Wife and mother each claim the husband through competing temporal orientations

Evidence

The hostility she feels to this stranger who “steals” her child has often been described. … Each woman understands the beloved’s happiness in her own way: the wife wants to see in him a man through whom she will control the world; the mother tries to keep him by taking him back to his childhood; to the projects of the young wife who expects her husband to become rich or important, the mother counters with the laws of his unchanging essence: he is fragile, he must not tire himself. The conflict between the past and the future is exacerbated when it is the newcomer’s turn to get pregnant. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1725

Categorization

• DEFINE: The wife’s project-oriented ‘future’ stance vs. the mother’s essence-based ‘past’ stance isolates the immanence/transcendence dialectic in miniature.