Second sex analysis and Simone de Beauvoir
Simone de Beauvoir’s second sex is the most important feminist book ever written, and yet English readers have never known exactly what he says. The English translation of 1953 of the Book of H. M. Parshley, who consolidated his international reputation, was an abbreviated version, with cuts made by insistence of his American editor, Alfred Knopf. As feminists often notice mockingly, Parshley was a zoologist who lacked the basis in the existentialist philosophy that gave De Beauvoir much of his vocabulary. But so far, its translation has been the standard, and there is no complete version in English of The Second Sex.
Therefore, the arrival of Constance Edge and the new edition without editing of Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, which is published just over sixty years after the first appearance of the book in France, is an important literary event. However, he adds a little less to our understanding of De Beauvoir’s ideas than one might think. In fact, reading it suggests that Parshley deserves more credit than they gave him previously. This new second sex is less a revelation than a reminder of the dirty and overflowing brilliance revealed in the previous edition in English.
On a level of word by word, it could be more accurate, but it is, in any case, less lucid.The new edition has already received the fulminant criticism of some scholars from Beauvoir. ‘The best thing I can say about the new translation of the second sex is that it is complete, that part of the philosophical vocabulary is more consistent than in the Parshley version, and that some sections … are better than others’, Toril Moi, author ofSimone de Beauvoir: The manufacture of an intellectual woman, wrote in the London Review of Books in February. The new translators are American women who spent decades teaching English at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in France;Like Parshley, his background is not in philosophy. According to all reports, they tried to be scrupulously faithful to De Beauvoir’s words, but the result, Moi wrote, is what Nabokov, a great defender of literal translation, called ‘false literalism’ (as opposed to ‘absolute precision’ ‘). Obsessive literalism and innumerable errors make it more reliable and much less readable than Parshley. ‘Moi is not alone in his opinion;In a letter published the following month, Nancy Bauer, professor of philosophy of TUFTS to whom the translators consulted for help, blamed her work for a clumsy ‘so penetrating that it makes reading the text is painful in almost all thepages’.However, if prose is often clumsy, the amazing reach and the vision of the book itself does not hide.
Despite its defects, this new and complete version gives us a valuable opportunity to review a canonical work that prefigured many of the famous feminist texts that emerged after it.The second sex was Beauvoir’s exhaustive effort to deal with strangers predicaments that he thinks he is a woman for a human being. The dilemmas he analyzed continue to obsess and sometimes tormenting modern women: conflicts between significant work and motherhood, the temptations of dependence, the painful artifice that conventional femininity requires. His work anticipates both the feminism of the second wave and his reaction. ‘Today’s independent woman is divided between her professional interests and the concerns of her sexual vocation;She has trouble finding her balance;If she does, she is at the expense of concessions, sacrifices and juggling that keep her in constant tension, "she wrote, words that are not less true all these decades later.The fundamental intuition of De Beauvoir, which is now a wisdom so conventional that it barely seems an idea, is that throughout registered history, humanity has been understood as masculine, with women located as others non -essential.
The man is subject, the woman is object. This asymmetry, from Beauvoir argued, frustrates women’s dreams, deforms their "psyche" and alienating themselves, while also trying to form reciprocal and loving relationships with men with men.’History has shown that men have always had all the specific powers;Since the early days of patriarchy they have considered it useful to keep the woman in a state of dependence;Her codes were established against her;She like that was specifically established as the other, "she wrote. However, while Beauvoir saw this situation as almost universal, I didn’t see it as something natural. Rather, it was the result of patterns of culture and socialization that arose from the material circumstances of human history, patterns subject to transformation. As he wrote in the famous translation of Parshley, ‘one is not born, but becomes a woman’.When The Second Sex first published in the United States, Elizabeth Hardwick, writing in the Partisan Review, called it "madly and brilliantly confused" madly confused ’.
That trial is still maintained. It is a huge, often repetitive beh of a book, and its treatment of femininity is alternatively absurdly exhaustive and narrow. Beauvoir gallopó widely, and sometimes crazy, through history and disciplines: the original choice of a zoologist for a translator makes more sense when one finds his opening section on sexual differentiation in insects, birds and mammals. But his understanding of humanity can be surprisingly narrow, as completely extrapolated from the lives of middle -class Western intellectuals. Sometimes there is a bold recklessness to its generalizations, particularly when it comes to motherhood, a state that considers barely disguised horror. ‘A mother must have a rare mixture of generosity and detachment to find enrichment in the life of her children without becoming a tyrant or turning them into their torturers," he wrote, a line that says more about his own life than about the human condition. The experience of each reader will determine which parts of the second sex feel amazingly perceptual and which are wrong. As an existentialist committed, by Beauvoir he saw the freedom to create his own life, define his own values and choose his own projects, as essential for human dignity.
Denied such freedom, women are reduced to slavery or vassalage, even if they don’t know. Because Beauvoir hated the way in which society molded women, some passages from El Second Sex seem almost misogynist. ‘[A] the woman has been assigned the role of parasite: all parasites are necessarily exploiters;She needs man to acquire human dignity, eat, feel pleasure, procreate;She uses sex service to ensure her benefits, "he wrote. But this is not a criticism of anything essential about women, but it is an accusation of male society that deforms them. Beauvoir wrote: ‘Many of the failures for which they are reproached – mediocrity, meanness, shyness, meanness, laziness, frivolity and servility – simply express the fact that the horizon is blocked for them’.
Beauvoir did not denied the basic principles. biological and even erotic differences between men and women, or dream of an androgynous culture. ‘Man is a sexed human being;The woman is a complete individual, and equal to the male, only if she is also a sexed human being. Giving up his femininity means giving up part of his humanity ‘, he argued. She never discovered precisely how to combine difference and equality, although no one else has done it either. We all continue to fight with the problems she illuminated.
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