Montherlant’s misogyny stems from refusing risk among peers

Evidence

Montherlant’s attitude has no positive counterweight, and it expresses nothing but his own existential choice. In fact, this hero chooses fear. … And because he does not dare confront humanity, he abolishes it. … His hero always rises up alone facing animals, children, women, landscapes; he is prey to his own desires (like the queen of Pasiphaé) or his own demands (like the master of Santiago), but no person is ever beside him. Even Alban in The Dream does not have a friend: when Prinet was alive, he disdained him; he only exalts him over his dead body. Montherlant’s works, like his life, recognize only one consciousness. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 485

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the ‘betrayal of the self’ temptation and the refusal of genuine intersubjectivity central to existentialist ethics. — connects to: Montherlant redefined woman as a lack of virility and condemned autonomous women — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 461; Montherlant’s misogyny stems from measuring the distance between male transcendence and female immanence; Montherlant replaced genuine engagement with the world by narcissistic self-worship — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 496
• DEEPTHINKING: The diagnosis that those who fear recognition among equals instead negate the other entirely — abolishing the human to avoid the risk of coexistence — is a dense, durable psychological-social claim.

Broader Connections

• Montherlant replaced genuine engagement with the world by narcissistic self-worship #complicates (0.75) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 496