Woman’s conflicting archetypes range from demon and predator to muse and goddess

Evidence

The saintly mother has its correlation in the cruel stepmother, the angelic young girl has the perverse virgin: so Mother will be said sometimes to equal Life and sometimes Death, and every virgin is either a pure spirit or flesh possessed by the devil. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 654 (#expands, via linked claim)

It is always difficult to describe a myth; it does not lend itself to being grasped or defined; it haunts consciousnesses without ever being posited opposite them as a fixed object. The object fluctuates so much and is so contradictory that its unity is not at first discerned: Delilah and Judith, Aspasia and Lucretia, Pandora and Athena, woman is both Eve and the Virgin Mary. She is an idol, a servant, source of life, power of darkness; she is the elementary silence of truth, she is artifice, gossip, and lies; she is the medicine woman and witch; she is man’s prey; she is his downfall, she is everything he is not and wants to have, his negation and his raison d’être. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 322 (#expands, via linked claim)

In concrete reality, women manifest themselves in many different ways; but each of the myths built around woman tries to summarize her as a whole; each is supposed to be unique; the consequence of this is a multiplicity of incompatible myths, and men are perplexed before the strange inconsistencies of the idea of Femininity; as every woman enters into many of these archetypes, each of which claims to incarnate its Truth alone, men also find the same old confusion before their companions as did the Sophists, who had difficulty understanding how a person could be light and dark at the same time. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 653 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The seductive-woman archetype persists as a cultural figure of danger.; Women’s sensuality divides between active and passive modes that pull against each other. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 956; Woman as myth is a fluctuating, contradictory object that evades fixed definition — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 322 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• The Eternal Feminine is defined by paired opposite archetypes #expands (0.92) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 654
• Woman as myth is a fluctuating, contradictory object that evades fixed definition #expands (0.90) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 322
• Incompatible myths of woman coexist because each claims to be the whole truth #expands (0.88) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 653
• Women’s sensuality divides between active and passive modes that pull against each other. #expands (0.85) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 956
• Woman embodies Nature, whose ambivalence makes her both ally and enemy to man #epitomizes (0.80) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 324