Poetic tradition reduces woman’s body to a natural landscape for man to possess.

Evidence

This unique woman, both carnal and artificial, natural and human, casts the same spell as the equivocal objects loved by the surrealists: she is like the spoon-shoe, the table-magnifying glass, the sugar cube of marble that the poet discovers at the flea market or invents in a dream; she shares in the secret of familiar objects suddenly discovered in their truth, and the secret of plants and stones. She is all things: But she is Beauty, above and beyond every other thing. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 595 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Woman is not a being in her own right, a subject. She produces nothing but looks after those who do; she is a living monument to a long-vanished era when the domestic economy was self-contained. The division of labor imposed upon her by man brought her little that was worthwhile. She became the embodiment of the biological function, the image of nature, the subjugation of which constituted that civilization’s title to fame. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 255 (#expands, via linked claim)

So woman is no longer flesh, she is glorious body; rather than trying to possess her, men venerate her for her untouched splendor; the pale dead of Edgar Allan Poe are as fluid as water, wind, or memory; for courtly love, for les précieux, and in all of the gallant tradition, woman is no longer an animal creature but rather an ethereal being, a breath, a radiance. Thus it is that the feminine Night’s opacity is converted into transparence, and obscurity into purity, as in Novalis’s texts: Thou, Night-inspiration, heavenly Slumber, didst come upon me-the region gently upheaved itself; over it hovered my unbound, newborn spirit. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 383 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Surrealist desire reduces woman to the status of a fetishized equivocal object. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 595; Woman embodies Nature, whose ambivalence makes her both ally and enemy to man — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 324; Men transform woman from flesh into an ethereal ideal, denying her body — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 383 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Surrealist desire reduces woman to the status of a fetishized equivocal object. #corroborates (0.82) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 595
• Woman’s subjugation symbolizes the mastery of nature that defines civilization #expands (0.80) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 255
• Men transform woman from flesh into an ethereal ideal, denying her body #corroborates (0.78) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 383
• Woman embodies Nature, whose ambivalence makes her both ally and enemy to man #expands (0.75) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 324
• Traditional marriage confines woman to immanence and denies her transcendence #expands (0.72) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1196
• Female virtue is the broken form in which exploited nature enters male culture #exemplifies (0.72) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 256