Beauvoir & V. in a C/c atholic Man's World

[alice wellintown]

Just getting round to this fat book with new introduction
Excerpt Introduction to Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘The Second Sex’
By JUDITH THURMAN
Published: May 27, 2010 see NY Times online


Mme de Beauvoir, intent on keeping up a facade of gentility, however
shabby, sent her daughters to an elite convent school where Simone,
for a while, ardently desired to become a nun, one of the few
respectable vocations open to an ambitious girl. When she lost her
faith as a teenager, her dreams of a transcendent union (dreams that
proved remarkably tenacious) shifted from Christ to an enchanting
classmate named ZaZa and to a rich, indolent first cousin and
childhood playmate, Jacques, who took her slumming and gave her a
taste for alcohol and for louche nightlife that she never outgrew.
(Not many bookish virgins with a particle in their surname got drunk
with the hookers and drug addicts at Le Styx.) Her mother hoped vainly
that the worthless Jacques would propose. Her father, a ladies’ man,
knew better: he told his temperamental, ill-dressed, pimply genius of
a daughter that she would never marry. But by then Simone de Beauvoir
had seen what a woman of almost any quality — highborn or low, pure or
impure, contented with her lot or alienated — could expect from a
man’s world.



The Second Sex has been called a “feminist bible,” an epithet bound to
discourage impious readers wary of a sacred text and a personality
cult. Beauvoir herself was as devout an atheist as she had once been a
Catholic, and she dismisses religions — even when they worship a
goddess — as the inventions of men to perpetuate their dominion. The
analogy is fitting, though, and not only to the grandeur of a book
that was the first of its kind but also to its structure. Beauvoir
begins her narrative, like the author of

Genesis, with a fall into knowledge. The two volumes that elaborate on
the consequences of that fall are the Old and New Testaments of an
unchosen people with a history of enslavement. (“Facts and Myths” is a
chronicle of womankind from prehistory to the 1940s; “Lived
Experience” is a minutely detailed case study of contemporary
womanhood and its stations of the cross from girlhood through puberty
and sexual initiation to maturity and old age, with detours from the
well-trodden road to Calvary taken by mystics and lesbians.) The epic
concludes, like Revelation, with an eloquent, if utopian, vision of
redemption:

The same drama of flesh and spirit, and of finitude and transcendence,
plays itself out in both sexes; both are eaten away by time, stalked
by death, they have the same essential need of the other; and they can
take the same glory from their freedom; if they knew how to savor it,
they would no longer be tempted to contend for false privileges; and
fraternity could then be born between them.