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Hiding in Plain Sight: the Rhetorical Workings of Simone De Beauvoir's Feminist Language Emily Crawford University of South Carolina - Columbia

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Hiding in Plain Sight: the Rhetorical Workings of Simone De Beauvoir's Feminist Language Emily Crawford University of South Carolina - Columbia University of South Carolina Scholar Commons Theses and Dissertations 1-1-2013 Hiding In Plain Sight: the Rhetorical Workings of Simone De Beauvoir's Feminist Language Emily Crawford University of South Carolina - Columbia Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd Recommended Citation Crawford, E.(2013). Hiding In Plain Sight: the Rhetorical Workings of Simone De Beauvoir's Feminist Language. (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/2431 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you by Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT : THE RHETORICAL WORKINGS OF SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR ’S FEMINIST LANGUAGE by Emily Crawford Bachelor of Arts Mercer University, 2002 Masters of Arts University of South Carolina, 2005 _____________________________________ Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English College of Arts and Sciences University of South Carolina 2013 Accepted by: Erik Doxtader, Co-Director John Muckelbauer, Co-Director Katherine Adams, Committee Member Christy Friend, Committee Member Lacy Ford, Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies © Copyright by Emily Crawford, 2013 All Rights Reserved. ii To Emile. Thank you for being my companion. iii Acknowledgments My biggest supporter throughout the dissertation process has been my partner, Emile, who has been generous and encouraging beyond my expectations. The dissertation process has been long, and to say I appreciate his patience doesn’t do justice to his patience. Emile has supported me both financially, making it possible for me to write, pay tuition, and simply live; and creatively, reading chapter drafts, asking questions (and learning when not to ask questions!), and attending conference presentations. Emile gives me the most precious gift for a person immersed in a large, seemingly never-ending writing project: perspective. Whenever I felt I could not possibly keep writing or sustain interest in the project any longer, Emile encouraged me to keep going and helped me experience a fulfilling life. Thanks to my parents who early in life instilled the importance of education and who have continued to support me in my learning endeavors. I thank Lydia for her unbridled enthusiasm (one summer she traveled to the library with me almost every day and embarked on her own research project: a massive illustrated feminist history timeline she titled “You Go, Girls!”) and Louis for entertaining me with pirouettes, juggling, and jokes. I also thank Erik Doxtader for unflappably guiding my nascent ideas from prospectus to dissertation, for patiently directing my hunches into more fully developed arguments, reading and commenting upon numerous chapter drafts, and making my project a fuller, more interesting version of itself. I am iv appreciative to Christy Friend who helped keep my project rhetorically focused and offered invaluable advice on balancing work and family lives. My classes with John Muckelbauer helped me discover the rhetorical possibilities of Beauvoir as a dissertation project before I could and pushed my thinking into more interesting directions. I thank Kate Adams for serving as my outside reader and for testing my ideas against an interdisciplinary frame of women’s studies. Finally, I am grateful to both my friends and employers these past years for supporting me. Lisa Bailey has seen me through the ups and downs of dissertation writing and coached me along, meeting with me over coffee and tea and either reading my new writing, responding to my ideas, or talking me through my writer’s block. Mark Brantner and Brooke Rollins lead by example with their own dissertations and helped me by lending supportive calls, texts, and when they were in town, meals and drinks. Thanks to the University of South Carolina’s English Department, the Moore School of Business’s Center for Business Communication, and Tell Them! for allowing me to work and providing me the space to finish my research and writing. v Abstract Simone de Beauvoir’s 1952 English rendering of The Second Sex translated into instant U.S. feminist acceptance, but by 1981 Julia Kristeva’s call for “Women’s Time” coupled with the rise of poststructuralism in the academy essentially sounded the death knell for Beauvoir in the world of feminist language theories. Where the new French feminists explored experimental ecriture feminine , Beauvoir’s language appeared unsophisticated and outdated. In the past twenty years a handful of feminists have slowly and intermittently begun to reconsider Beauvoir’s language from a variety of post-poststructuralist perspectives. My dissertation adds to this growing scholarship by exploring the rhetorical workings of five key language problems in Beauvoir’s feminist texts. Instead of accepting what Beauvoir and feminists in her lineage say about her language, I derive her language assumptions from how her language works. First, I look at the contradictions in The Second Sex not as problems to be overcome but as opportunities for Beauvoir to explain her philosophy. If, as Beauvoir argues, woman is an ambiguous category not grounded in biology but in ever-changing existential situations, then the interpretative plurality of the text enacts the same process. Next, I explore Beauvoir’s use of masculine language in The Second Sex as a reiteration with possibilities for feminists. After that, I examine Beauvoir’s non-representational language and the possibilities it allows vi for variety of ambiguously ethical relations—both mutually and agonistically rendered. Then, I read “Merleau-Ponty and Pseudo-Sartreanism” from the vantage of longstanding stylistic debate in rhetoric and feminism over the merits of clear versus opaque language and what those stylistic choices mean in terms of social change. Finally, I argue that even though Privileges , the work to which Beauvoir first points readers to her feminist philosophy and politics, seems to work toward different ends than The Second Sex or The Ethics of Ambiguity , the place where most feminists begin to understand Beauvoir’s feminist philosophy and politics, these texts enact the very same critique of her “serious man” whose principle ethical problem is consistently applying abstract ethical principles in the face of changing situations. Ultimately, I argue that Beauvoir’s language, rhetorically conceived, imbues her feminism with an ambiguity that encourages an openness to the variety of feminist political and ethical possibilities. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION ……………………………………………………………………………….iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ………………………………………………...………………….iv ABSTRACT ……………………………………………………………...…………………vi 1. INTRODUCTION : A HESITANT BEGINNING …………………………..…………………1 2. A BOOK IS NOT BORN , BUT RATHER BECOMES : CONTRADICTION AS RHETORICAL POWER IN THE SECOND SEX ...……………………………………………………...13 2.1 CONTRADICTION IN BEAUVOIR STUDIES ………………………………………..19 2.2 THE QUESTION OF CONTRADICTION IN THE RHETORICAL TRADITION …………27 2.3 THE CONTRADICTION OF WOMAN AS CREATOR ……………………………….39 3. “VIVE LE POINT -VIRGULE !”: BEAUVOIR ’S TENDENCY TOWARDS COMPROMISE AND THE RELATIONAL ……………………...………………………………………………..59 3.1 WHAT IS MASCULINE LANGUAGE ?.................................................................65 3.2 “VIVE LE POINT -VIRGULE !” ………………………………………………………89 4. UNREADABLE RELATIONS : BEAUVOIR ON WHY FEMINISTS MUST NOT BURN SADE ………………………………………........................................................114 5. MORALITY AND STYLE : BEAUVOIR ’S DIFFICULTY THROUGH CLARITY ……………..145 5.1 STYLE AND SOCIAL CHANGE ….…………………………………………….…148 5.2 RENDERING CLARITY THROUGH OPACITY …………………………………….163 6. CONCLUSION : ON BEING FRUSTRATED WITH BEAUVOIR ……………………….….181 6.1 AMBIGUITY AS THE PLAINLY STATED ………………………………………….187 viii 6.2 AMBIGUITY AS THE TACITLY PERFORMED …………… …………………….196 6.3 CONCLUSION : A HESITANT ENDING …………………………………………..207 WORKS CITED…………………………………………………………………………214 ix Chapter 1: Introduction: A Hesitant Beginning Like Simone de Beauvoir in starting The Second Sex , I began my dissertation project with hesitation. As Beauvoir reflects, “I hesitated a long time before writing a book on woman. The subject is irritating, especially for women; and it is not new” ( Second 3). At our current point in feminism, some undoubtedly find The Second Sex “irritating” and “not new.” Haven’t we done all we can do with Beauvoir’s landmark feminist text? Aren’t our times firmly post-humanist, in stark contrast to the post-WWII context in which Beauvoir wrote? Perhaps. Yet, the more I read both about and by Beauvoir, the more I was captivated by my initial misjudgment of her feminism and her most well-known book. For one, Beauvoir positions The Second Sex not as launching a women’s liberation movement, but rather, as a post-feminist analysis of woman. “The free woman is just being born,” she tells us in her 1949 work (Second 751). As Penelope Deutscher points out, at the time when Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex , French women had been enfranchised five years earlier, and access to education and employment had been widened ( Philosophy 1). Particularly in her opening to The Second Sex , Beauvoir hints that woman, as a subject or issue to debate, had reached a point of cultural exhaustion. Feminism was practically over. “Enough ink has flowed over the quarrel about feminism,” she tells us, “it is 1 now almost
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