Adam

Adam is treated as a figure in a creation myth whose significance lies in the gender hierarchy it encodes. In Simone de Beauvoir’s reading, the account that Eve was made from Adam’s flank turns woman’s origin into dependence: she is not created independently, but as a companion assigned to him. The myth thus presents woman as the inessential Other, while man occupies the position of the essential subject.

Creation and Dependence

The creation story makes Eve’s relation to Adam the basis of her identity. She is neither formed at the same time as man nor fashioned from separate material; she is drawn from the first male’s body. Her creation is therefore represented as neither autonomous nor directed toward her own ends. God gives her to Adam to relieve his loneliness, and the story makes her spouse both her origin and her purpose.

This arrangement gives Adam a central place in the myth’s order of creation. Eve appears as his complement, but only in an inessential role: her existence is defined in relation to his. De Beauvoir argues that this account presents woman as a consciousness apparently made submissive by nature, a figure whom man can hope to possess while imagining that her submission confirms his own freedom.

Adam and the Construction of Woman as Other

Adam’s mythic priority illustrates a broader structure in which man establishes himself as the essential One and woman is defined as the Other. De Beauvoir distinguishes this arrangement from ordinary reciprocal relations between groups: women do not simply begin as an independent group later subordinated by a single historical event. Their position is represented as timeless and natural, in part because the sexes remain bound together within the couple. The creation story gives that unequal relation an origin in the first man and woman.

The myth also helps explain why the subordination can seem like a fortunate arrangement rather than an imposed one. Woman is presented as close to nature yet endowed with consciousness, and as a being through whom man hopes to achieve a sense of fullness. In this account, Adam’s relation to Eve is not represented as a reciprocal encounter between two independent subjects; Eve’s place is made intelligible through what she offers him.

The Myth’s Wider Meaning

De Beauvoir uses the story of Adam and Eve as one example of creation myths that express a belief valuable to men: woman is not an independent beginning but an appendage to male existence. The legend’s influence, carried through Christianity across Western civilization, gives this interpretation exceptional durability. A cultural arrangement is made to look like a fact of creation.

The myth’s significance is not that Adam has a developed personal history or a sequence of actions. He functions as the male origin around which Eve’s story is organized, making visible the larger argument that women’s social position is produced and maintained through ideas that naturalize dependence. De Beauvoir’s existentialist framework opposes that apparent destiny: woman, like every human being, is an autonomous freedom, but is forced to assume herself as Other when men treat her as an object and confine her to immanence.