The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy_ I Link Therefore I Am - Luke Cuddy [115]
The Mythology of Woman
In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir acknowledges that there are very real differences between the sexes, but this is not to say that one is necessarily better or worse than the other.83 Beauvoir argues that differences in situational factors, which began with biological differences, account for the historical subordination of women that persists to this day. Women can get pregnant and are physiologically equipped to care for their young. Infants need much attention and care because they cannot survive independently. A woman who’s tending to a newborn’s needs is less likely to take care of her own, so this became the responsibility of the man in her life. This explains the origin of women’s dependence on men. This dynamic has been reinforced through women’s demotion to second-class citizen status and their institutional disadvantages in capitalist economies. Women are left with few means for adequately taking care of themselves and are therefore stuck in an unbreakable cycle of dependence upon men, which is subsequently taken as evidence of allegedly inherent inferiority.
Because women have been historically subordinated to men, this places men in a position of advantage and privilege over women. One consequence of this is that history is most often described from a male point of view, even though this represents only around half of the entire species. So, the definitions that have been established and accepted come from the male perspective, even those pertaining only to the female portion of the population. This may explain the discrepancy between the definitions for ‘woman’ and ‘female’. Beauvoir points out that it is not enough to be a female to be a woman. Women are not born, but made, and they are both female and feminine. The notion of femininity is slippery and mysterious while at the same time pervasive and sought after: some men desire it, some women want to embody it, and other women reject it. This concept of femininity is integral to understanding what Beauvoir calls “the myth of woman.”
Beauvoir’s account of the myth of woman has three components: woman as Mother, woman as Wife, and woman as Idea. In referring to the myth of woman, Beauvoir is speaking of the view of woman as feminine, as voiced by man to serve his own interests and purposes. Describing femininity as a myth emphasizes the difficulty in comprehending what femininity is, since myths are ideas that transcend the mind and cannot be grasped in their entirety. The lack of ostensive description of femininity is attributed to the difficulties associated with comprehension of myths. And just as the typological female characters in the Zelda games correlate to different stereotypical female roles, the three parts of the myth of woman also represent different features of female life, isolating them so that they stand opposed to each other. This demarcation, both within the myth of woman and in the typologies, is not necessary, as the different parts of each are not mutually exclusive. But although it’s plausible for one character to occupy space outside these characterizations, this possibility is seldom explored.
Stories and the female characters depicted in them are one channel through which ideas regarding femininity proliferate. The maiden, and Zelda as the paradigmatic maiden, appears to be what Beauvoir was describing with the third component of the mythology of woman, woman as Idea. There exist striking similarities between woman