Simone de Beauvoir Crushes the Delusions of Patriarchy

Clapping Back to Misogyny, part six

Actual photo of my imaginary meeting of Germaine de Staël, Jane Austen, and Simone de Beauvoir. Photo by Karl Magnuson on Unsplash

Dear Reader,

Last week we considered the remarkable career of Germaine de Staël and her advocacy for the education of women and for the emerging literary form of the novel. My original plan had been to move on this week to her contemporary, Mary Wollstonecraft, who was making parallel arguments across the Channel in England. However, a comment on last week’s post struck me and changed my plans.

A. Jay Adler

wrote:

[T]he contrast between de Staël's connectedness, nonetheless, to intellectual elites and Austen's domesticated life far from centers of cultural power reminds that change has truly occurred only when those without ready access to cultural influence, who are not exceptions, as was de Staël, actually have freedom to become exceptional, as Austen made herself.

This really gets to the heart of the matter: Madame de Staël’s social position gave her the opportunity to become exceptional as a woman. The miracle of Austen is that we know her name at all—the daughter of an obscure clergyman with no fortune or social influence.

There could not be a better pair of examples of the existentialist poles of transcendence and immanence, at least in terms of their respective social positions, as described by Simone de Beauvoir in her 1949 magnum opus, The Second Sex. So, we will get to Mary Wollstonecraft eventually, but this week we will remain in France but move forward a century and a half to close this first part of the series.

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“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” This simple statement, with its implicit distinction between gender and chromosomes, is something many of us take for granted in 2023, especially those of us who went to graduate school in literature in the 1990s and read Judith Butler. But in 1949, when Simone de Beauvoir published these words in her epoch-making volume, The Second Sex, this was a radical claim—shocking, even.

While it may have been shocking, anyone keeping up with the burgeoning existentialist movement could have seen it coming, since it follows logically from the basic tenets of these philosophers, especially those of Jean Paul Sartre, Beauvoir’s lifelong friend and companion. Sartre claimed that humans were distinct from other animals in their radical freedom. Human beings are born with no “essence,” and their subjectivity is defined by their decisions and actions, along with the cultural conditions that shape them. Unlike, say, a horse, a human may choose a life—may choose to become one thing rather than another, a sailor rather than a soldier, for example. For Sartre, this ability to choose one’s course is potentially alienating and creates great anxiety, because it means that with our radical freedom comes a radical responsibility for one’s own decisions. This is why people tend to gravitate toward social roles that are predictable and that will limit available choices—though often, of course, these social roles are imposed upon them through social and cultural institutions.

In The Second Sex, Beauvoir applies a variation of this perspective to the problem of female subjectivity. For Beauvoir, the distinction between existential transcendence (authenticity and freedom, making one’s mark in the world) and immanence (living in a restricted state, defined by social conditions) is starkly gendered. This is because patriarchy has defined woman as the “Eternal Feminine,” which means that their biological sex has strictly categorized their social roles for them and has restricted their freedom. Women, therefore, have been denied subjectivity, have been constructed as “Other” rather than as a transcendent self:

Thus paternalism that calls for woman to stay at home defines her as sentiment, interiority, and immanence; in fact, every existent is simultaneously immanence and transcendence; when he is offered no goal, or is prevented from reaching any goal, or denied the victory of it, his transcendence falls uselessly into the past, that is, it falls into immanence; this is the lot assigned to women in patriarchy; but this is in no way a vocation, any more than slavery is the slave’s vocation.¹

Patriarchy has constructed feminine archetypes to categorize women and to deny their self-determination: virgin, whore, mother, housewife confined to domestic spaces. Because of this patriarchal taxonomy, “for many women, the roads to transcendence are blocked.” And this patriarchal context embeds this blockage at an ideological level; many women become indoctrinated to misogyny, to gender-based essentialism. As Sarah Bakewell writes, “Beauvoir’s guiding principle was that growing up female made a bigger difference to a person than most people realized, including women themselves.”

Existentialist ideas, however, provide the potential for liberation, because “essence does not precede existence: in his pure subjectivity, the human being is not anything. He is to be measured by his acts.” In other words, “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” This is one point at which Beauvoir diverges from Sartre. If this radical freedom is alienating to Sartre, it is for Beauvoir the promise of an alternative transcendence for women. Women potentially have just as much freedom as men to create themselves through their acts.

This explicit denial of some kind of feminine “essence” is why I teach Beauvoir early in the semester in my course on criticism, in the unit called “Grappling with Plato.” (For more on this course, and specifically the unit on Plato, see this two-part piece: part 1 and part 2.) Beauvoir’s is to me the most powerful attack on Plato’s theory of forms, the idea that everything is defined by an eternal, perfect essence, an “ideal form.” The most devastating aspect of the attack is the revelation of how profoundly gendered Plato’s theory is at its core: for Plato, men represent transcendence in their ideal, while women represent immanence. For Beauvoir, there is no “ideal form” of a woman; there is only what individual women do in the world, and each woman may potentially define herself in any way she wants, regardless of any ideal.

Furthermore, a release from these idealist illusions would benefit men as well as women, Beauvoir argues, because:

Man would have nothing to lose, quite the contrary, if he stopped disguising woman as a symbol. Dreams, when collective and controlled—clichés—are so poor and monotonous compared to living reality: for the real dreamer, for the poet, living reality is a far more generous resource than a worn-out fantasy.

And this assertion brings us back, full circle, to Madame de Staël and her argument that the novel is a valuable literary form because of its potential to represent the individual lives of women, in all their variety, rather than stale tropes, in clichés. It brings us back to Austen as well, who writes about women trapped in social contexts that provide them with very little freedom, but with a desire for some sort of transcendence, for the ability to define themselves through their actions.

As radical as it may have seemed in 1949, Simone de Beauvoir’s claim that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” both Germaine de Staël and Jane Austen anticipated it by living lives in which they embraced the freedom to define themselves by their radical actions. Transcendence indeed.

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We will be continuing “Clapping Back to Misogyny” in the new year as an occasional series. There are a number of other women that we should consider: Aphra Behn, Mary Wollstonecraft, Virginia Woolf, Zora Neale Hurston, and others. But don’t worry, I have something else interesting planned to carry us through the last three Wednesdays of the year.

Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet typewriter to yours.

Photo by Laura Chouette on Unsplash

1. Translations from the French by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier.