Self and Other: the Symbolic Relation of Women and
Man
One of the most challenging
developments of the approach to ideology as a central concept in analyzing the relation
between a literary or artistic work and its changing contexts has been provided
by feminist critics. Feminist critics have in fact made a massive contribution
to the contemporary challenge to the notion of a received literary canon. This
paper deals on an issue 'self and other'; from Simone de Beauvoir's work The Second Sex. Symbolic relation of
women to man is a particularly important aspect of Simone de Beauvoir's
theorization because it is concerned with the relation of self and other, and
thus with difference. It is a schema that is often taken to be the only
possible conceptualization of the constitution of self, and so is often seen as
posing a knotty problem, concerning feminine subjectivity.
The main thesis of The Second Sex
revolves around the idea that woman has been held in a relationship of
long-standing oppression to man through her relegation to being man's
"Other." In agreement with Hegelian and Sartrean philosophy, Beauvoir
finds that the self needs otherness in order to define itself as a subject; the
category of the otherness, therefore, is necessary in the constitution of the
self as a self. However, the movement of self-understanding through alterity is
supposed to be reciprocal in that the self is often just as much objectified by
its other as the self objectifies it. What Beauvoir discovers in her
multifaceted investigation into woman's situation, is that woman is
consistently defined as the Other by man who takes on the role of the Self. As
Beauvoir explains in her Introduction, woman "is the incidental, the
inessential, as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the
Absolute-she is the Other." In addition, Beauvoir maintains that human
existence is an ambiguous interplay between transcendence and immanence, yet
men have been privileged with expressing transcendence through projects,
whereas women have been forced into the repetitive and uncreative life of
immanence. Beauvoir thus proposes to investigate how this radically unequal
relationship emerged as well as what structures, attitudes and presuppositions
continue to maintain its social power.
Beauvoir follows Hegel in presuming
the fundamental necessity of the category of Other "through which, and in
opposition to which, self consciousness is able to constitute itself" (Singer
231) .
This relation Singer says "is usually reciprocal, at least between men.
The other ego, too, assumes the position of essential subject in opposition to
what he constructs as the inessential other" (Singer 233) . As Hegel puts it,
self-consciousness exists "in and for itself … only in being
acknowledged" (Hegel 178) . This is possible
even though this other is constructed as non-essential, because
self-consciousness recognizes itself in the other.
In the case of sexes, Beauvoir finds
that the reciprocity posited by Hegel does not occur. Woman does not place
herself wholly in the subject position in opposition to man, but, as Beauvoir
makes clear, it is up to her to do so. As she says "it is not 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" (Beauvoir 18) . So, the fact that
man sets woman up as his Other in order to pose his selfhood, his subjectivity,
should not mean that woman must see herself as Other, but, rather, that she
should pose him as Other in order to establish her own subjectivity. As Beauvoir
says "If woman … never becomes the essential, it is because she herself fails
to bring about this change" (Beauvoir 19) .
Hegel's story of self-consciousness/
self-becoming is not simply an innocuous game in which active and passive roles
are interchanged. Rather, it is a drawn out and complex dialectical series of
developments, in which each struggling protagonist "must seek the other's
death" (Hegel 187) . Beauvoir accepts
and emphasizes this violent confrontation, saying for example that "we
find in consciousness itself a fundamental hostility towards every other
consciousness; the subject can only be posed in being opposed" (Beauvoir 17) . Judith Butler
describes this as "self-consciousness constituting its subjectivity
through constant effort to assimilate external difference into itself" (Butler 6) . Assimilation, a
kind of devouring of the other, is, of course, a violent act.
Beauvoir takes it to be a
fundamental human characteristic that the women resist being enslaved through
being objectified by the other, reflecting a need to be subject in control of
one's own identity. It is notable that this understanding of the process of
self-creation denies any primary role for the social world. Beauvoir begins her
analysis with two individuals confronting each other in some primal world,
empty of other human beings and of the effects of their presence. This raises
the question of to what extent, and at what level of their construction, people
are to be regarded as social beings.
It is far from insignificant that
Hegel's two protagonists are implicitly male and that women enter only into
another, smaller, story. For Beauvoir herself accepts this depreciation of the
feminine. So, for Hegel, the question of woman and her freedom of choice does
not arise in the same context as self-consciousness' self-creation.
Beauvoir agrees with Hegel, saying
that while men relate to men in a mutual or reciprocal manner, men and women do
not. "Thus, men, between themselves, have a mutual regard for the
subjectivity of the other, but woman remains as absolute Other, and as property
to be handed between men" (Beauvoir 102) . "Man is
dependent upon woman, but his dependence is more akin to a slave-owner's upon a
slave, where the owner remains in control of the means of satisfying his own
needs" (Butler 20) . Woman, meanwhile,
has no means of reciprocal recognition, the more so because women lack the
concrete means of mutual recognition between themselves, because they "
live dispersed among the males, attached through residence, housework, economic
condition, and social standing to certain men … more firmly than they are to
other women" (Butler 19) .
Hegel sees woman as created in
different dialectical movement from that described above for man. Woman is seen
as embodying a less advanced stage of consciousness, which is confined to the
private, reproductive and bodily world of family life. For the women critics, here
is the nether world of the particular, while man's public life, through his
higher form of consciousness, "becomes existence and activity" (Butler 466) . The public and
private worlds are dependent each upon the other, the family dependent on the
man for his organization of the world, and thus for its livelihood, and the man
dependent on the family not only for reproduction.
Beauvoir is agreeing that woman is
indeed created as Hegel, and suggesting that this is what must be changed. She
has a variation upon Hegel's story, and it is this that enables her to judge
woman.
Apart from the general objection to blaming
the victim, there is another sense in which Beauvoir's statements is
problematic, for taken to mean that it is the world that constructs woman, this
is in conflict with her emphatic attribution of self-responsibility to woman. The
result is a number of ambiguities as she tries to explain how woman has come
into being. This is a severe problem, but Beauvoir deserves credit for
wrestling with it. As Beauvoir admits, man is not really as independent of
woman in his self-construction as Hegel indicates. Man needs woman as woman.
This makes problematic the simple substitution of a person of the female sex
into the primal confrontation between the two would-be subjects, yet this is
what Beauvoir suggests is the solution to woman's dilemma.
Works
Cited
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1975.
Butler, Judith. Subject of Desire:Hegelian Reflection in Twentieth
Century France. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1987.
Hegel, G.W.F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford: Clarendar Press,
1977.
Singer, Linda. "Women's Studies International Forum." Interpretation
and Reerival (1985): 231-238.
No comments:
Post a Comment