Writing of Simone de Beauvoir.

Paper Summary:

This paper offers a detailed analysis of Beauvoir's writing with particular reference to 'Memoires of a Dutiful Daughter', 'The Second Sex' and 'A Very Gentle Death'. It examines the question of Beauvoir's complicity in a patriarchal society and draws on the criticism of Levinas, Judith Butler and Toril Moi. This paper discusses that much radical-seeming women's writing in modern France is produced under the uncriticized influence of patriarchal ideology.

From the Paper:

"Despite persistent attempts, Beauvoir's writing belies inclusion in any definition of "women's writing", if such a genre can be said to exist, beyond one that simply refers to writing that has been undertaken by a woman. Whilst her position as a woman informs her writing and occupies much of her thinking, she is not situating herself within a concept of "women's writing" and nor indeed can her readers pigeonhole her so easily. Her writing remains solely her own, whatever it may owe to her gender. Having said that, women dominate her texts, male-female relations dominate her philosophical outlook and her situation as a woman who is acutely aware of the role society expects her to perform clearly dominates her attitude towards life. Beauvoir struggled with the limitations of her position as a woman and when she was confronted with the disadvantages and prejudices facing women she vented her anger through her writing. Despite the obvious frustrations felt by Beauvoir, however, her critics have suggested that, far from attacking and undermining the patriarchal ideologies to which she objected, she in fact came to subscribe to them. In other words, she became as complicit through her writing as the women she herself criticized in society as a whole because she sought to radically overturn the perceptions of women but never lived up to the promise of her aim."

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