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The unnatural complexities of marriage and motherhood.

A new translation of Simone de Beauvoir's "Second Sex" is reviewed by Francine du Plessix Gray. Here's a paragraph about marriage and motherhood:

Wedding nights ?transform the erotic experience into an ordeal? that ?often dooms the woman to frigidity forever.? It isn?t surprising, she adds, ?that ?conjugal duties? are often only a repugnant chore for the wife.? ?No one,? she argues, ?dreams of denying the tragedies and nastiness of married life.? Conjugal love, in Beauvoir?s view, is ?a complex mixture of attachment, resentment, hatred, rules, resignation, laziness and hypocrisy.? Even marriages that ?work well? suffer ?a curse they rarely escape: boredom.? Already alarmed? Wait until you come to the discussion of motherhood. A woman experiences the fetus as ?a parasite.? ?Maternity is a strange compromise of narcissism, altruism, dream, sincerity, bad faith, devotion and cynicism.? ?There is nothing like an ?unnatural mother,? since maternal love has nothing natural about it.? It is significant that the only stage of a woman?s life Beauvoir has good things to say about is widowhood, which, in her view, most bear quite cheerfully. Upon losing their spouses, she tells us, women, ?now lucid and wary, . . . often attain a delicious cynicism.? In old age, they maintain ?a stoic defiance or skeptical irony.?...

[A] pivotal notion at the heart of ?The Second Sex? ... is her belief that... ?one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.? This preposterous assertion [is] intended to bolster her argument that marriage and motherhood are institutions imposed by men to curb women?s freedom....

De Beauvoir herself, did not marry. But her longtime companion Jean-Paul Sartre did propose to her. She told him he was being "silly."

Full post as published by Althouse on May 29, 2010 (boomark / email).