women as themselves

“To identify Woman with Altruism is to guarantee to man absolute rights in her devotion, it is to impose on women a categorical imperative,” says Simone de Beauvoir, making her point clear about the idea that it is the “paternalism” that had deprived of woman of her “transcendence” of which she was, as it was with man, with her at once. It was that as woman was stolen of her own meaning of purpose or direction, out of man’s selfishness, her “transcendence” eventually disappeared and certain claims of man through which she seemed inactive and subordinate was regarded as innate in her.

In her story, “The New Dress,” Woolf describes a woman named “Mable” whose emotions go through a course of great struggle in which she tries to fight her dilemma as a woman in the society where she’s in. Mable’s conception of herself is very much fragile and largely influenced by how she would fit into the society where man’s eyes and comments seem to be the only and absolute measure of all. She frequently tries to feel assure of herself by asking men, though indirectly, of their opinions on how she looked. As their returning words fail to meet her expectation, her world is as though shattered, as in “I feel like some dowdy, decrepit…she said, making Robert Haydon stop just to hear say that…,” “…she saw the truth. THIS was true…”

What Woolf tries to show in her story and the notion of de Beauvoir regarding men’s superiority over women seem to move into the same direction in which they both try to depict how women’s self worth largely depended on the way men had constructed the society.

As the thought of “delicious moments” came to Mabel, in which she felt truly happy by being by herself beside the ocean, experiencing the solitude in which she was the only and absolute being, Woolf seems to try to offer a way in which a woman is to gain what was lost to her. That is, for women to have a time and space where she can appreciate and enjoy herself. Though it may vary in ways in which a woman is to be truly happy, it always comes down to a point where it is herself that is the center of all the values that are to be arranged. Through the forms of literature, women are sometimes portrayed as lesser beings than men, but writings such as that of Woolf try to imply, that it is in the hands of women, to get rid of the ways that men had created, in search of women’s strength and freedom in their truest form.