Le Deuxième Sexe - Mythes
- Created by: CaraPW
- Created on: 12-04-21 12:10
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- Le Deuxième Sexe - Mythes
- Pygmalion myth
- Male sculptor creates ideal woman statue who comes to life - male desire to mould a wife completely
- Virginity myths
- Reveal dual aspect of male attitudes to women - fear and desire
- Virginity prized - woman offered up to man for his enjoyment
- Virginity feared in older women as sign of female sexuality unmastered by the male
- Mary as holy virgin mother - motherhood and virginity sacred parts of Biblical womanhood - they are objects of men's use
- Supreme masculine victory - woman rehabilitated by her defeat and subjugation
- Story of Adam and Eve
- Eve posited as subordinate partner, responsible for fall and sexual sin
- Used to develop idea of otherness which maintains man's supremacy
- Fertility - man is creator, woman is incubator, sustainer, stable
- Feminine mystique
- Women as opaque, inscrutable, unknowable
- Freud - women are dark, capricious creatures, moods linked to the moon
- Most celebrated type of woman in art and literature - projection of the other
- Beauvoir cites Nerval and Breton - women as link to power of imagination and madness, extends to figures like the femme fatale and the roman noir
- Woman as poetic, unknowable reality, man projects onto her everything he has decided not to be in that context
- Contradiction
- Myths are contradictory - virgins and temptresses and mystiques - express what man wants to project in different cultures
- Woman is at the same time Eve, Virgin Mary, idol, servant, source of life, power of darkness, elemental silence of truth, artifice, gossip, lies, healer, witch, man’s prey, man’s ruin
- Woman is everything man is not and that he wants to have, his negation and reason for being
- Specific literary mythmaking
- Montherlant
- Women presented as fleshy monsters, parasites - associated with hard-right Nazi sympathies
- DH Lawrence
- Phallocentric representations of masculinity and femininity
- Polarised binarisms of active male virility and passive femininity
- Claudel
- Catholic playwright
- Beauvoir suggests that he presents women as man's saviours - Mary Myth
- Free women idolised as holy but present as servants to the male - route to male salvation
- Breton
- Surrealist exultation of women - associates them with peace, magic, nature and the childlike
- Allows subjectivity to men only
- Women are instrument by which men can receive transcendence
- Celebration of supposed irrational female mind in opposition to the rational male mind
- Surrealist exultation of women - associates them with peace, magic, nature and the childlike
- Stendhal
- Beauvoir credits Stendhal with creating autonomous and credible female characters
- Although the role of women in his work is to devote the self to male protagonists
- Shows how myths about women are perpetuated and circulated by male writers - deconstructive feminism
- Montherlant
- Pygmalion myth
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