Marital love society demands drives wives into self-deception rather than honest feeling
Evidence
The young wife rarely admits her feelings to herself with such sincerity. To love her husband and to be happy is a duty to herself and society; this is what her family expects of her; or if her parents were against the marriage, she wants to prove how wrong they were. She usually begins her conjugal life in bad faith; she easily persuades herself that she feels great love for her husband; and this passion takes on a more manic, possessive, and jealous form the less sexually satisfied she is; to console herself for this disappointment that she refuses at first to admit, she has an insatiable need for her husband’s presence. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1288
Categorization
- DEFINE: Beauvoir’s use of ‘bad faith’ as a technical existentialist term applied to conjugal life.
- XREF: Directly applies Sartre’s ‘bad faith’ from Being and Nothingness to the married woman’s situation. — connects to: Marriage’s frustrated eroticism causally drives wives into adultery — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1617; Marriages can misplace emphasis on trivial shared intimacy and lose substance; Sincerity can be an active ingredient of self-deception rather than its opposite — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1405 (+4 more)
Broader Connections
- Marriage’s frustrated eroticism causally drives wives into adultery
#expands(0.85) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1617 - Sincerity can be an active ingredient of self-deception rather than its opposite
#expands(0.80) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1405 - Marriage’s ethical dignity actually suppresses rather than dignifies women’s sexuality
#corroborates(0.80) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1136 - Marriage forces spontaneity and deliberate decision to coincide impossibly
#expands(0.78) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1157 - Marriages can misplace emphasis on trivial shared intimacy and lose substance
#expands(0.72)