Arthur Rimbaud

Arthur Rimbaud is invoked by Simone de Beauvoir as a poet whose prophecy imagines women’s liberation opening a new field of creation. His place in the discussion is not biographical: he serves as a counterpoint to claims that women lack creative genius, because their opportunities to make work have been systematically denied.## Rimbaud as a Prophetic Witness De Beauvoir cites Rimbaud’s vision of a future after “woman’s infinite servitude is broken,” when women live for themselves and become poets. In that imagined transformation, men cease to be the sole bearers of freedom: woman, too, will “find the unknown,” discovering ideas and experiences that may appear strange, unfathomable, repugnant, or delicious. The prophecy gives poetic form to a political claim: creative capacity is not the property of one sex, and women’s entry into authorship could enlarge what humanity is able to know.

The quotation does not establish that women’s future art must be fundamentally unlike men’s. De Beauvoir immediately qualifies that possibility: women will liberate themselves partly by assimilating the intellectual world from which they have been excluded, and no confident prediction can determine how singular their contributions will remain. What is certain, in her account, is that women’s suppressed possibilities have been lost not only to women but to humanity as a whole.## Creativity and Historical Exclusion Rimbaud’s prophecy answers the claim that women have produced no comparable geniuses by shifting attention from the record of achievement to the conditions that made achievement possible. De Beauvoir rejects history as proof of an eternal female incapacity: the historical past records a situation, and that situation is visibly changing. Women could scarcely have been expected to accomplish works of genius when they were refused the opportunity to accomplish even ordinary works.

To clarify the injustice in that inference, she compares it with reproaches directed at other excluded groups. Old Europe looked down on Americans it called barbarian for having no artists or writers; Jefferson’s answer, as De Beauvoir renders its force, is to live before being asked to justify one’s existence. Black people answer racists who demand a Whitman or Melville, while the French proletariat cannot be expected to produce a Racine or Mallarmé under conditions that deny it access to cultural achievement. These comparisons make absence evidence not of innate deficiency but of withheld possibility.

The argument also confronts claims that women’s alleged neuroticism rules out valuable creation. De Beauvoir notes the contradiction in the charge: the same critics often describe genius itself as a neurosis, and Proust demonstrates that psychophysiological imbalance does not entail impotence or mediocrity. Against theories of a fixed creative instinct or an “eternal feminine,” Rimbaud’s future-facing image helps insist that a free woman is only beginning to emerge; her unrealized work cannot be judged by the restrictions that preceded it.## The Price of “Feminine Charm” Elsewhere in the same argument, De Beauvoir tests the defense of women’s subordination that presents inequality as the necessary price of feminine charm. The imagined woman is assembled from historical and exotic images: Thebes, Minos, Chichén Itzá, an African-forest totem, a helicopter, a bird. She seems to carry the remotest past into modern life, until, beneath her painted hair, rustling leaves become thought and words escape from her breasts. The sequence makes the spectacle of femininity dazzling, but also exposes the distance between an object admired by men and a person whose words can be heard as her own.

Once grasped, the supposed miracle dissolves: wife and mistress speak with their mouths, and their words and bodies have no value beyond what they actually are. De Beauvoir grants that feminine charm, like flowers, lace, and other rare beauties, can be appreciated. But aesthetic pleasure cannot justify preserving a social situation that damages both sexes. If such treasures are purchased with blood or misery, they must be relinquished. Rimbaud’s prophecy points toward that relinquishment’s creative consequence: women freed from servitude would no longer exist chiefly as an enchanting spectacle, but could make work and take their own chances in the shared human world.