综合英语.西方思想经典选读(常俊跃黄滔)_Text B The Second Sex（1 / 1）_综合英语.西方思想经典选读最新章节免费阅读无弹窗

Simone de Beauvoir

Pre-reading

Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) was a French writer and social activist, and one of the most influential feminist theorists of the 20th century. Beauvoir got a degree in philosophy in 1929 from the école Normale Superiéure and the Sorbonne, where she met Jean-Paul Sartre to begin a free, lifelong association with him. Beauvoir and Sartre remained in Paris during World WarⅡ, and were active in the resistance movement against the German occupation. During these years they refined the principles of Existentialism. After the war Beauvoir became a committed writer, her writings including the novel The Mandarins (Les Mandarins 1954) which received the Prix Goncourt, a prestigious French literary award. She collaborated with Sartre on the political and literary journal Les temps modernes(Modern Times) and traveled with him throughout Europe, Asia and America. Beauvoir is known primarily for her treatise The Second Sex (Le deuxième sexe 1949), a scholarly and passionate plea for the abolition of what she called the myth of the “eternal feminine”. It became a classic of feminist literature during the 1960s, and the existential analysis of the situation of women was extremely influential in the formation of feminist theory. In these writings she revealed herself as a woman of formidable courage and integrity: the basic options of an individual made on the premises of an equal vocation for man and woman founded on a common structure of their being, independent of their sexuality. For this and many others, she has often been referred to as “Grand-mother” of 20th century feminism.

Prompts for Your Reading

1.After reading the first two paragraphs, make a prediction for the possible conclusion the author might come to in the following paragraphs.

2.How would you comment on the author’s tone or attitude toward the questions she raised in the opening paragraphs?

3.In answering the question of “what is a woman?”, the author cites long-standing concept as from men, women themselves, great thinkers or scholars and even the Bible. Locate these concepts and find the critical remarks of the author.

4.List up those mythical “definitions” of women from men’s perspective.

5.The author asks the questions: Why is it that women do not dispute male sovereignty? Whence comes this submission in the case of woman? Read carefully for the answers to these questions.

6.Inequality in the society is not uncommonly seen between groups of people, black and white, poor and rich, native and foreigner, etc. But what is distinguishingly special about inequality between man and woman?

[1] For a long time I have hesitated to write a book on woman. The subject is irritating, especially to women; and it is not new. Enough ink has been spilled in quarrelling over feminism, and perhaps we should say no more about it. It is still talked about, however, for the voluminous nonsense uttered during the last century seems to have done little to illuminate the problem. After all, is there a problem? And if so, what is it? Are there women, really? Most assuredly the theory of the eternal feminine1 still has its adherents who will whisper in your ear: “Even in Russia women still are women”; and other erudite persons — sometimes the very same — say with a sigh: “Woman is losing her way, woman is lost.” One wonders if women still exist, if they will always exist, whether or not it is desirable that they should, what place they occupy in this world, what their place should be. “What has become of women?”was asked recently in an ephemeral magazine.

[2] But first we must ask: what is a woman? “Tota mulier in utero,” says one, “woman is a womb2.” But in speaking of certain women, connoisseurs3 declare that they are not women, although they are equipped with a uterus4 like the rest. All agree in recognizing the fact that females exist in the human species; today as always they make up about one half of humanity. And yet we are told that femininity is in danger; we are exhorted to be women, remain women, become women. It would appear, then, that every female human being is not necessarily a woman; to be so considered she must share in that mysterious and threatened reality known as femininity. Is this attribute something secreted by the ovaries5? Or is it a Platonic essence, a product of the philosophic imagination? Is a rustling petticoat enough to bring it down to earth? Although some women try zealously to incarnate this essence, it is hardly patentable．It is frequently described in vague and dazzling terms that seem to have been borrowed from the vocabulary of the seers, and indeed in the times of St. Thomas it was considered an essence as certainly defined as the somniferous virtue of the poppy.

[3] But conceptualism has lost ground. The biological and social sciences no longer admit the existence of unchangeably fixed entities that determine given characteristics, such as those ascribed to woman, the Jew, or the Negro. Science regards any characteristic as a reaction dependent in part upon a situation. If today femininity no longer exists, then it never existed. But does the word woman, then, have no specific content? This is stoutly affirmed by those who hold to the philosophy of the enlightenment, of rationalism, of nominalism6; women, to them, are merely the human beings arbitrarily designated by the word woman. Many American women particularly are prepared to think that there is no longer any place for woman as such; if a backward individual still takes herself for a woman, her friends advise her to be psychoanalyzed and thus get rid of this obsession. In regard to a work, Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, which in other respects has its irritating features, Dorothy Parker7 has written: “I cannot be just to books which treat of woman as woman... My idea is that all of us, men as well as women, should be regarded as human beings.” But nominalism is a rather inadequate doctrine, and the antifeminists have had no trouble in showing that women simply are not men. Surely woman is, like man, a human being；but such a declaration is abstract. The fact is that every concrete human being is always a singular, separate individual. To decline to accept such notions as the eternal feminine, the black soul, the Jewish character, is not to deny that Jews, Negroes, women exist today —this denial does not represent a liberation for those concerned, but rather a flight from reality. Some years ago a well-known woman writer refused to permit her portrait to appear in a series of photographs especially devoted to women writers; she wished to be counted among the men. But in order to gain this privilege she made use of her husband’s influence! Women who assert that they are men lay claim none the less to masculine consideration and respect. I recall also a young Trotskyite8 standing on a platform at a boisterous meeting and getting ready to use her fists, in spite of her evident fragility she was denying her feminine weakness; but it was for love of a militant male whose equal she wished to be. The attitude of defiance of many American women proves that they are haunted by a sense of their femininity. In truth, to go for a walk with one’s eyes open is enough to demonstrate that humanity is divided into two classes of individuals whose clothes, faces, bodies, smiles, gaits, interests, and occupations are manifestly different. Perhaps these differences are superficial, perhaps they are destined to disappear. What is certain is that they do most obviously exist.

[4] If her functioning as a female is not enough to define woman, if we decline also to explain her through “the eternal feminine”, and if nevertheless we admit，provisionally, that women do exist, then we must face the question “what is a woman”?

[5] To state the question is, to me, to suggest, at once, a preliminary answer. The fact that I ask it is in itself significant. A man would never set out to write a book on the peculiar situation of the human male. But if I wish to define myself, I must first of all say:“I am a woman”; on this truth must be based all further discussion. A man never begins by presenting himself as an individual of a certain sex; it goes without saying that he is a man. The terms masculine and feminine are used symmetrically only as a matter of form, as on legal papers. In actuality the relation of the two sexes is not quite like that of two electrical poles, for man represents both the positive and the neutral, as is indicated by the common use of man to designate human beings in general; whereas woman represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity. In the midst of an abstract discussion it is vexing to hear a man say: “You think thus and so because you are a woman”; but I know that my only defense is to reply: “I think thus and so because it is true”, thereby removing my subjective self from the argument. It would be out of the question to reply: “And you think the contrary because you are a man”, for it is understood that the fact of being a man is no peculiarity. A man is in the right in being a man; it is the woman who is in the wrong. It amounts to this: just as for the ancients there was an absolute vertical with reference to which the oblique was defined, so there is an absolute human type, the masculine. Woman has ovaries, a uterus: these peculiarities imprison her in her subjectivity, circumscribe her within the limits of her own nature. It is often said that she thinks with her glands. Man superbly ignores the fact that his anatomy also includes glands, such as the testicles9, and that they secrete hormones. He thinks of his body as a direct and normal connection with the world, which he believes he apprehends objectively, whereas he regards the body of woman as a hindrance, a prison, weighed down by everything peculiar to it. “The female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities,” said Aristotle, “we should regard the female nature as afflicted with a natural defectiveness.” And St. Thomas for his part pronounced woman to be an “imperfect man”, an“incidental” being. This is symbolized in Genesis where Eve is depicted as made from what Bossuet called “a supernumerary bone” of Adam.

[6] Thus humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being. Michelet10 writes: “Woman, the relative being...” And Benda11 is most positive in his Rapport d’Uriel: “The body of man makes sense in itself quite apart from that of woman, whereas the latter seems wanting in significance by itself... Man can think of himself without woman. She cannot think of herself without man.” And she is simply what man decrees; thus she is called “the sex”, by which is meant that she appears essentially to the male as a sexual being. For him she is sex —absolute sex, no less. She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute — she is the Other.

[7] The category of the Other is as primordial as consciousness itself. In the most primitive societies, in the most ancient mythologies, one finds the expression of a duality — that of the Self and the Other. This duality was not originally attached to the division of the sexes: it was not dependent upon any empirical facts. It is revealed in such works as that of Granet12 on Chinese thought and those of Dumézil13 on the East Indies and Rome. The feminine element was at first no more involved in such pairs as Varuna-Mitra14, Uranus15-Zeus, Sun-Moon, and Day-Night than it was in the contrasts between Good and Evil, lucky and unlucky auspices, right and left, God and Lucifer16. Otherness is a fundamental category of human thought.

[8] Thus it is that no group ever sets itself up as the One without at once setting up the Other over against itself. If three travelers chance to occupy the same compartment, that is enough to make vaguely hostile “others” out of all the rest of the passengers on the train. In small-town eyes all persons not belonging to the village are “strangers” and suspects; to the native of a country all who inhabit other countries are “foreigners”; Jews are “different”for the anti-Semite, Negroes are “inferior” for American racists, aborigines are “natives” for colonists, proletarians are the “lower class” for the privileged.

[9] Lévi-Strauss17, at the end of a profound work on the various forms of primitive societies, reaches the following conclusion: “Passage from the state of Nature to the state of Culture is marked by man’s ability to view biological relations as a series of contrasts; duality, alternation, opposition, and symmetry, whether under definite or vague forms, constitute not so much phenomena to be explained as fundamental and immediately given data of social reality.” These phenomena would be incomprehensible if in fact human society were simply a Mitsein18 or fellowship based on solidarity and friendliness. Things become clear, on the contrary; if, following Hegel, we find in consciousness itself a fundamental hostility towards every other consciousness; the subject can be posed only in being opposed — he sets himself up as the essential, as opposed to the other, the inessential, the object.

[10] But the other consciousness, the other ego, sets up a reciprocal claim. The native traveling abroad is shocked to find himself in turn regarded as a “stranger” by the natives of neighboring countries. As a matter of fact, wars, festivals, trading, treaties, and contests among tribes, nations, and classes tend to deprive the concept Other of its absolute sense and to make manifest its relativity; willy-nilly, individuals and groups are forced to realize the reciprocity of their relations. How is it, then, that this reciprocity has not been recognized between the sexes, that one of the contrasting terms is set up as the sole essential, denying any relativity in regard to its correlative and defining the latter as pure otherness? Why is it that women do not dispute male sovereignty? No subject will readily volunteer to become the object, the inessential; it is not the Other who, in defining himself as the Other, establishes the One. The Other is posed as such by the One in defining himself as the One. But if the Other is not to regain the status of being the One, he must be submissive enough to accept this alien point of view. Whence comes this submission in the case of woman?

[11] There are, to be sure, other cases in which a certain category has been able to dominate another completely for a time. Very often this privilege depends upon inequality of numbers — the majority imposes its rule upon the minority or persecutes it. But women are not a minority, like the American Negroes or the Jews; there are as many women as men on earth. Again, the two groups concerned have often been originally independent; they may have been formerly unaware of each other’s existence, or perhaps they recognized each other’s autonomy. But a historical event has resulted in the subjugation of the weaker by the stronger. The scattering of the Jews, the introduction of slavery into America, the conquests of imperialism are examples in point. In these cases the oppressed retained at least the memory of former days; they possessed in common a past, a tradition, sometimes a religion or a culture.

[12] The parallel drawn by Bebel19 between women and the proletariat is valid in that neither ever formed a minority or a separate collective unit of mankind. And instead of a single historical event it is in both cases a historical development that explains their status as a class and accounts for the membership of particular individuals in that class. But proletarians have not always existed, whereas there have always been women. They are women in virtue of their anatomy and physiology. Throughout history they have always been subordinated to men, and hence their dependency is not the result of a historical event or a social change — it was not something that occurred. The reason why otherness in this case seems to be an absolute is in part that it lacks the contingent or incidental nature of historical facts. A condition brought about at a certain time can be abolished at some other time, as the Negroes of Haiti and others have proved: but it might seem that natural condition is beyond the possibility of change. In truth, however, the nature of things is no more immutably given, once for all, than is historical reality. If woman seems to be the inessential which never becomes the essential, it is because she herself fails to bring about this change. Proletarians say“We”; Negroes also. Regarding themselves as subjects, they transform the bourgeois, the whites, into “others”. But women do not say “We”, except some congress of feminists or similar formal demonstration; men say “women”, and women use the same word in referring to themselves. They do not authentically assume a subjective attitude. The proletarians have accomplished the “revolution in Russia, the Negroes in Haiti, the Indo-Chinese battling for it in Indo-China; but the women’s effort has never been anything more than a symbolic agitation. They have gained only what men have been willing to grant; they have taken nothing, they have only received.”

[13] The reason for this is that women lack concrete means for organizing themselves into a unit which can stand face to face with the correlative unit. They have no past, no history, no religion of their own; and they have no such solidarity of work and interest as that of the proletariat. They are not even promiscuously herded together in the way that creates community feeling among the American Negroes, the ghetto Jews, the workers of Saint-Denis, or the factory hands of Renault. They live dispersed among the males, attached through residence, housework, economic condition, and social standing to certain men — fathers or husbands — more firmly than they are to other women. If they belong to the bourgeoisie, they feel solidarity with men of that class, not with proletarian women; if they are white, their allegiance is to white men, not to Negro women. The proletariat can propose to massacre the ruling class, and a sufficiently fanatical Jew or Negro might dream of getting sole possession of the atomic bomb and making humanity wholly Jewish or black; but woman cannot even dream of exterminating the males. The bond that unites her to her oppressors is not comparable to any other. The division of the sexes is a biological fact, not an event in human history. Male and female stand opposed within a primordial Mitsein, and woman has not broken it. The couple is a fundamental unity with its two halves riveted together, and the cleavage of society along the line of sex is impossible. Here is to be found the basic trait of woman: she is the Other in a totality of which the two components are necessary to one another

....

[14] Now, woman has always been man’s dependant, if not his slave; the two sexes have never shared the world in equality. And even today woman is heavily handicapped, though her situation is beginning to change. Almost nowhere is her legal status the same as man’s, and frequently it is much to her disadvantage. Even when her rights are legally recognized in the abstract, long-standing custom prevents their full expression in the mores. In the economic sphere men and women can almost be said to make up two castes; other things being equal, the former hold the better jobs, get higher wages, and have more opportunity for success than their new competitors. In industry and politics men have a great many more positions and they monopolize the most important posts. In addition to all this, they enjoy a traditional prestige that the education of children tends in every way to support, for the present enshrines the past — and in the past all history has been made by men. At the present time, when women are beginning to take part in the affairs of the world, it is still a world that belongs to men — they have no doubt of it at all and women have scarcely any. To decline to be the Other, to refuse to be a party to the deal — this would be for women to renounce all the advantages conferred upon them by their alliance with the superior caste. Man-the-sovereign will provide woman-the-liege with material protection and will undertake the moral justification of her existence; thus she can evade at once both economic risk and the metaphysical risk of a liberty in which ends and aims must be contrived without assistance. Indeed, along with the ethical urge of each individual to affirm his subjective existence, there is also the temptation to forgo liberty and become a thing. This is an inauspicious road, for he who takes it — passive, lost, ruined — becomes henceforth the creature of another’s will, frustrated in his transcendence and deprived of every value. But it is an easy road; on it one avoids the strain involved in undertaking an authentic existence. When man makes of woman the Other, he may, then, expect to manifest deep-seated tendencies towards complicity. Thus, woman may fail to lay claim to the status of subject because she lacks definite resources, because she feels the necessary bond that ties her to man regardless of reciprocity, and because she is often very well pleased with her role as the Other.

Notes

1.eternal feminine: The eternal feminine is a psychological archetype or philosophical principle that idealizes an immutable concept of “woman”. It is one component of gender essentialism, the belief that men and women have different core “essences” that cannot be altered by time or environment.

2.womb: 子宫

3.connoisseur: an expert able to appreciate a field; especially in the fine arts

4.uterus: 子宫

5.ovaries: 卵巢

6.nominalism: the doctrine that the various objects labeled by the same term have nothing in common but their name

7.Dorothy Parker: (1893-1967) American writer noted for her sharp wit

8.Trotskyite: radicals who support Trotsky’s theory that socialism must be established throughout the world by continuing revolution

9.testicles:睾丸

10.Jules Michelet: (1798-1874) French historian who was the first to use and define the word Renaissance; author of History of the French Revolution (1847)

11.Julien Benda: (1867-1956) a French philosopher and novelist. He remains famous for his essay The Betrayal of the Intellectuals.

12.Marcel Granet: (1884-1940) French sociologist, ethnologist and sinologist. He was one of the first to bring sociological methods to the study of China.

13.Georges Dumézil: (1898-1986) French comparative philologist best known for his analysis of sovereignty and power in Proto-Indo-European religion and society

14.Varuna-Mitra: Varuna, in Vedism, god of the night sky who with his thousand eyes watches over human conduct and judges good and evil and punishes evildoers; Mitra, Hindu god of friendship and alliances, usually invoked together with Varuna as a supporter of heaven and earth

15.Uranus: god of the heavens; son and husband of Gaea and father of the Titans in ancient mythology

16.Lucifer: chief spirit of evil and adversary of God; tempter of mankind; master of Hell

17.Claude Lévi-Strauss: (1908-2009) French anthropologist and ethnologist whose work was key in the development of the theory of structuralism and structural anthropology

18.Mitsein:（德语）（哲学）同在，共在

19.Ferdinand August Bebel: (1840-1913) German socialist politician, writer, and orator; one of the founders of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany in 1869

Questions for Further Thinking

1.Why does the author say that the subject of woman is irritating? Why is it especially irritating to women?

2.Have you ever thought that the definition of woman could be a problem? Why or why not? What about the definition of man?

3.Is there any difference between being a female and being a feminist? If yes, what are the differences?

4.What is your interpretation of the definition of woman as the other of man? How does this definition lead to a sharp criticism of discrimination against woman?

5.According to the author, many American women are prepared to think that there is no longer any place for woman as such. Do women in China feel the same way? Why or why not?

6.The author believes that women themselves should strive to bring about the change from being inessential to being essential. In today’s society, what can a woman do to make this change happen?

7.Can you think of some Chinese notions about women and compare them with those discussed in this essay?

8.In contemporary society, are there any attitudes and phenomena that echo discriminating attitudes against women decades ago?

After-reading Assignment

Oral Work

1.A well-repeated Chinese saying goes “women can hold up half the sky”. Do you believe so? Hold a debate in your group either for or against this statement. Evidence and supports can be found in this passage as well as in all areas in life.

2.It is said that “behind every successful man there is a woman”. Work with your partner and reverse the statement, namely “behind every successful woman there is a man”. What evidence can you find to support the new statement? Report your findings to the class.

3.Throughout Chinese history to date, there have been negative idioms and expressions about women. Collect some of them and refute them in a presentation with reasonable evidence.

4.Irony is a figure of speech that achieves emphasis by saying the opposite of what is meant, the intended meaning of the words being the opposite of their usual sense. This form of irony is called verbal irony. Not all verbal irony is light and humorous. More often it is used to veil feelings in a subtle way, using words of praise where condemnation is meant, and vice versa. Locate at least 5 sentences with an irony in them and explain the meaning and affective effect of the irony in a presentation.You can also use examples from other sources in English or Chinese.

Written Work

1.Make a list of 3 “successful” women both from China and overseas and research into their life and careers. Then use the evidence you get from your research and write an argumentative essay in support of or against the notion “women can keep their womanly entity and be successful at the same time”.

2.Conduct a free interview with boys and men of different ages and backgrounds and ask them what qualities they value in a woman. Summarize their responses and discuss the implications of their response in a 500-word research report.

3.Suppose men submit to women in all areas and let women “rule”. Write an essay of comparison and contrast, discussing advantages and disadvantages of a womendominating world.

4.Sarcasm is figure of speech to cause pain to a person. It is to ridicule and wound the feelings of the subject attacked especially by expressions which clearly mean the opposite to what is felt. It could be thought of as the severe form of irony. Study sarcasm in greater detail and take notes. Your study notes should be more than 300 words.