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A review by elerireads
Le deuxième sexe, tome I : Les faits et les mythes by Simone de Beauvoir
5.0
Ok so this was INSANELY hard, and not even because it was in French (although that did slow me down, obviously). De Beauvoir goes into so much depth and detail of what it means to be a woman, starting off with the more scientific and factual stuff and then interrogating women's place in society throughout the course of history and in mythology and literature.
The overarching narrative is of man as the norm and woman as the Other, onto which man can project all his fear and confusion about anything different from himself. I thought the point she made about a pattern of historical structural equality being inversely proportional to actual equality of living conditions was particularly interesting. Some of the philosophical stuff, especially this idea of "mitsein" went over my head a bit, despite a concerted effort to understand it, but hopefully I got the general gist. Unfortunately I also didn't get much out of the final section which analysed the portrayal of women by different writers, because I had only read anything by one of them. Might be something to revisit if I ever do read any Stendhal or Breton...
Simone de Beauvoir's writing is brilliant and fluid and acerbic. Honestly a pleasure to read. I really liked the use of capitalisation of certain important words to make them into a more abstract and general concept. The capitalisation of Autre this way seems to be fairly common practice in French and it did make me wonder if this was actually something that originated from de Beauvoir? I'll be having a Google.
Anyway this was only part I, so looking forward to seeing what part II has in store
The overarching narrative is of man as the norm and woman as the Other, onto which man can project all his fear and confusion about anything different from himself. I thought the point she made about a pattern of historical structural equality being inversely proportional to actual equality of living conditions was particularly interesting. Some of the philosophical stuff, especially this idea of "mitsein" went over my head a bit, despite a concerted effort to understand it, but hopefully I got the general gist. Unfortunately I also didn't get much out of the final section which analysed the portrayal of women by different writers, because I had only read anything by one of them. Might be something to revisit if I ever do read any Stendhal or Breton...
Simone de Beauvoir's writing is brilliant and fluid and acerbic. Honestly a pleasure to read. I really liked the use of capitalisation of certain important words to make them into a more abstract and general concept. The capitalisation of Autre this way seems to be fairly common practice in French and it did make me wonder if this was actually something that originated from de Beauvoir? I'll be having a Google.
Anyway this was only part I, so looking forward to seeing what part II has in store