Nazlpnar 1 Muzaffer Derya Nazlpnar Dr.

Gamze Sabanc 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

Nazlpnar 2 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 mens 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.