Over the course of history, marriage as an institution has changed dramatically, passing through various phases and forms. What started as a purely reproductive relationship blossomed into emotional companionship. Or does he have it? Is marriage synonymous with happiness? Is happiness love, or vice versa? What is a woman without a man? Author Simone de Beauvoir poses and works to answer the age-old questions of love, happiness, marriage, and perhaps concludes that all three are incapable. From the text “Second Sex”, the play Medea and the film White Material, we can conclude that marriage may be just a word. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essayIn Beauvoir's work "Second Sex," she makes a clear distinction between love and happiness and between the roles of a man and a woman in a marriage. Happiness, according to Beauvoir, is what is “promised” to the bride: a calm and repetitive “balance” from which she cannot and will not escape. She is supposed to be the “manager,” staying within the walls of her home, building a life of happiness. Thus, we can conclude that the woman does not like her life as a wife, but that it makes her happy. She has “no other choice than to build a stable life where the present, extending the past, escapes the threats of tomorrow, that is to say precisely to create happiness”. The woman is stuck in this perpetual “immanence”, a word that Beauvoir uses to oppose the masculine duty of “transcendence”. She affirms that the existence of women is only validated by men. This idea of ​​security through marriage is evaluated and verified by the play Medea. Medea's entire life unfolds when she is left by Jason for another, younger woman. She claims she was the perfect wife: "I even gave you sons just to have them abandoned by a new wife." If you had not had children, this need for another bedfellow might have been forgiven” (60). Medea here confirms Beauvoir's position according to which a woman only has value when a man gives her value: in this case, it is her fertility which gives meaning to her position as a wife. Yet this is still not enough for Jason, who, as a male, is expected to “prosper” – according to Beauvoir, “to produce, to fight, to create, to progress”. The nurse claims that Medea is “the perfect foil to Jason, being in marriage what saves: a woman who does not go against her man” (1). Medea, as Beauvoir would say, is the queen of the hive “in her domain,” relying on her husband for importance. In the film White Material, the main character Maria Vial is divorced from her husband but married, in a way, to her. planting. The plantation itself is owned by her ex-father-in-law, but she still works there as manager. As Beauvoir says, the woman is supposed to fulfill precisely this function: “within the walls of her house, she will be in charge of management, she will enclose the world; it will perpetuate human existence into the future. Therefore, the woman is supposed to supervise, but never own; in Maria's case, she considered the plantation to be hers, but she never really owned it, which was evident when it was sold to the mayor by her father-in-law. Maria refuses to give up her life on the plantation, where everything is regular and routine. She can't bear the idea of ​​leaving her home and returning to France. For both characters, marriage, whether of a person or a thing, is their salvation. For Medea, her marriage is her security; later in the play, she begs King Aegeus for help. She said: “Aegeus, I..