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

[Ian Livingston]

> fraternity could then be born between them.

Interesting choice of words, don't you think? Why mightn't sorority be
born between them, I wonder? or community? or sympathy?

On Sun, Aug 8, 2010 at 1:07 PM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>



-- 
"liber enim librum aperit."