The Girl and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex: Feminine Becomings

This article traces the girl in The Second Sex [(1949). Paris: Éditions Gallimard] as a necessary figure for understanding what it means to become woman. I argue that Simone de Beauvoir’s overall significance and philosophical contribution is intimately connected to what she discovered by asking about this moment of feminine becoming. My central contention is that we cannot understand how one ‘becomes’ woman without first/also undertaking the task of understanding the situation of the girl. Drawing on the new translation of The Second Sex by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier [(2010). London: Vintage], I offer a close reading of the chapter entitled ‘The Girl’ with attention to embodiment and temporality. In so doing, I seek to expand and refine our understanding of Beauvoir’s philosophical project in The Second Sex; a project which launched a fundamental challenge to the meaning of being and gave rise to the possibility of a feminist philosophy.     

Elizabeth’s Pious Pilgrimage; or the Ghost in the Garden

Abstract

This article is an analysis of the ‘Pious Pilgrimage’ section of Elizabeth and Her German Garden from a psychoanalytical perspective, focusing on the uncanny sense of the spectrality of the living and its connection to gender identity. It also offers an intertextual reading, placing the passage in the context of ‘the ghost in the garden’ as a recurring trope in the English novel. When ‘Elizabeth’ returns to the garden of her childhood, she experiences two spectral encounters: an imagined glimpse of her grandfather’s ghost and an encounter with a doppelgänger in the shape of a real child with her own name, who makes her feel as if, like Shelley’s Magus Zoroaster, she has met her ‘own image walking in the garden’. She is not the only figure in English literature to do so: behind the kitchen garden where Elizabeth has her encounter we can feel the presence of the kitchen garden in Great Expectations, where Pip sees a prophetic vision and encounters a double in the form of a ‘pale young gentleman’. This same encounter with ‘the ghost in the garden which is not a ghost’ resurfaces in a number of later texts, of which the author discusses two instances: Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden and David Profumo’s The Weather in Iceland. These can be taken as positive and negative conceptions of the spectrality of the living: von Arnim’s ‘ghost in the garden’ is balanced between the two in a passage treading the boundaries of comic realism and Gothic horror.     

Finishing the Hat: Dorothy Braudy’s Artistic Journey

I always knew I was a painter but I didn’t know what that meant. Dorothy Braudy, May 2000     

The Constitution of Afghanistan and Women’s Rights

This article argues that women’s human rights were and are being violated in Afghanistan regardless of who governs the country: Kings, secular rulers, Mujahideen or Taliban, or the incumbent internationally backed government of Karzai. The provisions of the new constitution regarding women’s rights are analysed under three categories: neutral, protective and discriminatory. It is argued that the current constitution is a step in the right direction but, far from protecting women’s rights effectively, it requires substantial revamping. The constitutional commitment to international human rights standards seems to be a hallow slogan as the constitution declares Islam as a state religion which clearly conflicts with women’s human rights standards in certain areas. The Constitution has empowered the Supreme Court to review whether human rights instruments are compatible with Islamic legal norms and, in case of conflict, precedence will be given to Islamic law. Keeping this in view, it is argued that Afghanistan’s ratification of the Women’s Convention without reservations has no real significance unless Islamic law dealing with women’s rights is reformed and reconciled with international women’s rights standards.