Horse

In Simone de Beauvoir’s analysis, the Horse is more than a passing comparison: horses and a mare become tests through which male characters seek to confirm their power while avoiding the risks of equality with other men. The animal’s recurring place in that argument reveals how control is mistaken for strength, and how the wish to master a living being can narrow the possibility of recognizing another as a subject.

The animal as a safer test of strength

De Beauvoir describes an arrogance that wants to express itself without accepting the uncertainty of genuine contest. A man testing his strength against other men would meet rivals who could answer back, impose unpredictable rankings, and deliver an independent verdict. A Horse, by contrast, allows him to remain his own judge. The animal becomes a safer opponent precisely because the comparison is organized around the man’s sense of mastery rather than mutual recognition.

That argument extends to women whom a man chooses on the same terms: he can imagine himself alone in the encounter, without an equal who might challenge his judgment. The Horse is therefore part of a larger comparison between relationships shaped by reciprocal risk and relationships arranged to protect one person’s pride. Its role is not to establish that animals and women are interchangeable, but to expose the logic by which a man seeks a compliant counterpart rather than an equal.

Costals and the ideal of compliance

In discussing Costals, De Beauvoir examines his preference for a woman he imagines as childlike rather than equal. She argues that this claim does not explain the preference so much as disguise a refusal of equality: the other man, who could genuinely contest him, is frightening, while a carefully chosen woman can be made to seem less threatening. The comparison with a Horse helps disclose this protected form of arrogance.

A mare from Costals’s past sharpens the point. He remembers her as so proud and delicate that, while he rode her, she would not relieve herself. De Beauvoir reads his recollection as a wish to see the animal as a domesticated creature whose autonomy has been suppressed—even in an ordinary bodily function. His irritation at women’s bodily realities belongs to the same idealizing pattern: he would prefer to imagine himself as a pure spirit, forgetting that he too has a body. The episode makes the Horse a measure of the impossible standard Costals imposes, not evidence that the mare possesses no independent life.

Gerald and the mare

The Horse returns in De Beauvoir’s account of Gerald, whom she characterizes as proud, egotistical, cerebral, and determined to master life. Gerald’s treatment of a spirited mare brings that disposition into action: he holds her against a fence as a train passes, seeking the satisfaction of mastering her. De Beauvoir presents the episode as an instance of domination that debases the being subjected to it while giving Gerald an intoxicating sense of power.

The mare’s resistance matters to the analysis. Gerald’s display depends on encountering a living creature whose spiritedness he can try to overcome; mastery is not proof of a genuine meeting between equals, but an assertion that turns the other into an object of his will. De Beauvoir’s criticism is therefore directed both at the harm implicit in the attempt to dominate and at the self-deception behind it: power over a reduced, passive other does not amount to the possession of a meaningful independent counterpart.

Animal life and the gendered myth of vitality

De Beauvoir also places horses within D. H. Lawrence’s wider imaginative division between animal force and human gender. Lawrence’s male animals embody the unsettling mystery and vigor of Life; women are described as being subordinated to their spell. Among the examples, one woman is affected by a fox, another is taken with a stallion, and Gudrun feverishly challenges a herd of young oxen before being overwhelmed by the rebellious vigor of a rabbit. The Horse thus belongs to a pattern in which animal vitality is made to exert a powerful attraction over women.

This pattern accompanies a hierarchy of activity. In De Beauvoir’s account, Lawrence associates man with the aggressive drive of the phallic stream, the carrying forward of life, the pursuit of goals, and transcendence; woman, absorbed in sentiment, is assigned interiority and immanence. The animals help give this imagined cosmic hierarchy force, but they do not escape its human framing: their vitality is interpreted as a source of male power and female subordination. Read alongside Costals’s compliant mare and Gerald’s contested one, the Horse’s recurring significance lies in the contrast between animal life as something to be mastered and animal life as a force that resists reduction to an instrument of human pride.