her professed atheism, Beauvoir's early Catholic teaching survives...
...Will the relation between men and women then be reversed, or will the Other be drawn from a category other than sex...
...And like Haase and Abelard in the Middle Ages, Beauvoir and Sartre epitomize our own age's ambivalent attitudes toward sex and love...
...but this is above all because sex is a hole," he had written...
...It is the experience of the total body that Sartre now seeks—that which women are supposed to experience...
...Even though she herself might agree, I do not think this is true...
...It is doubtful that she wanted it either...
...Sartre confesses that he didn't attach a great deal of importance to intercourse—he simply engaged in it because it was expected...
...here Beauvoir prevailed...
...Supply and Demand GIVEN BEAUVOIR'S SOCIALIST IDEALS, her account of economic explanations for women as Other is probably the weakest section in The Second Sex...
Vol. 34 • July 1987 • No. 3
