Vivian Gornick
Taking a Long Look: The Second Sex
Deep into my own middle age, I reread The Second Sex in the wake of thirty years of thought and feeling much influenced by its steady presence among us and I find, turning its pages, that the question on my mind is not, ‘How does it read?’ but rather, How did it get written?’
In the 1989 Vintage edition of The Second Sex Simone de Beauvoir’s biographer, Deirdre Bair, tells us that in the fall of 1946, when:
‘Sartre was under sustained verbal attack in Paris…[de Beauvoir] believed she could defend [his] positions…by writing an essay in which she defined herself personally as a woman and philosophically as an existentialist. Her intention was to relate them both to Sartre’s system, which she had accepted unquestioningly as her own…In order to defend what she believed were Sartre’s universal principles, she had to begin with the specific and the individual, which in this case was her role within his system…One idea began ‘to emerge with some insistence’ from her thinking. It brought her to ‘the very profound and astonishing realisation’ that she was different from Sartre because he was a man and I was only a woman’.
In a 1982 conversation, Bair goes on, ‘she explained what she meant by “only”‘:
‘I had not yet settled on the idea of woman as the other – that was to come later. I had not yet decided that the lot of woman was inferior to the allotment of men in this life. But somehow, I was beginning to formulate the thesis that women had not been given equality in our society, and I must tell you that this was an extremely troubling discovery for me. This is really how I began to be serious about writing about women – when I finally realised the disparity in our lives as compared to men. But [in 1947], none of this was clear to me.’
In 1947 none of this was clear to her. She was thirty-nine years old. She had been out in the world as Sartre’s intellectual companion for twenty years. She knew everyone, went everywhere, experienced herself a person who spoke, thought, and moved freely. But now, setting out to write a simple analysis of her own life that would demonstrate the truth of Sartre’s philosophy, she found herself coming up against a stumbling block around which there seemed at first no easy way out – and then no way out at all. When it came right down to it, she realised, she was first and foremost a woman; that reality undercut almost everything she intended to demonstrate. It struck her forcibly that the condition carried more weight than she had previously been willing or able to understand. Throughout the history of the human race, she now saw, people who were women had systematically had less power, less standing, less definition. They were, in fact, what Existentialism called ‘Other’. The condition of birth into which she herself had been born was the single most powerful determinant in the shaping of a life consigned to organised subordination. To not see this, the ‘otherness’ of your life, if you were a woman, was to live in a permanent state of fantasy.
De Beauvoir came up against being a woman in much the same way as James Baldwin – in the same year, in the same city – came up against being black. Although Baldwin had scorned the intellectual torments of postwar Europe – after all, they’d brought it on themselves, hadn’t they? – it was impossible to be living in Paris in 1948 and not absorb the endless discussion of existentialist categories. Baldwin, too, began to see that he was ‘Other’; and then he saw that the idea of the ‘Other’ was something he could make use of; turn it this way and that to concentrate all the better, all the more exactly, on what it meant to be black. Conversely, de Beauvoir had begun by wanting to use herself only to make the case for Existentialism but had ended with a radically changed perspective that also concentrated itself on her own ‘otherness’. In the case of Baldwin, its application of the ‘Other’ led to some of the most extraordinary essays in American literature. In the case of de Beauvoir, it led to a monumental work of rediscovery that would, twenty years later, help usher in the second wave of Western feminism.
The story of how The Second Sex came to be written is in itself a prototypic tale of how modern feminism has proceeded to make use – every fifty years or so over the past two hundred years – of the conversion experience of one ‘brilliant exception’ after another – starting with Mary Wollstonecraft in England, leading on to Elizabeth Cady Stanton in America, and then on to de Beauvoir herself in France. Each of these women began her thinking life as an ardent partisan of a powerful social movement connected with a great war (the Enlightenment, the antislavery movement, Existentialism), and each of them, living a heightened life inside the visionary politics that had sparked her intellectual being, came, in turn, to see that she was ‘only a woman’. The contribution each then made to feminist understanding turned, appropriately enough, on an application of the central insight of the movement to which she was devoted. Wollstonecraft urged passionately that women become rational beings; Stanton that every woman exercise governance over her own inviolate self: de Beauvoir that women cease to be ‘Other’.
Once de Beauvoir ‘got it’ she became brilliantly, comprehensively obsessed: the more she read the more she thought; the more she thought the more she read. Her research was formidable, her concentration unparalleled. The picture widened and deepened, reaching back into biblical times, forward toward the end of her own century. How woman became woman’ began to encompass large notions of Destiny, History, and Myth-making; as well as even larger analyses of women in our own time as a group of people prepared from birth to become the Desired and the Protected, but never the Independently Acting. There had not, she observed, been a time when the social history of the human race did not posit man as the central actor on the stage of life and woman as his sidekick.
Why? She asked herself again and again – but could come up with no adequate answer to the question. Nothing – not biology, not materialism, not psychoanalysis – could explain to her satisfaction why woman had become the permanent subordinate of man. At last she concluded that the answer lay in the ‘imperialistic’ nature of human consciousness. It craved subordination; wherever and whenever it could, it created the ‘Other’ in order to oppress it. As good an explanation for that which can never be ‘explained’ as any – and one that led her into a wealth of observation that, to this day, we do not tire of responding to. Whether with gratitude or outrage.
In English The Second Sex runs to more than seven hundred pages, in French many more (the English edition is famously cut). The book is a magnificent piece of obsession on the grand scale: every resentment hounded to earth again and again. (‘I have seldom read a book that seems to run in such concentric circles,’ Alfred Knopf said of it. ‘Everything [is] repeated three or four times but in different parts of the text.’) At the same time, the book is written in a tone of voice remarkably self-distancing. The author of The Second Sex is at paints to put space between herself and her subject. She knows the condition whereof she speaks intimately but make no mistake, reader, she does not share it. Women – in this book written by a woman of great intellect and equally great outrage – are distinctly ‘they’ not ‘we’.
The rub, for de Beauvoir, was what she saw as the collaboration of women in their own fate. Blacks had submitted, but women had complied. It was the complicity she found unbearable. Throughout history they’d been relaxing like a cat into the subordinate condition; more than relaxing; endorsing the arrangement, sharing in the conspiracy, stupidly happy to remain slaves. She could not associate to it. The whole thing made her ill. As ill as it made Doris Lessing, whose Golden Notebook – the other major work on women written in the first half of the century – is a catalogue of grievance and self-hatred also delivered in a voice of angry scorn that separates the one writing from the ones being written about. (If it comes to that, Mary Wollstonecraft, writing in 1796, is also in a rage at those whose long-withheld rights she is setting out to vindicate.) Yet how could it have been otherwise? For women like Lessing and de Beauvoir, women’s rights was the intellectual ghetto. It is amazing enough that they delivered themselves of these encyclopedic accounts of the condition of their on sex. For them to have placed the materials of a woman’s life at the centre of serious works of intellect and sensibility was in itself an astonishment.
But it is interesting and important to note that the only American visionary thinker equal in intellectual stature to the Europeans – Elizabeth Cady Stanton – wrote ‘we’ not ‘they’ from the first minute she put pen to paper- it is not until ‘they’ transmutes into ‘we’ that you’ve got a movement – and that is why feminism belongs to America. Much as they burned over their second-class status, it was impossible for the European intellectuals – from Wollstonecraft to de Beauvoir – to give up their overwhelming longing for acceptance in the world of men (such was the strength of European culture internalised). This longing – erotic in its power to compel – bound them heart and soul to a dividedness of will that was crippling. The American visionaries, on the other hand, hardened their hearts against the romantic pull of worldliness – and eroticised feminism (such was the power of the democratic promise outraged). Women’s rights became their single-minded passion. This made them incomparably more undivided in their pursuit of equality – and incomparably more revolutionary. Thus, although feminism is rooted intellectually in Europe it is only in America that it takes hold and becomes a movement.
In 1947 de Beauvoir began a now famous affair with Nelson Algren. The affair came as a revelation for her. With Algren, she said, heart, soul, and flesh were one. She was alive in her senses as never before. It was the kind of feeling for which most people gladly give up everything’. But Simone de Beauvoir was not most people. Just months into the affair Algren asked her to marry him and move to Chicago. Reluctantly, she refused him and explained:
‘The reason I do not stay in Chicago is just this need I always felt in me to work and give my life a meaning by working. You have the same need, and that is one of the reasons for which we understand each other so well. You want to write books, good books…I want it too. I want to convey to people the way of thinking which is mine and which I believe true. I should give up travels and all kinds of entertainments. I should give up friends and the sweetness of Paris to be able to remain forever with you; but I could not live just for happiness and love, I could not give up writing and working in the only place where my writing and work may have a meaning.’
One way or another she repeated these words a number of times over the years, and when she did, she seemed often to be saying, ‘Give up Paris? Give up French? Give up Sartre?’ Her severest critics pounce on this construction, as though it is proof that the most famous feminist of the century was, finally, just another woman in thrall to the Great Man. I find this reading appalling. What is true is that it’s hard to pull those sentences apart. For her, I think, they actually were of a piece. Taken together they did define the tenet of faith she called work.
They were not good people, neither she nor Sartre – ruthless get absorbed, sexual predators, always needing to exert power over those within their orbit – but they were passionate about the life of the mind and for each of them, writing was a religion. Whatever else Sartre did to her or for her, the association with him was irrevocably bound up with the idea of work. Indeed, his presence in her life was iconic, and she seemed often to be worshiping the man himself. But I don’t believe she was. Crudely put, in a bid for independence on the part of a woman born in France in 1908, devotion to one man promised joy of the body, devotion to another man joy of the mind. That was the best she could do. She made her necessary – her distinctive – choice.
And it seems to me it stood her in infinitely better stead to hold work rather than love as a first value. It made her a better human being (the same cannot be said for Algren, a thin-skinned man, easily humiliated, capable in his neediness of cruel and reckless raging). In her letters to Algren, de Beauvoir never whines, pleads, threatens, or insults; no matter what is happening between them, the letters open with love and close with warmth. Out of them can be intuited the woman who applied herself to the task of researching and writing a report on the condition of her on sex with so much passionate steadiness that she transformed a polemic into one of the great books of the century.
Vivian Gornick is an American critic, essayist and memoirist. Her books include Approaching Eye Level, The Situation and the Story, and The Odd Woman and the City. She lives in New York City.
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