After Transcending“the Second”: An Ecocritical Reading of Simone de Beauvoir
In her monograph The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir analyzes and develops the interpretative framework in which women are taken as “the other” and which is to be one of the theoretical sources of ecofeminism: the patriarchal system distinguish the self and other so that the transcending subjectivity frees itself from the confinement of body/nature. Birth and maternity were classified as the “second”, women together with nature have been the object to be transcended, excluded and dominated by patriarchal discourse.Yet de Beauvoir fails to go beyond dualism in that her way of redemption demands that women overcome their naturality. This transcendence does not go beyond the Western concept of linear progress which will help women's liberation at least. There are also buds of harmonious thoughts in de Beauvoir's writing, revealing the path of a real transcendence: the elimination of dualistic domination and the final men/women and man/nature reconciliation.
