Lion

The lion in The Second Sex is a recurring image of masculine power: it makes male dominance appear grand and natural, while revealing that this grandeur depends on treating women as prey. Simone de Beauvoir uses the image to expose the insecurity beneath the performance of sovereignty, from a critique of Henry de Montherlant’s self-fashioning to the intimate gestures and fantasies of Costals.

The Lion and the Performance of Sovereignty

In her discussion of Montherlant, Beauvoir contrasts the figure of the lion with the supposedly weak feminine “mosquito.” The contrast seems to promise effortless mastery, but Beauvoir reverses its meaning: the man who believes himself sovereign only because he avoids any genuine burden has chosen ease, not strength. Montherlant’s self-awarded crowns and imagined grandeur cannot withstand an encounter with reality. His lion-like power is therefore defensive; he fears being tested by the very women he represents as inferior.

The animal image participates in a wider criticism of Montherlant’s idea of femininity. Beauvoir argues that he does not abolish the myth of an eternal feminine essence but turns it into a monstrosity, defining women through an alleged lack of virility. His treatment of Andrée Hacquebaut illustrates the consequence: her efforts to think and act as an autonomous person are represented as making her ridiculous. Against this framework, the lion’s apparent authority does not establish an actual superiority. It helps preserve a hierarchy in which a man can feel strong without recognizing a woman as an independent subject.

Costals’s Predatory Gestures

The lion becomes more directly predatory in Beauvoir’s account of Costals and Solange. At Solange’s first touch, Costals places a hand on her thigh and then at the center of her body; the narration compares his gesture to a lion spreading its paw over its prey. Beauvoir identifies this as the “primitive gesture of the Lord,” a way of staging possession as masculine grandeur. The comparison makes a familiar gesture legible as an assertion of power rather than an expression of mutual recognition.

The pattern continues in Costals’s imagined approach to women. Beauvoir describes him as sniffing a woman’s face like a lion pausing over its prey, and presents this carnivorous image as one form of the pleasure he takes in relations with women. His authority also appears in condescension, in his wish to shape a woman in his own image, and in his assumption that giving pleasure makes him the benefactor while the woman remains indebted. The lion thus connects physical gesture to a broader structure of unequal exchange: Costals casts himself as the active giver and possessor, and women as those who receive what he chooses to provide.

Symbolic Function

Across these passages, the lion is not developed as an animal with a life or perspective of its own. It is a human metaphor, and its force comes from the contrast between the animal’s imagined mastery and the male character’s dependence on a woman’s subordination. Montherlant’s lion fears the test of reality; Costals’s lion dramatizes possession. Together, the images show how apparent masculine strength can rely on fantasy, unilateral power, and the refusal of reciprocity.