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Muzaffer Derya Nazlıpınar

Dr. Gamze Sabancı

Contemporary Approaches in Literary Criticism

9th March 2012

THE SECOND SEX by SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

While I was reading ‘The Second Sex’, in which Beauvoir exhaustively tried to

overcome with the common misconceptions of being a woman, I was surprised to see that the

dilemmas she analyzed still continue to obsess and sometimes torment modern women -- the

conflicts between meaningful work and maternity, the temptations of dependence, and the

painful artifices conventional femininity requires.

According to Beauvoir, there is no such equilibrium between the sexes, since man is

representative of the essential and his actions are defined as transcendent. He is the

embodiment of humanity, while woman is his correlative negation. She is the inessential, the

incidental and immanent. Thus, she is always confined to exist relative to man as the

“absolute Other of [him]” (1405). Through these myths that the patriarchal ideology count on,

the society enforces its laws on women and makes them sometimes a “Crazy Womb”,

sometimes a “Praying Mantis” or “The Good Earth” (1405), which in my opinion is a very

subtle way to prove the discrepancy of the false myth placed upon women.

Then, Beauvoir proceeds to systematically refute the idea that to be a woman means to

embody some kind of mysterious feminine essence assigned by the false myth. That is, she

rejects the “eternal feminine” (1407) in favour of a more dynamic feminine model, in which

she differentiates between “femininity” and “woman” by proclaiming that to be a woman is a

becoming and not an automatic given. To assure her thoughts, Beauvoir asserts that women

have to accept themselves as “the Other” to become a “true woman”, because men

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“misconceive reciprocity” (1409-1410). According to Beauvoir, this form of reciprocity is

almost nonexistent in the relationship between the sexes, because while men can think of

himself without women, they cannot do this. Both in an ideological and sociological sense,

women do not exist independently from men. This underlying lack of reciprocity is what leads

Beauvoir to question the subject other relationship and the nature of subordination. She asks

why it is that women have accepted this subject-object dichotomy and why it has not been

disputed. In my opinion, the answer is clear: women have never fought back in the way; as a

result they have gained only what little men have allotted to them. Accordingly, women live

not only in men’s shadow, but in complete subordination to them. Beauvoir finishes her text

with the hope that women “will regain [their] place in humanity” (1414), but unfortunately, it

is so discouraging to see that we are still struggling with the same problems she illuminated.

Work Cited

Beauvoir, S. “The Second Sex”. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.

Norton & Company: USA. 2001. 1403-1414.