From its onset, life is trapped. It is trapped by sex, trapped by gender, trapped by the situation of birth. To the sexed world, to forsake this is to destroy the facticity of the self as it is known; you must live according to the Self-Evident Rules of Sex. This is the locus of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, a scathing, dense critique of the historical situation of woman in a phenomenological-existentialist perspective. To this aim, as a tome of masterwork, it is flawed; however, despite these flaws, Beauvoir’s text remains an incomparable exploration of the gendered and sexed body in its lived situation.

Beauvoir’s writing, despite its verbosity, is exceedingly concise. Her command of the run-on sentence is apparent in The Second Sex; she can put forth incredible indictments, oscillating between particulars and universals with nothing more than a few semicolons. This loquacious speech creates the feeling of an unceasing beating in the text, and, in her constant beating forward, when she comes to a slower, less run-on pace, she creates a violence of impact in her brake. This style sweeps the reader into her rhetoric by the ferocity of its movement, and Beauvoir effectively extracts as much as can be said about each of her analytical subjects while rarely coming across as an interminable slog.

Where her writing does come across as an interminable slog, it is typically in the more confounding areas of her theory. One of these areas is her extensive pontificating about urinary fetishism (fetishism used as in “object fetishism”). She uses this as the nursery locus of feelings of “female mutilation” or “penis envy,” through analyzing the “activity” of the male urine stream as opposed to the “docility” of the female urine stream. What she attempts, here, is to illustrate the social dimension of urinary fascination, which formulates that “female mutilation” is a learned subjugation, not an inherent psychophysiological conflict. This argument works when Beauvoir considers how these ideas are inherited socially through the sexing of the body (“In order for her state to assume the character of a frustration, it is necessary for the young girl to be already, for some reason, dissatisfied with her situation.”), but it does not work when she reiterates the oppression of sexual differentiation by considering the female body as an innately inferior instrument to the transcendent project: “Every stream of water in the air seems like a miracle, a defiance of gravity: to direct, to govern it, is to win a small victory over the laws of nature; and in any case the small boy finds here a daily amusement that is denied his sisters.” (282, 279).

This is a repetitive sin in Beauvoir’s text. She seems to believe the female body is more animal than the male’s in its necessity for the continuation of the species and in the menstrual cycle, as is explicitly apparent when she remarks, “The two essential traits that characterize woman, biologically speaking, are the following: her grasp upon the world is less extended than the man’s, and she is more closely enslaved to the species” (79). This seems counterintuitive for formulating a rejection of sexual hierarchy when transcendence is placed as the object to aspire towards. It’s an ontological inferiority that makes woman’s situation contingent on tools that forego the body’s limits, which I admittedly struggle with.

Iterating again on her ontological evaluations of sexed bodies, she frequently oscillates between a murky mode of rejecting any ontological hierarchies and contributing to them. This is a textual issue that is difficult to disregard; it seems to confuse her formulation of the “situation of the body” each time it begins approaching clarity. It is best to accept her early remark that, “It is not upon physiology that values can be based; rather, the facts of biology take on the values that the existent bestows upon them,” and make a concerted effort to consider her departures from this abstract as aberrant, as this seems the most conducive interface for an advancing understanding of sex (40).

Another significant tension between me and the text lies in Beauvoir’s evaluation of homosexuality. To do so, she begins with a framework that declares love as the unification of the self with the Other (i.e., “true” love transforms the bodies enacting it into independent subjects who unify with an entity outside themselves through their relations while maintaining the self). As consequence, homosexual love is considered failed in the abstract, as to love the other, to Beauvoir, contains realizing one’s self in the partner’s sexed otherness, not so much to recognize one’s self in the partner:

Under a concrete and carnal form there is mutual recognition of the ego and of the other in the keenest awareness of the other and of the ego. Some women say that they feel the masculine sex organ in them as a part of their own bodies; some men feel that they are the women they penetrate. These are evidently inexact expressions, for the dimension, the relation of the other still exists; but the fact is that alterity has no longer a hostile implication, and indeed this sense of the union of really separate bodies is what gives its emotional character to the sexual act; and it is the more overwhelming as the two beings, who together in passion deny and assert their boundaries, are similar and yet unlike. This unlikeness, which too often isolates them, becomes the source of their enchantment when they do unite. The woman sees in man's virile impetuosity the reverse aspect of the passive fever that burns within her; the man's potency reflects the power she exercises upon him; this life-engorged organ belongs to her as her smile belongs to the man who floods her with pleasure. All the treasures of virility, of femininity, reflect each other, and thus they form an ever shifting and ecstatic unity. What is required for such harmony is not refinement in technique, but rather, on the foundation of the moment's erotic charm, a mutual generosity of body and soul (393).

What this also shows is an ascription of narcissism to a woman’s appreciation of a woman’s body (whether self or other), which… has dangerous implications.

Putting aside my criticisms, the rest of the text is, frankly, incomparable to any other major feminist writing. It is hard to sing the praises of this text without seeming to provide the basal framework of modern feminist and queer theory, which is perhaps a testament to its longevity.

To try, though: One of the most notable (and for me, insightful) features of this text is its formulation of the body-as-situation. Coupled with the oh-so-over-quoted beginning of the second volume, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” Beauvoir seems to imagine the body as a lived set of facts, whereupon gender is created and developed through the social extrapolation of the body-as-lived-fact (273). It would be incorrect to say this bifurcates sex into gender and sex; rather, gender, to Beauvoir, is the lived situation of sex, thus making them interdependent constructs.

However, Beauvoir does not so much criticize sex as a political and biosocial entity; rather, she focuses primarily on critiquing gender. I do not deem this disqualifying, as the necessary framework is clearly set and considered in the text, just hardly elaborated upon; it is not necessarily boxes that must be checked, but moreso that you cannot critique gender without first having an understanding of sex, which is achieved.

Further, it’s impossible not to appreciate the entire first volume as a deconstruction of the myth of the Feminine Mystique. Beauvoir understands the Feminine Mystique as a force of actualization: it is the Woman in heaven against which all women must be compared and melded into. This is, of course, the entire foundation of modern gender theory; gender is created through the individual’s relations to the image of the Absolute Man and Absolute Woman. Though not explicitly, this also condemns the myth of Masculinity in Beauvoir’s text, as she frequently considers how “boys” are actualized as “men” through action.

The Second Sex is imperfect and occasionally counterintuitive, but it is impossible to walk away from without understanding its value. As a critique of sex and (predominantly) gender, it is a significant groundwork for understanding the operation of sexed bodies and how gendering the body reduces the human being’s open future to the enactment of a generality. To live the body as the totality of the self, Beauvoir postulates, is to reject sex and myth-brokers: a myth is a dangerous thing; to live a myth is to live a foretold narrative.

I believe Eliot’s poetry is something I am going to have to come back to. At the present moment, I found this unnotable, but still felt a clawing intrigue that I could not quite grasp.
One thing I would like to point out, though, is how consciousness seems to bend and collapse in Eliot’s poems. To this end, of course, is the ending of The Hollow Men, which crumbles into metaphysic and religious mimicry, slowly dissolving:

Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the.

I read this book for a course. Both book and course proved to be disappointing. It’s fine for a surface-level, cursory overview of religious thought, and it may prove a useful introduction for anyone who needs it. Still, I would likely recommend… anything Eliade over this.

While attempting to construct the manner in which I wish to discuss Dracula, I marked a bifurcation between the text’s ‘viscera’ – its violence, sexuality, trances, and madness, each areas of its physicality and brutal affectations – as contrasted with the elements of its lightness, embodied in the aptly-named Crew of Light. Historically, the former has been the area of the text’s appreciation, and certainly for good reason, as Dracula’s viscera are dense and ripe for analysis. However, the lightness, loveliness, and purity of Dracula, the construction which so greatly accents its viscera, oft goes unnoticed, to the detriment of its criticism.

The Crew of Light embodies this best in their relations. What pervades the area of their discourses is a great heart, penetrating every discussion and communication, down to the very moment the audience is introduced to constituent characters:

Van Helsing would, I know, do anything for me for a personal reason, so no matter on what ground he comes, we must accept his wishes. He is a seemingly arbitrary man, this is because he knows what he is talking about better than any one else. He is a philosopher and a metaphysician, and one of the most advanced scientists of his day, and he has, I believe, an absolutely open mind. This, with an iron nerve, a temper of the ice-brook, and indomitable resolution, self-command, and toleration exalted from virtues to blessings, and the kindliest and truest heart that beats, these form his equipment for the noble work that he is doing for mankind, work both in theory and practice, for his views are as wide as his all-embracing sympathy.

Seward’s introduction of Van Helsing begins with a sort of flippancy by first attributing ‘arbitrariness’ to Helsing, a negative of his unclarity. “This is because he knows what he is talking about better than anyone else,” effects an immediate reversal of this negative, textually acknowledging tensions between individuals, lapses and failures in communication, only for it to be rejected in favor of purity and sweetness, as the rest of Seward’s introduction shows in its onslaught of compliments; the slightest tension created is overturned, then rapidly deconstructed.

The interpersonal discourses of Dracula are consistently modeled in this manner, continued in Seward’s reaction to Helsing announcing that Lucy is undead:

For a while sheer anger mastered me. It was as if he had during her life struck Lucy on the face. I smote the table hard and rose up as I said to him, "Dr. Van Helsing, are you mad?" He raised his head and looked at me, and somehow the tenderness of his face calmed me at once. "Would I were!" he said. "Madness were easy to bear compared with truth like this. Oh, my friend, why, think you, did I go so far round, why take so long to tell so simple a thing? Was it because I hate you and have hated you all my life? Was it because I wished to give you pain? Was it that I wanted, now so late, revenge for that time when you saved my life, and from a fearful death? Ah no!" "Forgive me," said I.

It is notable that anger “mastered” Seward, and his simile “It was as if he had during her life struck Lucy on the face,” catastrophizes the violence of the event. Helsing’s utterance is transformed by its receiver’s harsh affectations, which overcome or “master” the receiver in a failure of purity. Seward’s return to his previous state thereafter, with “the tenderness of his face calm[ing] [him] at once,” recollects him into his sweetness and dilutes the cruel faculties of mind against which he failed. Goodness is consistently performed by the Crew of Light in an unceasing manner, and failures in this performance result in the apology of the failed.

This is a constitutive element of the text’s purity/impurity dynamic for constructing Christian moralities to denigrate others, as pious and virtuous individuals master the violence and evil of an incorporate Satan through benevolence. Beyond this religious chivalry and the prescriptions to certain institutions which arrive with it – marriage, monogamy, etc. –, these characteristics create an incredible elegance and beauty to the text’s characters. Love is communicated so clearly, in tender glances and kind hearts; every character appears to be in a permanent infatuation which accepts and heals those faults that should mark its rupture. Softness and tranquility of this sort encompass the text entire, it is impossible not to love, it is captivating, and shamefully, under-noticed.

There is truly not much to be said; an undeniable text to the present historical moment, as the panopticon is universalized and invisibilized, and transgression from the exactitude of the state resumes its former retributive character in a new permutation of powers. It is also fascinating to think of Foucault's formulation of power-knowledge in relation to post-truthism and its correlative quasi-decentralization of knowledge production.

Discipline and Punish is a text that I must return to at a later date.

In the corpus of Austen’s literature, Persuasion marks a notable detour in its construction. Contrary to works such as Emma and Pride and Prejudice (both of which I am due a re-read of), Persuasion presents little dialogue to anchor its voice; in fact, it seems that the major point of discourse that Persuasion creates among Austen’s novels is in its register being populated by narrative voice more than the characters’ voices. What this creates is a very cerebral quality, instead of the verbosity that I have come to know Austen for. I admit that this proved a challenge to my preconceptions about Austen, and that in some of the prolonged periods of non-dialogue, I desired a re-orientation to the axis which I have come to know. However, the longer that I sit with Persuasion and retrace my steps throughout, the more I am able to appreciate Austen’s achievement. Even in moments of lesser consequence, Austen’s prose achieves a noetic quality, which, beyond constructing the characters merely through their relations and discourses with others, produces their lives in a stream-of-consciousness and observatory manner:

There was a momentary expression in Captain Wentworth’s face at this speech, a certain glance of his bright eye, and curl of his handsome mouth, which convinced Anne, that instead of sharing in Mrs Musgrove’s kind wishes, as to her son, he had probably been at some pains to get rid of him; but it was too transient an indulgence of self-amusement to be detected by any who understood him less than herself; in another moment he was perfectly collected and serious, and almost instantly afterwards coming up to the sofa, on which she and Mrs Musgrove were sitting, took a place by the latter, and entered into conversation with her, in a low voice, about her son, doing it with so much sympathy and natural grace, as shewed the kindest consideration for all that was real and unabsurd in the parent’s feelings.

Seeing these events in Anne’s perspective, the reader is shown the full spontaneities and machinations of her consciousness. Rather than Wentworth declaring certain feelings, Anne reads and infers them in the subtleties of his movements; the narrative voice, from the perspective of Anne, collects specific features in a countenance, which is then filtered and interpreted into a feeling; it is externally produced, outside of self-declarations. Notably, when Wentworth does begin to speak, the reader is only told that Anne hears him speaking in “sympathy and natural grace.” The words of his speech are not disclosed, but rather the impressions they emit are gathered. This is emblematic of the text’s whole, as this style settles as the novel’s narrative register. It can be, perhaps, more of an acquired taste for some – including myself – but it is something that I have learned to love in my time with the text.