Two Junior Reviews on Beauvoir and Woolf

Editorial Note: This piece brings together two reading reviews originally written by students in the Junior group. They have been lightly edited and paired for publication, with the authors’ original arguments and voices preserved.

Simone de Beauvoir and Virginia Woolf approach the condition of women through very different forms of writing. Beauvoir turns to history and genealogy, asking how “woman” came to occupy the position of the Other and why women have struggled to constitute themselves as a collective subject. Woolf often proceeds through another route: fictionalized narrators, imagined institutions, symbolic scenes, and counterfactual lives.

The following two junior reviews approach these writers separately. The first reads Beauvoir alongside Judith Butler and asks how history produces gendered subjecthood and political agency. The second examines Woolf’s use of imaginative narrative, with Plato’s Symposium as a point of comparison, and asks what fiction can make visible that abstract argument alone cannot.

Read together, the two pieces are concerned with a related question: how can writing make structures that appear natural, inevitable, or invisible available for critical thought?

IBecoming “Woman”: Beauvoir, Butler, and the Possibility of a Collective “We”

A genealogical analysis explores how our ideas about identity develop within particular historical contexts instead of treating these categories as permanent, unchanging truths. In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir uses this historical approach to explain women’s long-established position as the “Other.” Under patriarchal systems, women’s identities are largely defined relative to men, who are treated as the default independent subjects.

Without a collective history written from their own perspective, women’s historical agency has often been obscured or insufficiently recognized. Beauvoir traces this unequal arrangement through social, economic, and cultural institutions that have developed over generations.

Judith Butler’s 1986 essay “Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex” complicates this framework.¹ Beauvoir treats biological sex as a material condition upon which gendered social existence is constructed. Butler questions whether “sex” itself can ever be treated as a neutral, pre-social category, since the ways bodies are classified and understood are also shaped by historical language and social norms.

Beauvoir’s historical analysis therefore identifies the structural obstacles that keep women from forming a united, self-determined “We,” while Butler raises a further question: if the category “woman” is itself historically produced, how stable can the basis of such a collective identity really be?

1 A History Written from Elsewhere

Beauvoir does not try to identify one single moment when women’s oppression began. Instead, she traces how social expectations, legal rules, economic arrangements, and cultural narratives gradually combined over centuries to situate women as the Other.

Her statement that women “have no past, no history, no religion of their own”² should not be understood to mean that women were literally absent from history. Rather, recorded history has overwhelmingly been produced from male perspectives. Men largely determined which events counted as historically significant, while women were frequently represented through their relationships to men—as wives, daughters, mothers, or partners—rather than as independent historical subjects.

One major strength of Beauvoir’s genealogical method is that it challenges the assumption that women’s subordinate social status is natural or inevitable. If the position of women changes across historical periods and is repeatedly reinforced through institutions and conventions, then that hierarchy is historically constituted rather than simply given by nature.

This leads to an important political problem. If women have shared a marginalized social position for so long, why have they found it so difficult to unite against it?

2 Why Is There No Unified “We”?

Beauvoir compares women with other oppressed groups, especially the proletariat, whose members may develop a shared class consciousness and organize collective resistance.

Women, however, occupy a different structural position.

First, women are dispersed throughout society. They have historically lived within individual households and family structures rather than in separate communities organized around a common female identity. Without sustained common institutions or spaces, it becomes more difficult to develop lasting solidarity.

Second, women are materially and socially situated within relations of dependence that can make identification with men advantageous. Security, economic status, family position, and social recognition may all be tied to male family members. Under these conditions, attachment to the interests of men is not simply a matter of women consciously “accepting” oppression. It is produced by the structure of their lives.

Third, reproduction does not itself create oppression, but patriarchal societies have repeatedly interpreted women’s reproductive capacities as justification for restricting them to domestic roles. Biological difference becomes translated into social hierarchy.

Together, these conditions help explain why women do not automatically constitute themselves as a unified political collective simply because they share forms of subordination. A common position does not necessarily produce common consciousness.

For Beauvoir, then, the difficulty of forming a “We” is historical and structural. Women are not merely individuals who have failed to recognize an obvious collective interest. The social organization of their lives has repeatedly made such collective identification difficult.

3 Butler’s Challenge

Butler’s critique begins with one of Beauvoir’s most famous formulations: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”³

Beauvoir’s formulation distinguishes the biological conditions associated with sex from the social process through which someone comes to occupy the position of “woman.” Gender is not simply an innate destiny contained in the body.

But Butler pushes this argument further.

For Butler, it is not enough to say that a biologically given sex later receives a socially constructed gender. The category of sex is also interpreted through historically produced norms. What counts as a stable, meaningful sexed identity is not independent of culture and language.

This is where performativity becomes important. Gender does not result from individuals consciously deciding to “perform” femininity or masculinity. Rather, repeated social acts and norms produce the appearance that a stable gender identity existed prior to those acts in the first place.

This complicates Beauvoir’s account of collective political consciousness.

Beauvoir’s analysis presupposes a materially situated category of women whose shared social conditions can provide a basis for collective political consciousness. Butler questions whether such a category can be established independently of the norms that produce gendered subjects themselves.

Experiences of gender are also shaped by class, race, culture, sexuality, and other social conditions. There may therefore be no single universal experience of womanhood capable of representing everyone included within the category “women.”

But Butler’s critique does not simply invalidate Beauvoir’s historical account of women as the Other.

Instead, it changes how we might understand that process.

The position of the Other is not merely imposed upon an already complete and self-evident category of female bodies. Gendered identities and their subordinate social meanings are produced together across history.

4 Two Accounts of Agency

The difference between Beauvoir and Butler also changes how political agency can be imagined.

Beauvoir draws attention to the historical and material conditions that make collective consciousness difficult and therefore treats collective awakening as politically significant. Liberation requires women to recognize and transform the structures that have positioned them as dependent Others.

Butler shifts attention toward the instability of those structures themselves. If gender identity is continually reproduced through norms and repeated acts, then agency may emerge when those norms are disrupted, reworked, or exposed as contingent.

These perspectives should not be reduced to the claim that Beauvoir believes women simply need to “become aware,” while Butler believes individuals simply need to behave differently. Both accounts are more structural than that.

Their disagreement concerns where the stability of gendered identity comes from and, therefore, how that stability might be challenged.

Beauvoir’s genealogy exposes the historical and material arrangements that have kept women from forming an autonomous “We.” Butler complicates the possibility of such a unified subject by questioning whether “women” can ever be treated as a category existing prior to the norms that constitute gender.

Read together, they reveal two dimensions of gendered subjecthood: the historical structures that position women socially, and the processes through which the identity “woman” itself becomes intelligible.

IIImagining Inequality: Woolf and the Philosophical Power of Fiction

Philosophical truths are often associated with explicit arguments and abstract reasoning. Fiction, myth, and imagined situations seem to work differently. Their events may never have happened, yet they can make an idea easier to understand, experience, and remember.

Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own repeatedly uses this imaginative method. Her fictionalized narrator, the invented space of Oxbridge, the contrast between meals at men’s and women’s colleges, and the counterfactual life of Judith Shakespeare allow her to present gender inequality not simply as a proposition but as something a reader can picture.

A useful comparison can be found in Plato’s Symposium.⁴ Aristophanes does not define love through an abstract proposition. He tells a myth in which human beings were once whole and were later divided, leaving each half searching for the other.

The devices are not identical. Aristophanes employs myth; Woolf uses fictionalized narration, symbolic contrasts, and counterfactual invention. Yet both show why imaginative writing can have philosophical force: it turns an abstract idea into an experience the reader can enter.

1 Making an Abstract Idea Visible

In Aristophanes’ speech, the idea of incompleteness becomes bodily.

Instead of simply saying that human beings desire companionship because they feel incomplete, the myth imagines bodies literally divided into halves. The image makes incompleteness visible and almost tactile. Readers can imagine what it means to have lost a part of oneself and to search for it again.

The myth therefore does not close the question of love with a definition. It offers an imaginative model that can be accepted, challenged, or compared with the other accounts of love in the Symposium. A philosophical question becomes something the reader can picture and emotionally inhabit rather than merely an abstract proposition.

This is one reason stories can be persuasive. They provide detail and structure. They give abstract concepts a shape.

But the same method is especially important in Woolf because her subject is not only an emotion such as love. It is institutional inequality.

2 Mary Beton and Oxbridge

A Room of One’s Own employs a fictional narrative framework through its first-person speaker. Mary Beton is not simply identical with Virginia Woolf herself; she functions as a constructed perspective through which the experience of a female intellectual can be explored.

She moves through the fictional university town of Oxbridge, a composite that evokes Oxford and Cambridge. Through her movement, inequality is revealed in food, money, buildings, libraries, education, and physical space.

This matters because inequality can sound abstract when described only as a social structure.

Woolf instead makes it material.

The contrasting meals at men’s and women’s colleges turn differences in resources into something bodily and ordinary. Questions about institutional inequality become questions about what one eats, where one can enter, what books one can access, and whether one has enough money and privacy to think.

The famous requirement of “five hundred a year and a room with a lock on the door”⁵ works in the same way. Money and private space are concrete, familiar things. Through them, Woolf shows that intellectual freedom is not produced by talent alone. It depends upon material conditions.

A personal anecdote might suggest that one individual woman happened to encounter disadvantages. Woolf’s constructed setting allows her to present those disadvantages as part of an institutional structure.

The fictional framework therefore does not make the argument less serious. It gives the argument a world in which its consequences become visible.

3 Judith Shakespeare and What History Cannot Record

The example becomes even more striking in Woolf’s invention of Judith Shakespeare.

Judith is imagined as Shakespeare’s equally gifted sister. She possesses creative ability, but she does not receive the same education, freedom, mobility, or opportunity to write.

Her importance lies precisely in the fact that she is invented.

History can record the writers whose work survives. It can tell us whose plays were performed, whose books were published, and whose names entered literary history. But it has much more difficulty recording unrealized possibility.

It cannot easily show us the writers whose talent never had the conditions required to become visible.

Judith Shakespeare gives that absence a human form.

Woolf’s point is not that this particular fictional woman literally existed and experienced every event described. The counterfactual situation allows the reader to ask what might happen when talent exists but the social conditions necessary for its development do not.

Historical absence can tell us that women were excluded from literary institutions. Fiction can make readers imagine the possibilities destroyed by that exclusion.

In this sense, imaginative writing can do something that a list of historical facts cannot.

It makes absence imaginable.

4 Why Not Simply State the Argument?

Woolf could simply have argued that female writers require economic independence, educational access, and private space.

But imaginative narrative changes how the reader encounters that claim.

When the argument appears through meals, libraries, rooms, and an invented sister of Shakespeare, the reader does not only receive a conclusion. The reader is asked to imagine the situations from which that conclusion emerges.

Narrative can therefore invite empathy and voluntary reflection. It can make philosophical and social questions feel less like statements imposed upon the reader and more like problems the reader has entered.

The imaginative example does not necessarily prove the argument, however.

That distinction matters.

A story may make a claim vivid without establishing that the claim is universally true. A fictional situation can reveal a structure without representing every person affected by that structure.

This becomes one of the limitations of Woolf’s method.

5 The Limits of Fictional Representation

Fiction and allegory can be ambiguous because readers approach them with different experiences and historical backgrounds.

Even an image as famous as “five hundred a year and a room with a lock on the door” may not be immediately understood by a reader living in another place or period. The problem Woolf describes may persist, but its form can change.

Fiction can also simplify complicated realities.

Woolf’s imagined examples expose important structures of gender inequality, but no single narrative can account for every woman’s experience. Historical realities differ by period, class, culture, and circumstance. Individual examples cannot become universal descriptions.

The same limitation appears in Aristophanes’ myth.

The image of human beings searching for their lost halves gives love a memorable structure, but actual relationships are far more complicated. Love may involve desire, respect, independence, conflict, care, compromise, or forms of attachment that the myth cannot contain.

The problem, then, is not simply that fictional narratives are “false.”

Their strength and their weakness come from the same source: they organize complexity into a particular image.

That image can illuminate one aspect of reality while leaving others outside the frame.

6 Fiction and Argument Together

Fictional narrative and philosophical argument are therefore not opposing modes of thought.

Narrative supplies images, experiences, and counterfactual situations through which abstract arguments become intelligible. Argument provides the conceptual structure through which those narratives can be interpreted and challenged.

In Plato, a myth turns incompleteness into a divided body.

In Woolf, a meal makes institutional inequality visible; a room turns intellectual independence into physical space; and Judith Shakespeare gives unrealized female possibility a name and a life.

These examples are persuasive not because imagination replaces evidence or reasoning. They are persuasive because they allow readers to understand what an abstract claim might mean within human experience.

The best use of narrative therefore does not ask the reader to choose emotion over reason.

It allows the two to work together.

IIIAfterword: Two Ways of Making the Invisible Visible

Beauvoir and Woolf do not use the same method.

Beauvoir’s genealogy asks how a social category becomes historically constituted. Her analysis makes visible the institutions, dependencies, and inherited narratives that have positioned women as the Other. Butler’s critique then asks whether the category on which that history depends is itself more unstable than Beauvoir sometimes appears to assume.

Woolf works through a different form. Rather than tracing a genealogy, she repeatedly gives structures a scene: a meal, a library, a room, an imagined sister.

Yet both approaches resist treating the condition of women as self-evident or natural.

Beauvoir asks us to see a history where hierarchy once looked inevitable.

Woolf asks us to see a structure where inequality might otherwise remain abstract.

One makes the historical construction of gender available for analysis; the other makes its lived consequences available to imagination.

For two young readers approaching these texts today, perhaps this is part of what continues to make both writers compelling. They do not simply tell us what to think about women’s lives. They give us different methods for asking how a social reality came to appear natural—and how writing might make it visible again.

End of essay · NOUS Review