THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN
325
prison himself in another's being, but looks toward the world, seeks to
transcend himself, change the course of history. This is a fatiguing
exaggeration. For every Ophelia one remembers not only Cleopatra
but poor Swann, unable, for all his taste and enthusiasm, to write his
book on Vermeer, drowning his talents in the pursuit of pure pleasure
which can only be given by the "other," Odette; for every excited Medea
who gave up herself, her place, to follow the fickle man you remember
not only Joan of Arc but that being of perfect, blowsy immanence, the
Duke of Windsor, who abandoned the glories of a complex project
for the sweet, repetitive, futureless domesticity of ocean liners and re–
sorts. And Sartre has written a whole book on Baudelaire, a fascinating
and immensely belligerent one, which claims that Baudelaire resented
responsibility for his own destiny, refused his possibilities of transcend–
ence, would not make decisions, define himself, but flowed along on
a tepid river of dependence, futility, refusal-like women, fond of scents
and costumes, nostalgic, procrastinating, wishful.
It would seem then that men, even some "heroic" ones, often allow
themselves to be what women are forced to be. But, of course, with
the greatest will in the world a man cannot allow himself to be that
most extremely doomed and chained being-the mother who must bear
and raise children and whose figure naturally hangs over such a work
as
The Second Sex
like Spanish moss, shutting out the light, entangling
and unkillable. Simone de Beauvoir's opinion of the division of labor
established in the Garden of Eden, if not as some believe earlier,
IS
very
striking:
... giving birth and suckling are not
activities,
they are natural func–
tions; no projects are involved; and that is why woman found in them
no reason for a lofty affirmation of her existence-she submitted pas–
sively to her biologic fate. The domestic cares of maternity imprisoned
her
in
repetition and immanence; they were repeated from day to day
in
an identical form, which was perpetuated almost without change
from century to century; they produced nothing new.
But what difference does it make that childbearing is not an ac–
tivity, nor perhaps an instinct; it is a necessity?
The Second Sex
is so briskly Utopian it fills one with a kind of
shame and sadness, like coming upon old manifestoes and committee
programs in the attic.
It
is bursting with an almost melancholy desire
for women to take their possibilities
seriously,
to reject the given, the
easy,
the traditional. I do not, as most reviewers seem to,
think
the
picture offered here of a woman's life is entirely false-a lifetime of
