Germaine de Staël

Germaine de Staël appears in The Second Sex as a writer and performer who could convert self-presentation into public authority. Her example complicates the book’s account of narcissism: theatrical display can be a substitute for action, yet de Staël’s literary work and mastery of an audience distinguish her from women whose ambition remains bound to being admired or identified with a powerful man.

Public Performance and the Audience

The discussion places de Staël among women who made an event of their own appearance before others. In Corinne, she recounts charming Italian crowds by reciting poems to harp accompaniment. At Coppet, she enjoyed declaiming tragic roles; when playing Phaedra, she addressed ardent declarations to young lovers dressed as Hippolytus. The performances joined literary skill to deliberate self-staging, making the audience’s response part of the scene.

This practice belongs to a broader account of display: dressing and conversation can satisfy the desire to be seen, while more ambitious narcissism seeks a varied, public spectacle. De Staël’s example, however, does not end at the pleasure of applause. She is also named among the women who built a body of work rather than remaining exclusively absorbed in self-worship. The contrast marks the difference between attracting attention and making something that can outlast the occasion of performance.

Artistic Work and the Limits of Self-Worship

The book measures artistic ambition against the demands of sustained work. Painting, sculpture, and literature require training and solitary effort; some women abandon them without a strong desire to create, while others continue only in the manner of amateurs. Marie Bashkirtseff’s frustrated confession that she deceives herself at the easel illustrates how the hunger for glory can fail to become love of the work itself.

De Staël is set against that failure, alongside Anna de Noailles. Their achievement is attributed to not being exclusively occupied with self-worship, though the account also warns that self-indulgence can compromise a woman writer’s sincerity and narrow her work. De Staël’s significance, then, is not that she escaped the pressures attached to feminine display, but that she could make public presence and authorship coexist without reducing creation to self-advertisement.

Influence, Agency, and Gendered Defiance

The book distinguishes women who pursue values through projects of their own from those who try to attach ready-made prestige to themselves through influential men. Its example of Mabel Dodge describes a wish to enlist D. H. Lawrence’s will and creative imagination as instruments, achieving a vicarious sense of activity by persuading others to carry out the work. De Staël represents a different possibility: she appears not only as a source of inspiration or an associate of power, but as an author with a body of work.

Her social effectiveness also rests on a combination of strategies. The discussion says she mixed efforts to please with a more defiant manner, and that the combination made her almost always irresistible. Defiance is otherwise presented as a tactic that can irritate men when it takes the form of talking rather than listening, displaying cleverness, or contradicting an interlocutor. De Staël’s example therefore exposes a gendered bind: women are pressed to perform pleasing femininity, but may also claim the conversational and intellectual authority conventionally treated as masculine. Her success suggests that these modes need not be mutually exclusive, even as the surrounding argument insists that women’s freedom remains constrained by the terms on which men respond to them.