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Lucy Stone McNeece (essay date 1990)

SOURCE: "La Langue brisée: Identity and Difference in de Beauvoir's La Femme rompue," in French Forum, Vol. 15, No. 1, January, 1990, pp. 73-92.

[In the following essay, McNeece identifies the role language plays in the sufferings of Beauvoir's women protagonists in the collection The Woman Destroyed.]

Simone de Beauvoir's death in 1986 refocused attention on one of France's most admired yet controversial figures. Long identified as Jean-Paul Sartre's amenuensis, and thus intellectually bound to existential humanism, de Beauvoir eventually came to occupy a very particular ideological space in French culture. Rarely has an individual—woman or man—elicited such extremes of feeling and opinion. But rarely has anyone embodied so completely the diverse faces of a society in transition as has she. It has been said that de Beauvoir represented all sides of the deep-seated conflicts that...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Gillian Tindall (review date 1969)
   2. Glendy Culligan (review date 1969)
   3. Evan S. Connell, Jr. (review date 1969)
   4. David Littlejohn (review date 1969)
   5. Perry D. Westbrook (review date 1970)
   6. Terry Keefe (essay date 1976)
   7. Catharine Savage Brosman (review date 1981)
   8. Simone de Beauvoir (essay date 1982)
   9. Gabriele Annan (review date 1982)
   10. Anne Duchêne (review date 1982)
   11. Carol Ascher (review date 1982)
   12. Deirdre Bair (review date 1982)
   13. Terry Keefe (essay date 1983)
   14. Elizabeth Fallaize (essay date 1988)
   15. Lucy Stone McNeece (essay date 1990)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright