The Second Sex (SparkNotes Literature Guide)

By SparkNotes

The Second Sex (SparkNotes Literature Guide) by Simone de Beauvoir
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• Language: English
• Publisher: SparkNotes
• Release date: Aug 12, 2014
• ISBN: 9781411477476

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Cover of SparkNotes Guide to The Second Sex by SparkNotes Editors

The Second Sex

Simone de Beauvoir

© 2003, 2007 by Spark Publishing

This Spark Publishing edition 2014 by SparkNotes LLC, an Affiliate of Barnes & Noble

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ISBN-13: 978-1-4114-7747-6

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Contents

Context

Plot Overview

Historical Figures List

Themes, Motifs, and Symbols

Key Facts

Glossary of Terms

Context

Simone Lucie-Ernestine-Marie-Bertrand de Beauvoir was born into an eminent Parisian family in

1908

. Her father, who had ties—or at least pretensions—to the nobility, had ceded his aspirations in the theater for a respectable law career. He was an art-loving atheist who encouraged de Beauvoir’s love of literature, but he was also extremely conservative on social issues. Her mother was from a wealthy bourgeois family, and was a devout Catholic who tried to raise her daughters, Simone and her younger sister, Helene (Poupette), in the same tradition.

Though pious as a child, de Beauvoir repudiated religion at the age of fourteen, and this became a recurring source of tension between her and her mother. Her renunciation of God also brought marked loneliness, a realization of the deep solitude of life. Throughout her youth, de Beauvoir’s closest companions were Helene and a classmate, Elizabeth Mabille (Zaza). In

1929

, Zaza died, officially of meningitis, though de Beauvoir always believed that Zaza’s struggle to resist an arranged marriage had been the real cause of her death. Zaza’s friendship and her untimely death haunted de Beauvoir for the rest of her life, and many of de Beauvoir’s later critiques of rigid bourgeois constraints on women were rooted in her anger over