This is the opening line of The Second Sex Book II. It represents the logical persistence of the proofs De Beauvoir presents in Book I to sustain her case that femininity does not arise from differences in biology, psychology, or intellect. Rather, femininity is a creation of civilization, a reflection not of “essential” differences in men and women but of differences in their situation. Situation determines character, not the other way around. Woman is not born fully formed; she is gradually shaped by her upbringing. Biology does not determine what makes a woman a woman—a woman learns her role from man and others in society. Woman is not born passive, secondary, and nonessential, but all the forces in the external world have worked against
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The disjunction between the assertion: “there is no pretence, no lying “and the admission “I know I could not say all that I wanted /About my father “indicates the difficulty”(272) Jennings experienced in negotiating the space between her desire to represent “some aspect of the truth” and her inability to do so. What Jennings describes in the poem is a dilemma generally recognized by critics of autobiography. According to Finney: “The conflict between idealizing one’s past and seeking between defending the ego and stripping it of its defenses in order to the understand the origins of adult behavior, underlies all good childhood autobiographies”(121) In the autobiographical narrative of her life , Jennings is so determined to “defend the ego” that she does not deal with this dilemma. This stratagem of avoidance may account for weakness in the first and the third sections of the Autobiography that deal with the private area of her life. The second section which deals with the public sphere is an appealing and revealing account of her early life as a writer. The autobiographer according to Spacs: “claims by his announcement of genre that he presents to the reader some version of a real human being”(1) In her poem to her friend Jennings suggests that she was incapable to fill in the outlines of her own suggestions about her own childhood in later about the mental illness. Instead of realizing the expectations she established in the first and the third sections, Jennings depended on ambiguous reflections on the past and on oblique references to various troubled relationships to tell her story.
In her poems and in her prose “Autobiography”, Jennings explores and explains relationships between self and world, self and God and self and other. Feminist critics of autobiographies
The disjunction between the assertion: “there is no pretence, no lying “and the admission “I know I could not say all that I wanted /About my father “indicates the difficulty”(272) Jennings experienced in negotiating the space between her desire to represent “some aspect of the truth” and her inability to do so. What Jennings describes in the poem is a dilemma generally recognized by critics of autobiography. According to Finney: “The conflict between idealizing one’s past and seeking between defending the ego and stripping it of its defenses in order to the understand the origins of adult behavior, underlies all good childhood autobiographies”(121) In the autobiographical narrative of her life , Jennings is so determined to “defend the ego” that she does not deal with this dilemma. This stratagem of avoidance may account for weakness in the first and the third sections of the Autobiography that deal with the private area of her life. The second section which deals with the public sphere is an appealing and revealing account of her early life as a writer. The autobiographer according to Spacs: “claims by his announcement of genre that he presents to the reader some version of a real human being”(1) In her poem to her friend Jennings suggests that she was incapable to fill in the outlines of her own suggestions about her own childhood in later about the mental illness. Instead of realizing the expectations she established in the first and the third sections, Jennings depended on ambiguous reflections on the past and on oblique references to various troubled relationships to tell her story.
In her poems and in her prose “Autobiography”, Jennings explores and explains relationships between self and world, self and God and self and other. Feminist critics of autobiographies