HL4010 Feminist Studies. Beauvoir’s Binding Binaries: Women and Alterity in Alien

July 11, 2024 • 11 min read • Essay

In her 1944 book The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir defines gender as a duality. The man is an absolute being. By alterity, the woman is defined as an Other. She is an “inessential” (7) Object, as she exists only in relation to the man who is the neutral state of being., complete state of human. Women “have neither religion nor poetry that belongs to them alone” (213): women are represented in mythology not by themselves, but by male writers. No form of art “belongs to them alone” as there is no form of art that is exclusively created by women, in the perspective of women. Hence, women are represented in fiction from a purely male perspective, where they are depicted in secondary and tertiary roles of wife, daughter and mother while the male characters are the main Subjects..

In the Iliad, Helen of Argos is described as “a trophy” (Homer 104) and is the catalyst of the Trojan War as Theseus carries her off to Troy. The description of Helen as “trophy” is apt: the men of the Iliad treat her as a literal inanimate Object to be possessed. She lacks any form of agency as the men of the story, the Subjects, fight over possession of her. In the Chinese myth Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a concubine Diaochan plays the role of seductress. She uses her “uneven beauty” to seduce the warlords Lu Bu and Dong Zhuo, inciting them to fight each other over her possession. Once again, the female mythological character fulfils the role of a beautiful and prized “trophy” to be fought over by men. While Diaochan displays more agency than Helen in her incitement of the men, Diaochan is still only remembered in relation to the famous generals Lu bu and Dong Zhuo. She plays the role of an Object while the men who kill each other to possess her are the Subjects. There are countless more examples in world mythology where women are represented by a male perspective of the world. Women in myth exist as “men’s dreams” (B). Figures like Diaochan and Helen are “exclusively defined in her relation to man”. Their role in myth is to provide motivation for men, the main actors and Subjects. Both Diaochan and Helen are “designated as ‘sex’ the flesh, its delights and its dangers (213)”. They are written to be objects of desire, sexual trophies for men to fight over. These mythological female figures are representations of male writers’ view of women, hence the writings are from a male perspective of women as the eternal Object. Beauvoir further posits that “for woman it is man who is sexed and carnal is a truth that has never been proclaimed because there is no one to proclaim it” (213). Myths exclusively portray women as objects of desire, failing to acknowledge that from the female perspective, men may be objects of desire as well. This oversight in mythology goes to show that “he representation of the world” (213) in myth is of a male perspective, where women are Objects. Stories in fiction have the “unique power to create an internally consistent reality indistinguishable from the author’s perspective” (Selinger 6). Centuries of predominantly male writing “where the repression of woman has been perpetuated, over and over” (Cixous 879), ensure that only the Woman is sexed and represented as an object of desire. These stories, while fictional, enforce “male sovereignty” (7) by presenting the world from a male point of view. In these stories, men are represented as Subjects and actors, while women are forced to the sidelines, strengthening the “Othering” of women.

Hence, Beauvoir’s argument is as such: By defining themself as the Subject, men have “subordinated the weaker to the stronger” (Beauvoir 8). Women are defined in relation to men, hence they are “weaker” Objects. This alterity creates a convenient relationship between genders, where women are slaves to their male masters. Women’s status as the Other forces them into a “state of dependence” (215) where they must rely on their male counterparts economically and even in representation. At the time of The Second Sex’s writing, however, women were already in the process of breaking free of this master-slave relationship.

Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex during a period of social upheaval in 1944, where women were beginning to gain more rights after the Second World War. France had granted equal suffrage to women, and there were an increasing number of female workers in civilian jobs. In the United States, female workers in the population shot up from 27% to 37% after the war as women were encouraged to work the jobs of deployed men. By the end of the war, one in four women worked outside their homes. The increase in female workers comes with a shift away from the domestic sphere. Women shifted from traditional roles of homemaker to traditionally male jobs like working in factories and assembly lines. They “asser themselves as human beings” (217) by earning their own living wages. Women became less economically dependent on their male masters moving into the public sphere and becoming Subjects in their own right.

In this essay, I will argue that fictional depictions of women since the writing of The Second Sex have emancipated women from their traditional depictions of domestic roles. Modern fiction does so by granting fictional female characters agency and situating them as the main characters of their narratives. Ridley Scott’s Alien subverts the traditional role of female fictional characters by creating a strong female heroine Subject around which the film revolves. Marguerite Duras’ writes her novel The Lover from a female perspective, hence creating a representation of women in a fictional world by a woman, where the female protagonist is a Subject and her male Lover is the Object.

Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) attempts to subvert the master-slave relationship of man and woman. At the film’s onset, we are presented with the crew of the Nostromo, led by the charismatic male figure of Captain Dallas. The main character of the film, Ripley, takes on a passive role at the beginning of the film. The viewer is led to believe that Dallas is the main character of the film. Similar to the myths that Beauvoir mentions, the male forms the center of the story around which the action happens, whereas the female Ripley is a mere subordinate. The relationship between Dallas and Ripley is that of master and slave as Beauvoir describes, as Ripley is defined as “Dallas’ subordinate” in relation to him. However, the gender relationship is overturned with the arrival of the Alien. James H. Kavanaugh writes:

When the alien kills Dallas, whose image inflects a deep cultural seme-nice, strong, attractive male; must be hero, can’t be killed-the viewer registers definite subliminal surprise in realizing that the woman actually will be (and has been all along) the strong center of the film, the ego through which the story will be resolved and our identification made. (Kavanaugh 5)

As Dallas is killed, the focus of the narrative shifts to the female Ripley. She is freed from the master-slave relationship and Dallas’ authority by the Alien. The Alien does so by targeting men, killing them via bodily invasion and penetration. Scott induces horror with “the image of the phallus born from the stomach of the man with as many unconscious fears as possible, so as to produce more dramatically the horror effect” (6). The phallic Alien symbolises the unconscious fear by Man that he will be the one who is raped and impregnated instead of the Woman. And the Alien does exactly this. It exists as a third party apart from the Subject and the Other. It is physically stronger than the Man, the Alien overturns the existing social order among the crew in the ship. Instead of the woman being impregnated and dominated, now it is the man. The Alien uses its “vicious phallic power” to rape the men of the film, establishing its dominance over them.

The death of the traditional male “must be hero” shifts Ripley from the role of Object, defined in relation to Dallas, to that of the Subject who has agency and power. Ripley then assumes the role of the “strong woman” or “female hero”. However, for Ripley to transform into the hero of the story, she must first divorce herself from her femininity and assume masculine characteristics. Maureen Murdock writes in “The Heroine’s Journey”:

Male norms have become the social standard for leadership, personal autonomy, and success in this culture The girl observes this as she grows up and wants to identify with the glamour, prestige, authority, independence, and money controlled by men. (Murdock 203)

In Alien, Dallas embodies the archetype of the male leader, the Subject of the story. He commands respect from the crew and is a symbol of leadership and “personal autonomy” for the crew as he decisively leads the crew to trap the Alien in the airlock. It can be seen that Dallas is the leader, decision maker and Subject, while Ripley is a mere subordinate who follows his orders. For Ripley to assume the role of leader and Subject among the crew, she must first divorce herself from the feminine. As long as Ripley is “haunted by the feeling of own femininity” (Beauvoir 5), she is doomed to be a passive Object. To be feminine is to be a passive Object, docile and obedient like the female figures of myth. Hence, Ripley adopts Dallas’ leadership style, gaining “authority” and “independence”. She orders the male Parker and Lambert as Dallas once did. She is the only person capable of fighting the “phallic power” of the Alien. Consequently, Ripley is the only survivor of the crew and hence the sole Subject which the audience identifies this. Through Ripley’s transformation into female heroine, Scott subverts the master-slave relationship: now Ripley is the Subject and the men are Objects defined in relation to her.

However, while Scott has succeeded in creating the female heroine who is Subject of the story, Alien still suffers the problem of the male gaze, where the fictional woman is made the sexual object of the male viewer. In “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema”, Laurey Mulvey writes:

The image of woman as (passive) raw material for the (active) gaze of man takes the argument a step further into the structure of representation, adding a further layer demanded by the ideology of the patriarchal order as it is worked out in its favourite cinematic form — illusionistic narrative film. (Mulvey 815)

In the final scene of the film, Ripley undresses in front of the camera down to her underwear. Scott shoots the scene in medium medium shot with one long continuous take. Scott’s lack of editing in this scene creates a voyeuristic effect. The act of undressing is a private act, yet he guides the audience’s eyes towards Ripley’s near-naked body. He frames Ripley as a “passive raw material”, an Object whose purpose is to be looked upon by the audience in the cinema. She framed by the camera in a sexual light, as “erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium”. Hence, while Scott designates Ripley to be the Subject of a fictional narrative, this subversion is undercut by the fact that she is a passive Object gazed upon by the audience for their scopophilic pleasure. Like in Beauvoir’s mythological examples, Alien fails to represent the Woman as anything other than Object as the story is written and filmed from a male perspective. Woman continues to be “Othered” as the film’s male gaze enforces the role of Woman as the Object of desire to be looked upon by the male Subject. Scott ensures the dominance of the patriarchy by representing the fictional Woman as an Object from the male perspective.

Marguerite Duras subverts the Othering of woman and achieves female representation through her ecriture feminine novel The Lover. The novel follows a young French girl living in Saigon who engages in an illicit sexual affair with a Chinese man. As Cixous proclaimed, “Woman must write her self” (Cixous 875). Duras writes from a woman’s perspective. Unlike Alien and traditional male writing, the Woman is depicted and represented in fiction by her own counterpart. The protagonist in the novel is female, hence she is not defined in relation to man but stands as a Subject in her own right. Cixous writes:

“By writing her self, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display — the ailing or dead figure the cause and location of inhibitions. Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time.” (Cixous 880)

Woman’s body is “confiscated” from her by men, as they have appropriated it as the vessel of sexual desire and scopophilic pleasure in fiction. The body becomes “uncanny” as it is described from the perspectives of men, hence rendering it unnatural to the Woman, the true owner of the body. The body is “censored” as Woman is barred from showing her sexuality. Woman cannot lay bare their sexuality and proclaim that it is Man to her that is “sexed and carnal”. Duras represents women in her unabashed description of female desire:

“The skin is sumptuously soft. The body. The body is thin, lacking in strength, in muscle, he may have been illl, may be convalescent, he’s hairless, nothing masculine about him but his sex, he’s weak, probably a helpless prey to insult, vulnerable. She doesn’t look him in the face. Doesn’t look at him at all. She touches him. Touches the softness of his sex, his skin, carresses his goldenness, the strange novelty. He moans, weeps. In dreadful love.” (Duras 36)

Duras’ use of the word “sumptuously” depicts the idea of female desire. From the Girl’s perspective, the Lover is an object of sexual desire. The act of writing this from a female gaze cements the Girl as a Subject and the Lover as an Object. She describes the Lover’s physique as “helpless” and “weak” and that he has “nothing masculine about him but his sex”. In doing so Duras establishes that the supposed domination that the Lover should have over the Girl is only a result of the patriarchal culture. He is physically malnourished and feeble. The only superiority he has over the Girl is his phallus which indicates that he is a Man. Duras also establishes female agency by having the Girl initiate sex by touching “the softness of his sex ”. The Girl holds the power in the relationship as she is the one to initiate contact with the frail and feeble Lover. Duras further establishes the female perspective by describing the Lover’s phallus as “the strange novelty”. For the Woman, it is the Man’s phallus who is strange and Other. The Girl who describes the Lover’s phallus is the Subject, while the Lover is the Object. The Lover is further emasculated at the end of the novel when the Girl is about to leave him. He “had no strength, no potency” (Duras 90). Knowing that the object of his desire may no longer fulfil his need, he loses the power to use his phallus. The master in the relationship “holds the power to satisfy this need and does not mediate it; the slave, on the other hand, out of dependence, hope, or fear, internalizes his need for the master” (Beauvoir 33). Duras depicts the Girl as the master, as she possesses the autonomy to deny or grant the Lover access to her body. The Lover, out of his lust for the Girl’s body, hence becomes the slave.

In conclusion, fiction has changed significantly since Beauvoir’s time such that women can become protagonists and Subjects of their own story. In Alien, Scott creates a strong female character with agency, albeit with masculine traits. In The Lover, Duras writes a female character and allows the reader to see the world through her eyes. With women writing stories, fiction is no longer predominantly male, where the world is represented through the perspective of men alone.

2699 words

Works Cited

Duras, Marguerite. The Lover. Editions de Minuit. 1984

Scott, Ridley. Alien. Twentieth Century Fox, 1979.

Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Vintage Classics, 2015.

Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Screen, Volume 16, Issue 3, Autumn 1975, Pages 6–18, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/16.3.6

Kavanaugh, James H. “‘Son of a Bitch’: Feminism, Humanism, and Science in ‘Alien.’” October, vol. 13, The MIT Press, 1980, pp. 91–100, https://doi.org/10.2307/3397704.

Cixous, Hélèn. The Laugh of the Medusa. _Signs_ 1 (4):875-893, 1976

Selinger, Angelica. Portraying Women as Beauvoir’s “Other”: Fictional Representation of Women and Gender. American University. 2014

Murdock, Maureen. The Heroine’s Journey. Boston, Mass: Shambhala, 1990. Print.

Published 17th September 2021