There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ. So says the Bible and yet it seems today that the world is clearly divided in to two halves, one for men and the other for women. It is interesting to observe these two worlds, one is soft, the other hard, one is tender, the other robust, one is stylish, the other dowdy, one is creator, the other destroyer, one is beautiful, the other sublime, one is passive, the other aggressive, one is sensitive, the other tough-skinned, one is heart, the other is head, one is from Mars and the other from Venus. These two worlds today have curiously intermingled and we often find it tough to decide which one is for whom.
A man’s life was of activity, of struggle and of dearth. He was incomplete and empty and therefore his life was full of effort to fill the emptiness and nothingness in his life. The early man tried to fill it by waging a war with nature. Often he conquered nature and sometimes was subjugated by it. Nature however could not fill his nothingness; she either submitted with hostile silence or opposed him with a cold vengeance. When he took bite of an apple, the apple did not claw back or when he flattened mountains, it did not inflict its fury on man. Nature was too large and mighty to be of useful company.
A man’s life was of activity, of struggle and of dearth. He was incomplete and empty and therefore his life was full of effort to fill the emptiness and nothingness in his life. The early man tried to fill it by waging a war with nature. Often he conquered nature and sometimes was subjugated by it. Nature however could not fill his nothingness; she either submitted with hostile silence or opposed him with a cold vengeance. When he took bite of an apple, the apple did not claw back or when he flattened mountains, it did not inflict its fury on man. Nature was too large and mighty to be of useful company.
He felt need for an Other, who is created in his own image, a being more like him but not so much and so she was created, as Book of Genesis says, out of his flank. She was endowed by men and by the society created by man with mystery and with mythical character. She was at once Eve and the Virgin Mary. She was an idol, a servant, the source of life, a power of darkness. She was the silence of truth, an artifice and also a gossip. She was healing presence and also a sorceress. She was man’s prey and his downfall. She was everything that he was not and that he longed for. She was his raison d’etre.
This confusion and complication and irony confront us every day even today. To what extent is this true is the topic that the existentialist French novelist, essayist, playwright and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir addressed in her magnum opus “Le Deuxieme Sex “ or The Second Sex. It was published first as a series of articles in the political journal Les Temps Modernes, which the famous philosopher Jean Paul Sartre founded with Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The Second Sex harbingered the feminism of 70s.
This confusion and complication and irony confront us every day even today. To what extent is this true is the topic that the existentialist French novelist, essayist, playwright and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir addressed in her magnum opus “Le Deuxieme Sex “ or The Second Sex. It was published first as a series of articles in the political journal Les Temps Modernes, which the famous philosopher Jean Paul Sartre founded with Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The Second Sex harbingered the feminism of 70s.
Simone de Beauvoir was born in 1908 and was intellectually precocious from her childhood. She was also a devout catholic and wanted to become a nun till she had a crisis of faith when she was 14 and remained an atheist tall her life. She studied mathematics, literature, languages and philosophy and wrote a thesis on mathematician Leibnitz. She stood second only to Jean Paul Sartre in the aggregation examination of philosophy that ranked all students nationally in France and till today is the youngest student to have passed this exam.
Mle Beauvoir actively involved in the women’s liberation movement of France in 1971 and signed the famous manifesto of 343, a list of famous women who claimed to have abortion, though it was illegal then in France. In 1974, abortion was legalized. Today she is considered mother of feminism and is also said to have influenced the masterpiece of Sartre, “Being and Nothingness”. She died at the age of 78 in 1986 and is buried next to Sartre in Cimetiere du Montparnasse in Paris. In 2006, French government decided to construct a footbridge over the river seine in her honor, this bridge leads to the new national library of France.
No comments:
Post a Comment