The Sense of a Life: Re-assessing Simone de Beauvoir

Violently differing views on Simone de Beauvoir clash—how not? Our own obsessional reading of and about her is all the more enhanced by her look and manner(s) of dressing, and her affairs, but, above all, by her towering intelligence and pioneering spirit. This piece tries to deal with as many aspects of her being and seeming and appearance to others, as critics and as readers, as behoves such a vital spirit.     

Authenticity of self‐expression: Reinterpretation of female independence through the writings of simone de beauvoir

Based on the autobiographical writings of Simone de Beauvoir, this paper reinterprets the concepts of “dependency” and “independence” with respect to women's experiences. De Beauvoir, considered a strong and independent woman, continuously struggled for emotional independence, a struggle which she conceived as being against the need that drove her “impetuously toward another person”. However, a careful examination of de Beauvoir's inner voice as it is reflected in the subtext of her autobiographical writings, suggests that her true struggle revolves around a desire for authentic expression of her feelings and needs — rather than for separation from others.

As an adolescent de Beauvoir was caught between the expectations of her parents and her own needs, remaining the “dutiful daughter” at the expense of being false to her own self. This pattern of dependency reappears in her adult life, when she seems to be incapable of validating her feelings of jealousy and anger in her relationship with Sartre. Her means of coping with this problem is by giving it a literary expression, hence, she seems to gain a sense of freedom and independence by giving her repressed feelings an authentic outlet.

The re‐reading of de Beauvoir's autobiography in a new light of feminist criticism reveals a concept of dependency different from the need to rely on, receive help from, and be influenced by another. When one examines the meanings of dependency and independence through the female language of connectedness and women's values of care and involvement, the essential meaning of dependency shifts from the lack of self‐reliance to suppression of self‐expression, and from struggles for separation to struggles for one's personal truth and for authenticity in one's relations with others.     

‘The Message Is in the Book’: What Virago's Sale in 1995 Means for Feminist Publishing

This article examines the UK publisher Virago, the world's largest women's imprint and the best known of the second-wave feminist publishing houses that sprang up during the 1970s and 1980s. Feminist publishing remains a peculiarly unacknowledged and underexamined aspect of feminist history, but one that had real influence and effect. This article gives a historical account of Virago, noting its intention to enact feminist politicking through the act of publishing books. The author looks at the effect Virago had on the industry more widely, on literary culture and on attitudes to women. The author also examines changing formulations of feminism and how these were reflected—or not—through Virago's published output. The author then moves on to her central proposition: that Virago's sale in 1995, rather than marking the death of feminist publishing (as was stated in media comment at the time), was in fact the point at which it was saved. Virago's move into Little, Brown, coinciding with the rise of an increasingly commodified consumer culture, the conglomeration of the book industry and more pluralized expressions of feminism, allowed it to continue to work as a publisher of women's writing while none of its contemporaries survived. The author looks in detail at the changes post-1995 within the book industry, within feminism and in wider culture, as well as at Virago. The author asks whether Virago still has value as a ‘feminist’ imprint and how it has sought to remain vital and relevant.     

Cindy Sherman in a New Millennium: Fashion,Feminism, Art and Ageing

ABSTRACT

If feminism and the fashion industry were once seen as adversaries, given how the strictures of Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex (1949) permeated so much of second wave feminism, a consideration of ‘fashion’ is now central to contemporary feminist scholarship. But just as the earlier critique of fashion seemed finally to have been supplanted, certain basic arguments around dress and makeup nevertheless resurfaced within contemporary feminism. The current neoliberal climate has led to the ever-increasing consumption of ‘fashionable’ goods, provoking unease and encouraging the contested ‘protectionist discourse’ within feminism to shield young women from just such excesses. Meanwhile, the fashion world itself, arguably more powerful than ever, has across the last twenty years continued a process of legitimising itself through its various modes of alliance with the art world; it has even hijacked elements of feminist practice in the pursuit of publicity. This article suggests that the fashion industry and contemporary feminism are nonetheless alike in one significant respect: neither have properly engaged with the needs of an ageing population. It is an omission that this article will seek to examine through a discussion of the recent ‘portraits‘ of Cindy Sherman, an artist of great interest to feminist scholars, in whose earlier work there was a discernible ‘anti-fashion’ element. Now ‘fashionable’ herself, a leading figure in the global art world, she has collaborated with the fashion industry in rather different ways. Her ‘portraits’ of 2012, in which she reconfigured herself as imaginary Manhattan socialites in or beyond middle age, and a later series, exhibited in 2016, where she appears as a series of ageing, anonymous ‘movie stars’, reveal more general ideological tensions surrounding the representation of women, the ageing process and the fashionable ideal. It is the dissection of these tensions that underpin this article, for while Sherman’s work has been the subject of academic debate across a forty year period, her use and critique of the ‘fashionable ‘ image has not been examined alongside an exploration of the expanding activities of the fashion industry itself; nor have her recent images of ageing women been examined within this more general context.     

Adventures of Feminism: Simone de Beauvoir's Autobiographies,Women's Liberation,and Self-Fashioning

While The Second Sex is usually taken as Simone de Beauvoir's major theoretical contribution to feminism, in the 1960s and 1970s it was very often through her autobiographies – especially Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, The Prime of Life, and Force of Circumstance, along with novels such as She Came to Stay and The Mandarins – that her feminist ideas were most thoroughly absorbed. The autobiographies became nothing less than a guide for the fashioning of a new kind of feminine self. Where The Second Sex had intimated that a significant aspect of human liberation lay in women not losing their identity or their sense of self in those of men, it was the autobiographies which suggested and demonstrated in great detail how this might be done. In them, the rejection of conventional marriage and children was no mere slogan, but the foundation of what seemed to young female readers to be a fascinating and challenging life. In this paper, I reflect on de Beauvoir and her historical and contemporary relevance: first through reminiscence and re-reading of the autobiographies themselves; then with an historical examination of how they were read, taking Sydney, Australia, as my example; and finally by offering some reflections on subsequent feminist critique.     

Double Melancholy: The (Class) Politics of Loss in Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

In his essay ‘The “Uncanny”’, Sigmund Freud claims that ‘the double was originally an insurance against the extinction of the self’. The author suggests that literary writing, particularly memoir, can perform a kind of doubling, enacting this ‘self-preservation’ through ‘self-observation’. In her memoir Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal?, Jeannette Winterson seeks to convey a ‘doubleness at the heart of things’. The author argues that this ‘doubleness’ functions on two levels, both of narrative and of politics—Winterson’s preoccupation with her subjectivity is informed by politics and her politics are structured around her subjectivity. In order to think through the text’s focus on what the author deems maternal melancholy and ambivalence, the author considers how political melancholy works through and against Winterson’s desires for self-creation. Attending to the themes of writing, loss, adoption and depression throughout, the author sustains a class analysis that is motivated by a queer feminist approach. The author argues that the text works to recall the poor/working-class body into the narrative of the bourgeois subject in order to legitimate the present self—the double—both as exceptional and as different from the other.     

A Christ in curls: the contested charisma of Mary Ann Girling (1827–1886)

ABSTRACT

In May 1871 Mary Ann Girling, an itinerant preacher of Suffolk, set her first firm step to public, charismatic leadership. Through apocalyptic prophecies, mystical visions, stigmata, and gospel events that encompassed ‘dancings, prophesyings and trance utterances’, and through fashioning a public persona with a complicated relationship with the media and an elaborate appearance—the curls in the title are part of that appearance—she gathered a flock of devotees and ensured constant media attention. Her exuberance, also fascinated curious and sceptical people. They mocked her appearance, challenged her charismatic authority, and on several occasions resorted to violence to show their discontent. By tracing the stages in the construction and development of Girling’s charisma and examining its reception, this article argues that charisma is the precarious result of constant renegotiation between the charismatic, her community, and wider society.     

A Father's Body,a Nation's Heart—Caregiving Fathers in Contemporary Norwegian Film

Norway is internationally known for progressive gender politics that have emancipated women and domesticated fathers. Norwegian films produced in the last decade articulate a conservative counter-discourse to this state-feminist discourse of women's progress. In contemporary Norwegian films, men subscribe to caregiving fatherhood in order to prove their (hetero)sexual prowess and earn social recognition. In addition, by pledging to become caregiving fathers, these often troubled and undisciplined men become worthy members of the Norwegian national community. A closer investigation of caregiving fatherhood will help us better understand how heteronormativity continues to proliferate even in Norway, where state feminism has come a long way.     

Who Gets Played By ‘The Gender Card’?

This article is concerned with questions of sexism and misogyny in the context of post-feminism. It examines the particular case of former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s ‘misogyny speech’, a rare instance of a woman in high political office directly accusing her opponent of sexism. Through a critical discourse analysis of the coverage of that speech in the Australian print media, the article explores the radical disjuncture between how the speech resonated with women, both in Australia and internationally, and its construction in the print media as an illegitimate and ill-conceived ‘playing of the gender card’. In forwarding this analysis, the article highlights how, in a post-feminist media environment, the possibilities for women of naming experiences of sexism are being closed down not least because such naming is positioned as a strategic choice on the part of women deployed only to gain advantage.     

Laughing Medusa: Feminist Intellectuals at the Millennium

The role of the intellectual is traditionally gendered masculine, and women are excluded from consideration. Contemporary discussions of the 'death of the intellectual' noticeably make no reference to feminist intellectuals. On the other hand, women in academia have been reluctant to adopt the role of public intellectual as conventionally defined. There is an anxiety about the contemporary place of the intellectual, and about the necessity for the distinction made by some feminists between theory and practice, the intellectual and the activist, and where this might lead. In exploring the role of feminist intellectuals over the last two centuries, three paradigms of the feminist intellectual are proposed for consideration: Cassandra (the prophetess cursed with disbelief), for example Florence Nightingale; the feminist Messiah (the exceptional female saviour who would sacrifice herself to change women's lives), for whom the exemplar is Margaret Fuller; and the Dark Lady (the token woman in a community of men), such as de Beauvoir, Mary McCarthy and Susan Sontag. Indeed, Camille Paglia's rivalry with Sontag lends itself to being interpreted as evidence of her current desire to occupy this 'dark lady' role. In conclusion, after discussing contemporary, late twentieth-century feminism (Natasha Walter, Elizabeth Wurtzel, gurrl power, 'women behaving badly'), the role of Margaret Thatcher in changing perceptions of women's capacity for political power is proposed for celebration. Finally, there is Cixous's image of the feminist intellectual as the laughing Medusa, who turns men to stone, but turns laughter on herself.     

Tracing two generations in twentieth century Indian women's education through analysis of literary sources: selected writings by Padmini Sengupta

ABSTRACT

This article uses literary sources written by Padmini Sengupta, 1906–1988 (daughter of Kamala Satthinadhan, 1880–1950, educator, writer, and editor of the Indian Ladies’ Magazine) to map two generations of women in India from reformist backgrounds and their education and writing. Padmini's biography of her mother, The Portrait of an Indian Woman, 1956, is analyzed at length. Here, Sengupta offers at once a memoir of her own growing years and a biographical portrait of her mother Kamala Satthianadhan. Supplementing this analysis is an examination of how women's education is represented in Sengupta's novel Red Hibiscus, 1962. Padmini wrote many works of a non-fictional and biographical nature. In analyzing her writing, we also understand better how Indian women writers representing their own educational trajectories in the print and public sphere shortly after Indian independence lay the groundwork for the later development of women's history and Women's Studies in India.     

Fun in Gender—Youth and Sexuality,Class and Generation

Is the norm of love as a prerequisite for sexual relations becoming less prominent among girls today? The article looks into the changing cultural framing of young, heterosexual, female desire during the last three generations, and how class differentiation among women was established in new ways in these processes. The analysis draws on a study of young Norwegian women over three generations (born in the 1910s and 1920s, the 1940s and early 1950s, and in 1971–72). Throughout all generations young women have been looking for the fun in gender—for the grandmothers connected to innocent infatuations, for the mothers to romantic love, while the daughters seem to be on their way to discover the fun of sex. It is argued that this quest for fun in gender has been a progressive force of social change, however often neglected both by feminists and in discourses on gender equality. The aspects that are highlighted, to different degrees in the different generations, seem to circulate around three themes: firstly, the relation between sexuality and reproduction; secondly, the relation between sexuality and love; and thirdly, the relation between sexuality and independence. The grandmothers had to navigate between being seen as nice or cheap, the mothers between cheap and prim, the daughters between liberated and exposed. In all generations, however, there is a specially designed category for young girls who have too much sex or sex under the wrong circumstances, and this category has almost inextricably been connected to working‐class girls and in this way simultaneously worked as a double threat for middle‐class girls.     

Eileen Power's Asian journey, 1920-21: history,narrative, and subjectivity

Abstract

This article analyses the travel writings of the British medieval historian, Eileen Power (1889-1940), during her year-long journey around the world in 1920-21 as the first and only female awarded a travel fellowship administered by the Trustees of the University of London in the years following the First World War. Drawing upon a comparative reading of her official Report to the Trustees and her private diary record of her ‘Tour du Monde’, we examine the various dimensions of subjectivity and identity evident in her narrative of the journey, interrogating the difference which gender makes in the relationship of European travellers to empire. In addition, we examine how the narrative of her journey and subsequent historical narratives were part of those Orientalist forces/discourses which produced and were produced by the West's relationship to the East in the first half of the twentieth century.     

revolutionary voices: Nordic women writers and the development of female urban prose 1860–1900

In 1795, Mary Wollstonecraft's travels to Scandinavian cities gave her new perspectives on the English and Continental bourgeois cultures with which she was acquainted. Her notions of the city as a source of inspiration for self-knowledge and knowledge of the world are echoed in the epistolary writings of the Norwegian author Camilla Collett (1813–1895) and the novels of her countrywoman Amalie Skram (1846–1905). Collett and Skram were both frequent visitors to different European capital cities, and incorporated their impressions and experiences of these cities. This resulted in innovative texts, with the individual in a new, modern environment, the city, as one of the central themes. For Collett, who can be regarded as a city correspondent avant la lettre, the city was also a yardstick for cultural progress. In her novels, Skram used the European city as a sort of laboratory of the modern era. Nevertheless, Collett's and Skram's ‘city texts’ are not the ones that have ensured that these two authors found their way into the literary canon. Collett became famous as the author of the first Norwegian feminist novel, whereas Skram is known as a Norwegian naturalist. Until recently, the prose texts in which Collett and Skram processed their urban experiences were either not discussed in Norwegian literary historiography, or were labelled as contributions to the morality debate that raged in Scandinavia at the end of the nineteenth century. In this article, I shall propose that Collett and Skram contribute to a distinctive yet unrecognized genre – female urban prose – which proffers new modes of thinking and writing about women's experience of contemporaneous bourgeois culture.     

Technocrats and Tortured Bodies: Simone de Beauvoir's Les Belles Images

Through an analysis of Simone de Beauvoir's final novel Les Belles Images (1966), this article examines how a 1960s French technocratic class dealt with individual and collective traumas, particularly how they placed their faith in an undying hope in the future while simultaneously ignoring the horrors of wartime violence. The article contends that Beauvoir's novel is a story of not remembering—or, more specifically, attempting to forget—Algeria and all the conflict signified to the average French citizen, including decolonization, torture, racial difference and political tumult. Analysis rests on the novel's representation of its protagonist Laurence, who had been shaken to the core after reading a newspaper article about a (likely Algerian) woman tortured to death, ultimately causing a nervous breakdown that forever altered her interactions with her family and fellow technocrats. Gender and nationality also figure centrally in this examination of the broader role that images—not only belles images—played in the construction of French national identity at this historical moment.     

Gaining a Public Voice: Ottoman women's struggle to survive in the print life of early twentieth-century Ottoman society,and the example of Halide Edib (1884–1964)

After delving into the emergence of women in Ottoman print culture and the challenges associated with this process, this paper focuses on women's periodicals which provided a platform for women writers, education for a female audience and a means of communication between both parties. Analysing the social and technical challenges of establishing independently run and long-lived women's journals under the restrictive circumstances of the early twentieth century's gender-segregated Ottoman society, this article not only documents women's struggle for survival in the publishing world but also explains why women's periodicals and their female authors had an ephemeral print life. After acknowledging the role of print culture in the women's emancipation movement, the focus is on Halide Edib as an exceptional example in terms of her survival and transformation from unknown to world-renowned author. Her struggle to enter and become established in the print life of the late Ottoman society illustrates the potential and available positions for women in the publishing sphere and explains the failure of her female contemporaries to achieve success in this area.     

Over the centuries: a history of Wollstonecraft reception

ABSTRACT

Both Wollstonecraft’s fame and infamy are attributable to her lived experience as the woman author of the only radical republican feminist text published in the pamphlet war of the 1790s. Yet, her radical republican politics were divorced from her gender politics in the early reception. This paper argues that this separation was subsequently sustained in part by interpretive practices that rest on the suppression of the original split. It shows that over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, both outside and within academia, the dominant interpretive tendency of neglecting Wollstonecraft’s radical republican politics has deradicalized both her historical political thought and her iconic image. This conventional reception has both enabled and limited the resources made available through Wollstonecraft to feminists throughout history.     

The silencing of Simone de Beauvoir guess what's missing from the second sex

Inadequate, inaccurate English translations of works by feminist scholars can slow the advancement of international research in women's studies. We must begin to subject translations to the same critical attention we have focused on those sexist authoring and publishing practices that have defined women's interests as tangential to scholarly research.Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, one of the most widely known, classic essays on women's experience and a cornerstone of contemporary feminist theory, is available in only one English translation from the French. In that 1952 translation by a professor of zoology, Howard M. Parshley, over 10 per cent of the material in the original French edition has been deleted, including fully one-half of a chapter and the names of seventy-eight women in history. These unindicated deletions seriously undermine the integrity of Beauvoir's analysis of such important topics as the American and European nineteenth-century suffrage movements, and the development of socialist feminism in France.Compounding the confusion created by the deletions, are mistranslations of key philosophical terms. The phrase, ‘for-itself’, for example, which identifies a distinctive concept from Sartrean existentialism, has been rendered into English as its technical opposite, ‘in-itself’. These mistranslations obscure the philosophical context of Beauvoir's work and give the mistaken impression to the English reader that Beauvoir is a sloppy writer, and thinker.     

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.