The Second Sex

by Simone de Beauvoir

  VI

  These examples show that the great collective myths are reflected in each singular writer: woman appears to us as flesh; male flesh is engendered by the maternal womb and re-created in the woman lover’s embrace: thus, woman is akin to nature, she embodies it: animal, little vale of blood, rose in bloom, siren, curve of a hill, she gives humus, sap, tangible beauty, and the world’s soul to man; she can hold the keys to poetry; she can be mediator between this world and the beyond: grace or Pythia, star or witch, she opens the door to the supernatural, the surreal; she is destined to immanence; and through her passivity she doles out peace and harmony: but should she refuse this role, she becomes praying mantis or ogress. In any case, she appears as the privileged Other through whom the subject accomplishes himself: one of the measures of man, his balance, his salvation, his adventure, and his happiness.

  But these myths are orchestrated differently for each individual. The Other is singularly defined according to the singular way the One chooses to posit himself. All men assert themselves as freedom and transcendence: but they do not all give the same meaning to these words. For Montherlant transcendence is a state: he is the transcendent, he soars in the sky of heroes; the woman crouches on the ground, under his feet; he enjoys measuring the distance separating him from her; from time to time, he raises her to him, takes and then rejects her; never does he lower himself toward her sphere of viscous darkness. Lawrence situates transcendence in the phallus; the phallus is life and power only thanks to woman; immanence is thus good and necessary; the false hero who deigns not to touch the earth, far from being a demigod, fails to be a man; woman is not despicable, she is deep wealth, hot spring; but she must renounce all personal transcendence and settle for nourishing that of her male. Claudel demands the same devotion: woman is also for him the one who maintains life, while man prolongs the vital momentum by his activity; but for the Catholic everything that occurs on earth is steeped in vain immanence: the only transcendent is God; in God’s eyes the active man and the woman who serves him are exactly equal; each one has to surpass his earthly condition: salvation in any case is an autonomous undertaking. For Breton sexual hierarchy is inverted; action and conscious thought in which the male situates his transcendence are for him a banal mystification that engenders war, stupidity, bureaucracy, and negation of the human; it is immanence, the pure opaque presence of the real, that is the truth; true transcendence would be accomplished by the return to immanence. His attitude is the exact opposite of Montherlant’s: the latter likes war because women are banished from it, Breton venerates woman because she brings peace; one confuses mind and subjectivity, he rejects the given universe; the other thinks the mind is objectively present in the heart of the world; woman compromises Montherlant because she shatters his solitude; she is, for Breton, revelation because she wrests him from subjectivity. As for Stendhal, we saw that woman barely takes on a mythical value for him: he considers her as also being a transcendence; for this humanist, it is in their reciprocal relations that freedoms are accomplished; and it is sufficient that the Other is simply another for life to have, according to him, a little spice; he does not seek a stellar equilibrium, he does not nourish himself with the bread of disgust; he does not expect miracles; he wishes to concern himself not with the cosmos or poetry but with freedoms.

  That is, he also experiences himself as a translucent freedom. The others—and this is one of the most important points—posit themselves as transcendences but feel they are prisoners of an opaque presence in their own hearts: they project onto woman this “unbreakable core of night.” In Montherlant there is an Adlerian complex where heavy bad faith is born: these pretensions and fears are what he incarnates in woman; the disgust he feels for her is what he fears to feel for himself; he intends to trample in her the ever possible proof of his own insufficiency; he asks scorn to save him; woman is the ditch in which he throws all the monsters that inhabit him.120

  Lawrence’s life shows us that he suffered from an analogous complex but more purely sexual: woman in his work has the value of a compensatory myth; through her is found an exalted virility of which the writer was not very sure; when he describes Kate at Don Cipriano’s feet, he believes he has won a male triumph over Frieda; nor does he accept that his female companion challenges him: if she contested his aims, he would probably lose confidence in them; her role is to reassure him. He asks for peace, rest, and faith from her, just as Montherlant asks for the certitude of his superiority: they demand what they lack. Self-confidence is not lacking in Claudel: if he is shy, it is only the secret of God. Thus, there is no trace of the battle of the sexes. Man bravely takes on the weight of woman: she is the possibility of temptation or of salvation. For Breton it seems that man is only true through the mystery that inhabits him; it pleases him that Nadja sees that star he is going toward and that is like “a heartless flower”; his dreams, intuitions, and the spontaneous unfolding of his inner language: it is in these activities that are out of the control of will and reason that he recognizes himself: woman is the tangible figure of this veiled presence infinitely more essential than her conscious personality.

  As for Stendhal, he quietly coincides with himself; but he needs woman as she does him so that his dispersed existence is gathered in the unity of a figure and a destiny; it is as for-another that the human being reaches being; but another still has to lend him his consciousness: other men are too indifferent to their peers; only the woman in love opens her heart to her lover and shelters it in its entirety. Except for Claudel, who finds a perfect witness in God, all the writers we have considered expect, in Malraux’s words, woman to cherish in them this “incomparable monster” known to themselves alone. In collaboration or combat, men come up against each other in their generality. Montherlant, for his peers, is a writer, Lawrence a doctrinaire, Breton a leader of a school, Stendhal a diplomat or a man of wit; it is women who reveal in one a magnificent and cruel prince, in another a disturbing animal, in still another a god or a sun or a being “black and cold … like a man struck by lightning, lying at the feet of the Sphinx,”121 and in the other a seducer, a charmer, a lover.

  For each of them, the ideal woman will be she who embodies the most exactly the Other able to reveal him to himself. Montherlant, the solar spirit, looks for pure animality in her; Lawrence, the phallic, demands that she sum up the female sex in its generality; Claudel defines her as a soul sister; Breton cherishes Melusina rooted in nature, he puts his hopes in the child-woman; Stendhal wants his mistress intelligent, cultivated, free of spirit and morals: an equal. But the only earthly destiny reserved to the woman equal, child-woman, soul sister, woman-sex, and female animal is always man. Regardless of the ego looking for itself through her, it can only attain itself if she consents to be his crucible. In any case, what is demanded of her is self-forgetting and love. Montherlant consents to be moved by the woman who enables him to measure his virile power; Lawrence addresses an ardent hymn to the woman who renounces herself for him; Claudel exalts the vassal, servant, and devoted woman who submits herself to God by submitting herself to the male; Breton puts his hopes in woman for humanity’s salvation because she is capable of the most total love for her child and her lover; and even in Stendhal the heroines are more moving than the masculine heroes because they give themselves over to their passion with a more ardent violence; they help man to accomplish his destiny as Prouhèze contributes to Rodrigo’s salvation; in Stendhal’s novels, women often save their lovers from ruin, prison, or death. Feminine devotion is demanded as a duty by Montherlant and Lawrence; less arrogant, Claudel, Breton, and Stendhal admire it as a generous choice; they desire it without claiming to deserve it; but—except for the astonishing Lamiel—all their works show they expect from woman this altruism that Comte admired in and imposed on her, and which, according to him, also constituted both a flagrant inferiority and an equivocal superiority.

  We could find many more examples: they would always lead to the same conclusions. I
n defining woman, each writer defines his general ethic and the singular idea he has of himself: it is also in her that he often registers the distance between his view of the world and his egotistical dreams. The absence or insignificance of the female element in a body of work in general is itself symptomatic; it has an extreme importance when it sums up in its totality all the aspects of the Other, as it does for Lawrence; it remains important if woman is grasped simply as another but the writer is interested in her life’s individual adventure, which is Stendhal’s case; it loses importance in a period like ours in which each individual’s particular problems are of secondary import. However, woman as other still plays a role inasmuch as even to transcend himself, each man still needs to take consciousness of himself.

  1. Pitié pour les femmes (Pity for Women).

  2. Ibid.

  3. Le songe (The Dream).

  4. Pity for Women.

  5. The Girls.

  6. Ibid.

  7. Ibid.

  8. Adler considered this process the classic origin of psychoses. The individual, divided between a “will for power” and an “inferiority complex,” sets up the greatest distance possible between society and himself so as to avoid the test of reality. He knows it would undermine the claims he can maintain only if they are hidden by bad faith.

  9. The Dream.

  10. Ibid.

  11. La petite infante de Castille (The Little Infanta of Castile).

  12. Ibid.

  13. The Girls.

  14. Ibid.

  15. Ibid.

  16. Ibid.

  17. The Little Infanta of Castile.

  18. The Dream.

  19. The Girls.

  20. Ibid.

  21. Ibid.

  22. Ibid.

  23. Ibid.

  24. Ibid.

  25. The Little Infanta of Castile.

  26. Le maître de Santiago (The Master of Santiago).

  27. Le solstice de juin (June Solstice).

  28. Ibid.

  29. Ibid.

  30. Ibid.

  31. L’équinoxe de septembre (September Equinox).

  32. At the Fountains of Desire.

  33. Ibid.

  34. La possession de soi-même (The Possession of Oneself).

  35. June Solstice.

  36. At the Fountains of Desire.

  37. Ibid.

  38. Ibid.

  39. June Solstice.

  40. “We ask for a body that would have discretionary power to stop anything it deems to be harmful to the essence of French human values. Some sort of an inquisition in the name of French human values” (ibid.).

  41. The Girls.

  42. June Solstice.

  43. Ibid.

  44. Ibid.

  45. Women in Love.

  46. Ibid.

  47. Ibid.

  48. Sons and Lovers.

  49. Women in Love.

  50. Preface to L’amant de Lady Chatterley.

  51. Fantasia of the Unconscious.

  52. Ibid.

  53. Ibid.

  54. Ibid.

  55. Ibid.

  56. Ibid.

  57. Women in Love.

  58. Fantasia of the Unconscious.

  59. Women in Love.

  60. Sons and Lovers.

  61. The Plumed Serpent.

  62. With the exception of Paul in Sons and Lovers, who is the most vibrant of all. But that is the only novel that shows us a masculine learning experience.

  63. Partage de midi. [Break of Noon, trans. Wallace Fowlie. All other Claudel translations in this section are by James Lawler.—TRANS.]

  64. Les aventures de Sophie (The Adventures of Sophie).

  65. La cantate à trios voix (Cantata for Three Voices).

  66. Conversations dans le Loir-et-Cher (Conversations in the Loir-et-Cher).

  67. Le soulier de satin (The Satin Slipper).

  68. L’annonce faite à Marie (The Tidings Brought to Mary).

  69. The Adventures of Sophie.

  70. L’échange (The Trade).

  71. The Adventures of Sophie.

  72. L’oiseau noir dans le soleil levant (The Black Bird in the Rising Sun).

  73. The Satin Slipper.

  74. Positions et propositions (Positions and Propositions).

  75. La ville (The City).

  76. The Satin Slipper.

  77. Ibid.

  78. The Tidings Brought to Mary.

  79. La jeune fille Violaine (The Young Violaine)

  80. The City.

  81. The Satin Slipper.

  82. Ibid.

  83. The City.

  84. Le pain dur (Crusts).

  85. The City.

  86. Break of Noon.

  87. Cantata for Three Voices.

  88. Ibid.

  89. Ibid.

  90. Positions and Propositions, Volume 2.

  91. The Satin Slipper.

  92. L’histoire de Tobie et de Sara (The History of Toby and Sara).

  93. Le père humilié (The Humiliation of the Father).

  94. The Satin Slipper.

  95. The Humiliation of the Father.

  96. Feuilles de saints (Leaves of Saints).

  97. The Satin Slipper.

  98. Leaves of Saints.

  99. Ibid.

  100. The Satin Slipper.

  101. Positions and Propositions, Volume 1.

  102. The Satin Slipper.

  103. The Humiliation of the Father.

  104. L’otage (The Hostage).

  105. The City.

  106. The Trade.

  107. Ibid.

  108. The Hostage.

  109. Ibid.

  110. The Satin Slipper.

  111. Ibid.

  112. Ibid.

  113. Ibid.

  114. The Young Violaine.

  115. The Satin Slipper.

  116. Breton’s italics.

  * Arthur Rimbaud, “Vagabonds,” in Illuminations, and “Adieu” (“Farewell”) in Une saison en enfer (A Season in Hell).—TRANS.

  117. Breton’s italics.

  118. Breton’s italics.

  119. Stendhal’s emphasis.

  * L’esprit de sérieux: conventional thinking.—TRANS.

  120. Stendhal judged in advance the cruelties with which Montherlant amuses himself: “In indifference, what should be done? Love-taste, but without the horrors. The horrors always come from a little soul that needs reassurance of its own merits.”

  121. Nadja.

  | CHAPTER 3 |

  The myth of woman plays a significant role in literature; but what is its importance in everyday life? To what extent does it affect individual social customs and behavior? To reply to this question, we will need to specify the relation of this myth to reality.

  There are different kinds of myths. This one, sublimating an immutable aspect of the human condition—that is, the “division” of humanity into two categories of individuals—is a static myth; it projects into a Platonic heaven a reality grasped through experience or conceptualized from experience; for fact, value, significance, notion, and empirical law, it substitutes a transcendent Idea, timeless, immutable, and necessary. This idea escapes all contention because it is situated beyond the given; it is endowed with an absolute truth. Thus, to the dispersed, contingent, and multiple existence of women, mythic thinking opposes the Eternal Feminine, unique and fixed; if the definition given is contradicted by the behavior of real flesh-and-blood women, it is women who are wrong: it is said not that Femininity is an entity but that women are not feminine. Experiential denials cannot do anything against myth. Though in a way, its source is in experience. It is thus true that woman is other than man, and this alterity is concretely felt in desire, embrace, and love; but the real relation is one of reciprocity; as such, it gives rise to authentic dramas: through eroticism, love, friendship, and their alternatives of disappointment, hatred, and rivalry, the relation is a struggle of consciousnesses, each of which wants to be essential, it is t
he recognition of freedoms that confirm each other, it is the undefined passage from enmity to complicity. To posit the Woman is to posit the absolute Other, without reciprocity, refusing, against experience, that she could be a subject, a peer.

  In concrete reality, women manifest themselves in many different ways; but each of the myths built around woman tries to summarize her as a whole; each is supposed to be unique; the consequence of this is a multiplicity of incompatible myths, and men are perplexed before the strange inconsistencies of the idea of Femininity; as every woman enters into many of these archetypes, each of which claims to incarnate its Truth alone, men also find the same old confusion before their companions as did the Sophists, who had difficulty understanding how a person could be light and dark at the same time. The transition to the absolute shows up in social representations: relations are quickly fixed in classes, and roles in types, just as, for the childlike mentality, relations are fixed in things. For example, patriarchal society, focused on preserving the patrimony, necessarily implies, in addition to individuals who hold and transmit goods, the existence of men and women who wrest them from their owners and circulate them; men—adventurers, crooks, thieves, speculators—are generally repudiated by the group; women using their sexual attraction can lure young people and even family men into dissipating their patrimony, all within the law; they appropriate men’s fortunes or seize their inheritance; this role being considered bad, women who play it are called “bad women.” But in other families—those of their fathers, brothers, husbands, or lovers—they can in fact seem like guardian angels; the courtesan who swindles rich financiers is a patroness of painters and writers. The ambiguity of personalities like Apasia and Mme de Pompadour is easy to understand as a concrete experience. But if woman is posited as the Praying Mantis, the Mandrake, or the Demon, then the mind reels to discover in her the Muse, the Goddess Mother, and Beatrice as well.