The hostess’s entertainment is a ceremonial gift-giving that confirms her social position

Evidence

However, social life has more attractive forms than carrying out this idle duty of etiquette. Entertaining is not just welcoming others into one’s own home; it is changing one’s home into an enchanted domain; the social event is both festivity and potlatch. The mistress of the house displays her treasures: silver, table linen, crystal; she dresses the house with flowers: ephemeral and useless, flowers exemplify the gratuitousness of occasions that mean expenses and luxury; blooming in vases, doomed to a rapid death, flowers are ceremonial bonfires, incense and myrrh, libation, sacrifice. The table is laden with fine food, precious wines; it means satisfying the guests’ needs, it is a question of inventing gracious gifts that anticipate their desires; the meal becomes a mysterious ceremony. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1584

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the key framing of entertaining as ‘festivity and potlatch’ — a gift-economy lens that recurs throughout Beauvoir’s account of women’s domestic transcendence.
• CANDY: Beauvoir reading Mrs. Dalloway’s party as a potlatch — a Marcel Mauss-style gift-sacrifice — is a lovely cocktail conversation gem.