the woman in love

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

Through her ideological theories and literature, de Beauvoir establishes the role love plays in the conception of a woman’s self. She identifies the source of women's subordination and perpetual anguish as the lack of means to define and exist essentially for themselves.

ETHICS OF AMBIGUITY

"It is not true that the recognition of the freedom of others limits my own freedom: to be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future; the existence of others as freedom defines my situation and is even the condition of my own freedom." (39)

"One does not love the past in its living truth if he insists on preserving its hardened and mummified forms. The past is an appeal; it is an appeal toward the future which sometimes can save it only by destroying it." (41)

THE SECOND SEX

"she will never be more than one element in his life: she does not encapsulate his destiny; […] he is the liberator, he holds the key to happiness, he is prince charming." (341)

"she does not separate man's desire from the love of her own self" (350)

"In [men's] most violent passions, they never abandon themselves completely […] they want to integrate her into their existence, not submerge their entire existence in her. By contrast love for the woman is the total abdication for the benefit of the master." (683)

"She is only love, and when love is deprived of its object, she is nothing." (704)

"Two transcendence are face to face; instead of mutually recognizing each other, each freedom wants to dominate the other." (754)

THE MADARINS

“Do you think it's possible to bring back the past?” “She was ready to deny the existence of space and time rather than to admit that love might not be eternal.” (36)

"she doesn’t feel she’s alive when she’s alone" (73)

"Loving or not loving each other isn't the only thing in the world." "To me it's all that matters." (88)

"When you love someone, you're not vegetating." "But loving isn't a vocation." "You're wrong. For, me, it is a vocation." (129)

"A great love, it seems to me, is so much more important than a career. The only thing I regret is that its success doesn’t depend on me alone […] A great love doesn’t leave a woman free for anything else." (192)

"You speak as if [him] and I were two distinct beings perhaps it's kind of experience that simply incommunicable […] fundamentally we're one single being" (192)

"I had only to be exactly what I was and a man’s desire transformed me into a miracle of perfection." (342)

"[without love] she'd be like myself, like millions of other women: a woman waiting to die, no longer knowing why she was living." (447)

"After all, being loved isn't an end in itself, a raison d’etre; it changes nothing, it means nowhere." (538)

SHE CAME TO STAY

"She had reached the point of no longer knowing herself, except through [his] feelings for her, and now she was trying to merge with [him]. But in this hopeless effort she was only succeeding and destroying herself." (292)

"Passion had drained the past of its wealth, and, in this arid present there was nothing left to love, nothing more to think about." (324)

"She suddenly remember that in this world there were other things to love that were neither [him] nor [her]." (351)

MY ESSAY

"In this paper, I will argue that, by depicting love in only the negative, de Beauvoir fails to actualize her proposed emancipation for both sexes and, further, that this makes her positive version of love intangible, seemingly impossible to achieve, especially within our current system."

ELENA FERRANTE

Ferrante's Neapolitan novels follow the relationships between childhood friends into adulthood. A main trope is the impermanence of these intense and fragile relationships, which highlight the imbalance of gender roles within these connections.

A STORY OF A NEW NAME

"she had heard and seen the form of a female body break, from the need for hatred, the urgency for revenge or justice, and lose its substance" (22)

"[He] had changed that state, he had snatched her away from death […] he restored to her the capacity to feel. He had above all brought back to life her sense of self." (73)

"[He] must have perceived that in order to not lose her he had to be something more than a furious lover. Or maybe not, maybe he simply felt that passion was emptying him." (86)

"to be rich for her meant having [him], and since [he] was gone she felt poor, a poverty that no money could obliterate." (95)

"She had made too many mistakes and she was a child, and they had all converge into that last mistake: to believe that [he] couldn’t do without her as she couldn’t do without him, and that there’s with a unique, exceptional feet, and that’s a good fortune of loving each other will last forever and go distinguish the force of any other necessity" (95)

THOSE WHO LEAVE AND THOSE WHO STAY

"it was just a disgression. However, intense that experience must have been, however deep the marks it had left, it was over now. [he] had found himself again" (30)

"my husband never praised me but, rather, reduced me to the mother of his children; even though I had an education he did not want me to be capable of independent thought […] he appeared willing to love me only provided that I continually demonstrate my nothingness." (345)

"I constitued the proof of his omnipotence, the demonstration that he know how to be not only a man in the right way but also a woman. And today when he no longer senses me as a part of himself, he feels betrayed." (405)

"Did he know how to love and induce one to love only in that excessive way, did he not know others?" (458)

"maybe, in the face of abandonment, we are all the same; maybe not even a very orderly mind can endure the discovery of not being loved." (479)

THE STORY OF THE LOST CHILD

"What if he loved you, seriously, and yet knew that he could love you only in this way?" (108)

"I told him that i had to get used to doing without him, but that for now i couldnt, i needed time. He answered that he, instead, would never be able to live without me." (109)

"love ended only when it was possible to return to oneself without fear or disgust" (111)

"I saw in her eyes the flame that in that moment she saw blazing around her father. A light that [he] would never have had if he had sunk with Lila; the light that Nadia had lost forever, sinking with Pasquale: and that would abandon Dede if she were lost following Rino. Suddenly I felt with shame that I could understand, and excuse, the irritation of Professor Galiani when she saw her daughter on Pasquale’s knees, I understood and excused Nino when, in one way or another, he withdrew from Lila, and why not, I understood and excused Adele when she had had to make the best of things and accept that I would marry her son." (404)

CYNICAL

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

ELENA FERRANTE

SONGS