Throughout history, marriage as an institution has changed drastically, intertwining between various phases and forms. What began as a purely reproductive relationship evolved into an emotional companionship. Or does it have it? Does marriage equal happiness? Is happiness love or vice versa? What is a woman without a man? The author Simone de Beauvoir asks and works to answer the age-old question of love, happiness, marriage and perhaps concludes on the inability of the three. Using the text “Second Sex,” the play Medea, and the film White Material, one can conclude that marriage is perhaps nothing more than a word. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay In Beauvoir's piece "Second Sex," she makes a clear distinction between love and happiness and between the roles of the male and female in a marriage. Happiness, according to Beauvoir, is what is "promised" to the bride: a calm and repetitive "balance" from which she cannot and does not want to escape. She will have to be the "manager", remaining within the walls of the house, building a happy life. We can therefore conclude that the woman does not love her life as a wife, but it makes her happy. He has no choice but to build a stable life in which the present, prolonging the past, escapes the threats of tomorrow, that is, precisely to create happiness. The woman is stuck in this perpetual “immanence,” a word Beauvoir uses to counteract the male duty of “transcendence.” She claims that the existence of women is validated only by men. This idea of ​​security through marriage is evaluated and verified by the play Medea. Medea's entire life is revealed when she is left by Jason for another, younger woman. She claims she was the perfect wife: “I even gave you children only to be discarded for a new bride. Had I been childless, this desire for another bedfellow might have been forgiven” (60). Here Medea confirms Beauvoir's position that a woman only has value when a man gives her value: in this case, her fertility is what gives meaning to her position as a wife. Yet it is still not enough for Jason, who, as a male, is destined to “thrive” – according to Beauvoir, to “produce, fight, create, progress”. The Nurse claims that Medea is “the perfect counterpart of Jason, being that saving grace in marriage: a wife who does not go against her man” (1). Medea, as Beauvoir would say, is the queen of the hive “within her domain,” and relies on her husband for importance. In the film White Material, the protagonist Maria Vial is divorced from her husband but married, in a sense, to her. plantation. The plantation itself is owned by her former father-in-law, but she still works as a manager. As Beauvoir states, woman is destined to fill exactly this position: “within the walls of her home she will have the task of managing, she will enclose the world; will perpetuate human existence into the future.” The woman, therefore, is destined to supervise, but never to possess; in Maria's case, she perceived the plantation as hers but never truly owned it, evident, clearly, when it was sold to the mayor by her father-in-law. Maria refuses to give up life on the plantation, where everything is regular and routine. He can't bear the thought of leaving his home and returning to France. For both characters, marriage, whether to a person or a thing, is their salvation. For Medea, marriage is her security; later in the play, he asks King Aegeus for help. He says, “Aegeus, I beg you…I hold these knees…let me come to Athens, host me, accept me into your home” (123). She is helpless without her husband. In the film we see Maria's mental state deteriorate..