14 - Gender and sexual identity in the modern French novel

Summary

Simone de Beauvoir's Le Deuxieème Sexe (1949) soundly refuted the patriarchal myth of an eternal feminine nature which, until then, had provided poets and novelists with their most cherished topoi. The famous opening line of Beauvoir's second volume is considered the origin of gender construction theory: 'On ne nait pas femme; on le devient' (Beauvoir, Le Deuxième Sexe (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), vol. ii, p. 2) ['One is not born, but becomes, woman']. Writing after the Holocaust, in the early days of France's colonial wars, at a time when Afro-American writer Richard Wright was in Paris publishing articles and excerpts from his novel Black Boy in Les Temps modernes, Beauvoir showed that patriarchy uses the eternal feminine to oppress women, precisely as antisemitic and racist systems of oppression deploy ideologies of the Black soul or Jewish character. Le Deuxième Sexe outraged French literary and critical establishments. Hostile articles and hate mail poured in. Even Beauvoir's friend Albert Camus castigated her for making French men appear foolish. But Le Deuxième Sexe also elicited letters of gratitude from female readers and stimulated a wealth of women's fiction in the following decade. It remains the intellectual cornerstone of twentieth-century Western feminism, the text with or against which feminist theorists and novelists have been writing for nearly fifty years.