Re-Reading The Second Sex's ‘Simone de Beauvoir’

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Notes

¹Toril Moi has pointed out that, as an author, it could well be said that Beauvoir's autobiographies and reflective fiction invites this response (Moi, 1994, 74). As the Fullbrook's found:

The powerful structures that Beauvoir had built to fit her accounts of her life into a coherent frame featured not only omissions, selective interpretations, and incomplete mediations on experience that was still very much in progress, but the deliberate laying of false trails, and a thorough and purposeful commitment to skewing the accounts of some of the central features at the heart of the story.

(Fullbrook and Fullbrook, 1995, 101)

²In later works, Marks is substantially less critical of Beauvoir, noting the significance of irony that her earlier readings of Beauvoir tended to overlook (see Marks, 1987, 2).

³‘In this atmosphere of dissolution, shock, emptiness, and disillusion, Beauvoir, prompted by Sartre to explain what it was to be a woman, began work on The Second Sex, a comprehensive examination of the situation of woman’ (Nye, 1988, 74).

⁴Beauvoir ‘tried to establish a fragile reciprocity between Sartrean lover’ (88, my italics).

⁵Beauvoir's initial appeal to the transcendent heavens (to ask the question of woman, she claims ‘What we need is an angel – neither man nor woman – but where shall we find one?’ (1997, 27)) may support the critical belief that the first volume of the book is concerned with locating an origin of women's oppression. Despite seeming to search for an objective ground of analysis, however, Beauvoir never distinguishes this ‘origin’ of women's oppression, other than through vague and contradictory gestures: she finds history pointing to economic and biological weakness in women, but discounts this because they fail to grasp the ‘total perspective’ (91), and as such is not enough to define woman (69), thus leading to an existentialist perspective as the only adequate analysis (98). Only, she then concludes from that existentialist argument that economic and biological factors contribute to women's oppression (169). The fundamental point is that Beauvoir's stated intention is never realised in a satisfactory answer.