Simone De Beauvoir: Transgressing Immanence, Motherhood And Social Constructs

Abstract

The thesis of the present paper is to investigate the reasons why it may become difficult for the 20 th century Western woman to avoid feeling trapped within her status of motherhood and to transcend her immanence as a woman. Simone de Beauvoir argues in The Second Sex, Part V, chapter XVII (“The Mother”) that the modern Western woman proves unable to transgress her own immanence. What are the three factors that stand in the way of the woman's existential telos? What is the natural consequence of her Snow White-type of imprisonment? Will she impose the same pattern of panoptic surveillance upon her own offspring?