Women, Love, and Power: Literary and Psychoanalytic Perspectives

13. The Female Body and the Male Mind: Reconsidering Simone de Beauvoir

13 The Female Body and the Male Mind: Reconsidering Simone de Beauvoir new modes of living with regard to the individual, the family, and the state, and its attempt to change 'human nature' as men traditionally have defined it, entitle feminism to a place among the grand visionary schemes."1 As with so many other Utopian movements the leader of this one was French. The difference is that this time the leader was a woman. Forty years ago Simone de Beauvoir sat in front of a blank sheet of paper at the Café des Deux Magots, on the Boulevard St. 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. At first I thought I could dispose of that pretty quickly. I had never had any feeling of inferiority, no one had ever said to me: ''You think that way because you're a woman"; my femininity had never been irksome to me in any way. "For me," I said to Sartre, "you might almost say it just hasn't counted." "All the same, you weren't brought up in the same way as a boy would have been; you should look into it further!"2 And so her book The Second Sex was born. It was, in a sense, Jean-Paul Sartre's baby. But when published in France, it was viewed as illegitimate. 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." She was labeled "unsatisfied, frigid, priapic, nymphomaniac, lesbian, 230 INW o m e ni nS e a r c ho fU t o p i aIw r o t e ,' ' s u r e l yi t se m p h a s i so n THE FEMALE BODY AND THE MALE MIND 23! a hundred times aborted," as she tells us in her autobiographical Force of Circumstance. 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. Her friend Albert Camus threw the book across the floor, saying it made men look ridiculous. Not surprisingly, considering its attack on religion and the traditional family, the Pope banned it. The American edition of The Second Sex is not quite the whole story. The translator, H. M. Parshley, omitted large chunks— mainly those having to do with women in history, the drudgery of housework, and the nineteenth-century feminist movement. Still, there is enough. 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. Nonetheless, The Second Sex is a child of its times. 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. It's not just the hierarchy of the terms that they are questioning but the concept of dualism itself. 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. 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 some of the complexities in her work and her life that I would like to explore here. As a member of the existentialist movement that grew up around Sartre in the 19405, Beauvoir was nurtured on such heady concepts as engagement, freedom, transcendence. Existentialism posits a philosophical division between Subject and Other, similar in some ways to Hegel's paradigm of master-slave. 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 232 WOMEN, LOVE, AND POWER actually marked relations between the two sexes. In relation to men, she said, all women are the Other. Unlike men, who represent consciousness and activity in the world (what Beauvoir calls transcendence or the pour...