A wife’s childhood-formed core resists a husband’s attempts to reshape her
Evidence
Man is being naive when he imagines he will easily make his wife bend to his wishes and “shape” her as he pleases. “A wife is what her husband makes her,” says Balzac; but he says the opposite a few pages further on. In the area of abstraction and logic, the wife often resigns herself to accepting male authority; but when it is a question of ideas and habits she really clings to, she opposes him with covert tenacity. The influence of her childhood and youth is deeper for her than for the man, as she remains more closely confined in her own personal history. She usually does not lose what she acquires during these periods. The husband will impose a political opinion on his wife, but he will not change her religious convictions, nor will he shake her superstitions: this is what Jean Barois saw, he who imagined having a real influence on the devout little ninny who shared his life. Overcome, he says: “A little girl’s brain, conserved in the shadows of a provincial town: all the assertions of ignorant stupidity: this can’t be cleaned up.” In spite of opinions she has learned and principles she reels off like a parrot, the wife retains her own vision of the world. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1302
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to Stendhal and Ibsen heroines mentioned, and to Beauvoir’s broader thesis that woman’s interior life formed before marriage survives masculine domestication. — connects to: A woman’s acceptance of conception mirrors her relations with her mother and husband.; A mother’s escalating control over her daughter coincided with increasing physical abuse — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 601
- QUESTION: Beauvoir inverts the folk wisdom that marriage shapes the wife — worth checking how her account of female childhood ‘conservation’ fits her later chapters on the young girl.
Broader Connections
- A mother’s escalating control over her daughter coincided with increasing physical abuse
#exemplifies(0.75) — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 601 - A woman’s acceptance of conception mirrors her relations with her mother and husband.
#expands(0.72)