Surrealist desire reduces woman to the status of a fetishized equivocal object.
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
Categorization
- XREF: This is Beauvoir’s critique of the surrealist cult of woman as object — parallels her later analysis of how male desire turns woman into an equivocal thing rather than a subject. — connects to: Desire strips the world of meaning to reduce self and Other to pure facticity. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 985; Poetic tradition reduces woman’s body to a natural landscape for man to possess.; Men transform woman from flesh into an ethereal ideal, denying her body — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 383 (+4 more)
Broader Connections
- Surrealist exaltation of woman still denies her subjectivity; she remains Other
#corroborates(0.95) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 605 - Woman’s contradictory image stems from being man’s inessential Other
#expands(0.85) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 413 - Desire strips the Other’s body of movement and garb to reveal pure flesh
#complicates(0.75)