Attaining subjectivity as the woman destroyed.

• Main Author: Chow, Ming Yan.
• Other Authors: School of Humanities and Social Sciences
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2010
• Subjects: DRNTU::Humanities::Literature::English
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/35254
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This paper discusses the woman's difficulty in writing about herself through a language that is phallocentric. As Simone de Beauvoir highlights in The Second Sex, "as long as she still has to become a human being, she cannot be a creator", woman's passivity is similarly reflected in her writing through her struggle with words. In an attempt to construct her own subjectivity, the woman has to work within her circumstances and make herself heard. As a "woman" and The Other, she is destroyed both linguistically and socially. The state of destruction is a 'situation' that she faces as a woman. With the hope of liberating herself through self-articulation, the woman turns to writing as a form of 'rehabilitation'. Through the use of three different narrative styles in The Woman Destroyed, Beauvoir explores the themes of time, body and language as important aspects of women's writing. Although the three narrators in Beauvoir's short stores are presented as failed heroines, there is still a feminist conclusion to be drawn - the woman must faithfully invoke her own situation through her own destruction in order to attain self-actualisation.