Narcissistic self-fashioning lets woman express personality without being beautiful

Evidence

The woman eagerly tries to confirm these analyses in her behavior; she chooses a color: “Green is really my color”; she has a favorite flower, perfume, musician, superstitions, and fetishes that she treats with respect; she does not have to be beautiful to express her personality in her outfits and home. The character she portrays is more or less coherent and original according to her intelligence, obstinacy, and depth of alienation. Some women just randomly put together a few sparse and mismatched traits; others systematically create a figure whose role they consistently play: it has already been said that women have trouble differentiating this game from the truth. Around this heroine, life goes on like a sad or marvelous novel, always somewhat strange. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1800

Categorization

• DEFINE: Beauvoir here shows how the narcissist’s play-acting of a persona shades into genuine self-deception, a mechanism central to the chapter.
• XREF: Connects to Sartre’s bad faith and the for-itself/for-others dialectic; also how Goffman later theorized performed selves. — connects to: Feminine dress functions as self-decoration, offering the wearer up as merchandise — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1078; Narcissistic women use audiences rather than mirrors to confirm their self-image — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1813; Lack of beauty frees a woman from self-objectifying and toward pure intellectual life. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1950 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Narcissistic women use audiences rather than mirrors to confirm their self-image #expands (0.85) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1813
• Lack of beauty frees a woman from self-objectifying and toward pure intellectual life. #qualifies (0.75) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1950
• Being objectified by another’s look constitutes an inescapable existential guilt #complicates (0.72) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 72