De Beauvoir What Is A Woman As A Feminist Analysis

De Beauvoir brings up the topic of female existentialism. By raising the question “What is a woman?”, De Beauvoir makes evident the need of a re-evaluation of the notion of woman, which has been wrongfully defined since antiquity. Since then, woman has never been portrayed as a self-sustaining, autonomous being, instead being portrayed as a being dependent on man.
The terms “male” and “female” are usually used in binary opposition, but in reality this opposition is taken at face value, for the perks of being a male vastly overshadow those of a woman. Man is treated as the standard, it has been overly-glorified to the point that the word itself has become used to generalize the entire human species (for example, in expressions such as “each
The drawback to feminist critique is the fact that the analyzed materials are a product of male artists, therefore their portrayals of women is not fully accurate, because they are not bona fide portrayals of women, but rather the projected perceptions that male authors have on women.
• La gynocritique, which deals with woman as writer of literature dealing with female-related topics which are depicted with accuracy. Unlike feminist critique, gynocritics is based on female experience, thus signifying the departure from the pre-determined template given by men.
Showalter proposes that the history of female literature should be further researched and reconstructed. Besides the more famous female writers, other obscured female artists should be rediscovered and pinpointed in the female literary history so the continuity of female tradition could be established and the literature canon changed. Thus, Showalter lists the three phases of female