The wife reduces the man to bodily presence to deny his transcendence

Evidence

To posit themselves before the male as essential subjects, Frieda and Élise make use of a tactic men have often denounced: they try to deny them their transcendence. Men readily suppose that woman entertains dreams of castration against them; in fact, her attitude is ambiguous: she desires to humiliate the masculine sex rather than suppress it. Far more exact, she wishes to damage man in his projects, his future. She is triumphant when her husband or child is ill, tired, reduced to a bodily presence. They then appear to be no more than an object among others in the house over which she reigns; she treats them with a housewife’s skill; she bandages them like she glues together a broken dish, she cleans them as one cleans a pot; nothing resists her angelic hands, friends of peelings and dishwater. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1316

Categorization

• DEFINE: Demonstrates immanence/transcendence as a live mechanism: the wife’s domestic power operates by dragging the husband from transcendence into immanence.
• XREF: Connects to the Hegelian master-slave dialectic and Sartre’s concept of the look/objectification that Beauvoir is reworking. — connects to: Traditional marriage confines woman to immanence and denies her transcendence — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1196; Men transform woman from flesh into an ethereal ideal, denying her body — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 383; Granting woman freedom while denying her transcendence yields only negative freedom — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 406

Broader Connections

• Men transform woman from flesh into an ethereal ideal, denying her body #complicates (0.85) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 383
• Granting woman freedom while denying her transcendence yields only negative freedom #expands (0.75) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 406