Lady with a Lance

THE SECOND SEX (732 pp.)--Simone de Beauvoir--Knopf ($ 10).

Numberless are the world's wonders, but none

More wonderful than man; the storm-grey sea

Yields to his prows, the huge crests bear him high . . .

Were Sophocles to croon this chorus (from Antigone*) below the boudoir of Existentialist Simone de Beauvoir, she would very likely fling wide her French window and bomb him with The Second Sex (weight: 2 3/4 Ibs.). For Sophocles' measures stand for just about everything that Author de Beauvoir considers most hateful in human life. As she sees it, the male's conquest of the earth, the sea etc. is just an analogue of his smug conquest of the little woman.

Many authors of both sexes have bent their pens to the exploration of this subject, but none has bent so nearly double as Author de Beauvoir, or painted the plight of woman on so large a canvas. She begins her book, in time, with a discussion of Eve in the Garden of Eden and carries right on from there through recorded history to the age of Dr. Kinsey. By the time she has finished her biological, psychoanalytical and historical-materialist dissection of the situation of her sex, the warm aura of mystery that commonly surrounds woman has been reduced to a steely chill.

The Invention of Woman. As Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre's major disciple and friend, Author de Beauvoir deplores the fact that much of mankind draws spiritual nourishment from myth, religion, legend and unthinking optimism. Man, argues the existentialist, must be more than a mere passive "being." He must be an "existent," i.e., one who boldly accepts the mortality of body & soul but nonetheless resolves to pit his courage (his only weapon) against the cruel reality of life & death.

"Male-man," argues Simone de Beauvoir, is relatively lucky. He has raised himself by the bootstraps from the gutter of nonentity to the dignity of "human being ; he may, at will, transcend even this and rise to the stature of an "existent." But woman's uplift has barely begun. Far from being an existent, she is not even a human being yet. She is a "lie" and a "treason" to her own reality, because she is "in large part man's invention." Her plight in a man-made world is summed up in two of Author de Beauvoir's characteristically sweeping statements: 1) "The most sympathetic of men never fully comprehend woman's concrete situation," and 2) "The most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women."

"One is not born, but rather becomes a woman . . . It is civilization . . . that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch . . ." From childhood she is "fated . . . to be the passive prey of man," to awake in him "an unknown being whom he recognizes with pride as himself." What man dreads above all, Author de Beauvoir believes, is woman's ceasing to be his most priceless "idea" and becoming very much like himself. For this reason, he never pries into the recesses of her mind: it might give her the notion that she has a mind. On the other hand, there is no tribute he will not pay to what he considers her finest qualities--of which "renunciation" is the one he loves best.

The Building of Brotherhood. As these samples show, Author de Beauvoir knows how to take a bead on a man and bring him down like a sack of hypocrisy. More's the pity that she writes pages of nonsensical epitaphs over her bleeding targets. The chip on her shoulder makes her believe that every man is as autocratic as a Turk and every female as malleable as a slave. Many of her protestations would strike even the inmates of a harem as being behind the times.

Contraception, legal abortion, easier divorce are the foundations on which Author de Beauvoir hopes to build the "real" woman. The structure--which is to bring about "brotherhood" between men & women--will rise the sooner if men will only stop chanting about the wonder of their works.

*As translated by Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald.

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