[In the following essay, Fallaize examines de Beauvoir's ideology of romance in the context of The Woman Destroyed.]

The feminist credentials of Simone de Beauvoir's fictional texts are sometimes assumed to be guaranteed by the fact that their author also produced The Second Sex, and indeed Beauvoir's fiction is most usually read against her essays (or Sartre's). However, more recently, there has been a tendency to judge the fiction—and to find it wanting in some respects—against the conventions of the romance plot.¹ It is indeed difficult to deny that elements of the romance plot are easily discernible in Beauvoir's early fiction: heterosexual couple formation plays a large part in the narrative, and within this couple the woman tends to be in what Rachel Blau Duplessis has called romantic thraldom (by which she means a totally defining love between apparent unequals—the lover has the power of conferring a sense of identity and purpose upon the loved one) to the often strongly gendered man.²

In the early fictional texts, published in the forties and fifties, the central women characters are on the whole rewarded by getting their man when they take the right turning after an initial period of bad faith—thus Françoise of She Came to Stay (1943) destroys the rival woman and is rewarded with the love and attention of both the central male characters; Hélène of The Blood of Others (1945) valorises love above all else and comes to merit the hero's love when she adopts his quest as her own; the central preoccupation of Anne of The Mandarins (1954) is her choice between two men. In more general terms it is quite clear that, despite the strong warnings she gives in The Second Sex about the dangers of love for women, Beauvoir herself valued love and the couple very highly. In the first volume of her autobiography, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, she describes her anguish and fury as an adolescent at reading a novel in which a man and a woman ‘made for each other’ decide to sacrifice the possibility of a relationship in the interests of a cause: ‘True love, from the moment it burst into passionate life, was irreplaceable (…). Daniel's career, the cause, and so on were all abstract things. I found it absurd and criminal that they should put them before love, happiness, life’.³ Forty years later, in Force of Circumstance, she begins her summing-up of her life: ‘There has been one undoubted success in my life: my relationship with Sartre’.⁴ It is of course important to distinguish between placing a high value on love within the heterosexual couple on the one hand, and all the baggage of the romance ritual on the other, but maintaining the distinction between the two can be a slippery route.

However, the kind of observation which can be made of the extent to which the ideology of romance permeates Beauvoir's earlier fictional texts appears more difficult to make when we turn to her last two fictional texts, Les Belles Images (1966) and The Woman Destroyed (1968), written more than a decade after her earlier fiction and in a period of rapid transformation of the social roles of women. The thrust of both these texts is essentially a demystifying one, and though in Les Belles Images, Beauvoir's main attack is centred on the ideology of the technocratic bourgeoisie, the text also carries out a brutal dismantling of the ideology of the couple: the heroine finds that her husband and her lover are interchangeable and a whole series of romantic gestures and images—such as the sending of flowers, the gift of an expensive necklace, the romantic image of the handsome and elegant couple driving away in their Ferrari—are shown to be not just conventional and ritualistic but to conceal a materialism, a self-interest and even a violence sufficient to deter the most determined romantic heroine. The deconstruction of the romantic and the technocratic go hand in hand when the richest and most powerful male character of the text announces that he is to marry the daughter of his ex-mistress: ‘No-one can rule their heart’, he explains in self-satisfied justification.⁵

Nevertheless it is possible to ask whether this attack is really mounted on romantic ideology itself, or whether, on the contrary, it is not the characters' failure to meaningfully enact the amorous ritual which may be intended to signal the aridity and inhumanity of the bourgeoisie.⁶ And this kind of doubt persists with ‘The Woman Destroyed’, the final story in the cycle of three short stories also entitled The Woman Destroyed, in which the problem of the romance plot becomes particularly acute. Before turning to the story itself, however, it is worth examining more closely the nature of the romance against which I propose to read the story. Blau Duplessis defines the romance plot as one which ‘muffles the female character, represses female quest, valorises heterosexual ties, puts individuals into couples as a sign of their success. It evokes an aura around the couple itself and constructs couples based on an extreme of sexual difference’. Blau Duplessis accepts that ‘narrative is a version of, or a special expression of, ideology: representations by which we construct and accept values and institutions’. But it does not appear that she gives an overwhelming force to this ideology since she assumes that women writers critical of androcentric culture can revise and restructure the romance plot, thus signalling ‘a dissent from social norms as well as narrative forms’.⁷

In contrast to this position, Michelle Coquillat in her recent study of the roman de gare (popular romance) in France stresses heavily the ideological function of the romance plot, emphasising the way in which it renders ‘natural’ values which are actually socially determined and describing the roman de gare and its central code, romantic love, as a ‘prodigious instrument’ in our culture's persuasion process that to be real women we must seek our lives in love of our hero and in domesticity.⁸ And Coquillat does not confine her conclusions to the more popular versions of literature: though the code can be perceived to be operating in its grossest form in the roman de gare, it is also to be discovered, she argues, albeit in more sophisticated wrappings, in the more elite reaches of literature.

The code that Coquillat discovers at work in the Harlequin series, in the novels of Guy des Cars, of Delly and other popular romance writers does in fact have much in common with Blau Duplessis's definition of the romance plot, despite the fact that Coquillat's model is based on reading ‘popular’ literature and Blau Duplessis's on ‘higher’ forms. However, both these studies focus on the separately published novel, and in the case of ‘The Woman Destroyed’, an even more relevant intertext is that of women's magazine fiction, since the first publication of ‘The Woman Destroyed’ was as serialised extracts in the prestigious French women's magazine Elle. Serialised over five issues, from 19 October to 16 November 1967, the text was accompanied by a series of illustrations of the story by Simone de Beauvoir's sister, Hélène de Beauvoir, and by large photographs of the author herself.⁹ Both are important in making the story conform to the genre of women's magazine fiction since a series of illustrations of the heroine of the story are virtually de rigueur.

Jean Emelina has analysed other conventions of the women's magazine short story in France: like the roman de gare, the point of view of the narrative is that of a central female protagonist with whom the reader is encouraged to identify, and is usually a first-person account. There are various sub-genres, but in the ‘true confession’ type the tone is highly personal and intimate, revealing the connection between the story and the problems page of which the story is in some ways the prolongation. The setting is usually contemporary, the experience recounted always revolves around love and its problems, and there may be a considerable emphasis on the family (noticeably more so than in the English equivalent). The problems raised are always dealt with strictly on an individual level, as in most popular fiction, and not viewed as being related to any social, class or gender base—again, a feature of the roman de gare strongly emphasised by Coquillat.¹⁰

Turning now then to the story of ‘The Woman Destroyed’, we can begin by identifying the features it shares with the women's magazine story in particular, and with romantic fiction in general. One of the most basic features of the women's magazine story is that it must be seen to be about women and for women, and this is much more true of all three stories of The Woman Destroyed than of any other of Simone de Beauvoir's fictional texts. In the case of the particular story with which we are concerned here, the central figure is Monique, a woman in her forties whose total energies in life are devoted to her husband and her children. Her diary constitutes the narrative and provides the woman-centred focus and confessional tone of the romance script. The central focus on the complications of love, also essential to the genre, is revealed as early as the sixth entry of the diary, where we find recorded the event which is to form the central crisis of the story: Monique's husband Maurice reveals that he is having an affair with another woman. The presence of the rival woman, virtually a sine qua non in Delly,¹¹ is used here as the stimulus to provoke Monique into examining her life with Maurice, past and present, and into trying out a number of remedies designed to win back her husband. Most of the remedies are more or less explicitly culled from reading agony and advice columns—after all, Monique's situation of being abandoned by her husband at forty when the children have left home constitutes a stock situation of such pages.

‘This evening [writes Monique in her diary] I am going out with Maurice. The advice of Isabelle and of Miss Lonelihearts column—to get your husband back, be cheerful and elegant and go out with him, just the two of you.’¹² Advice also emerges from the female community, since Monique discusses her situation with a number of other women acquaintances. These other women are kept very shadowy, in keeping with another convention of the romance script, which is that the woman is always basically alone; other women are understood to be potential rivals rather than sources of support. From the women emerges a body of generalisations about men, of the kind: ‘In Maurice, like most men, just beneath the surface slumbers an adolescent lacking in self-assurance’¹³ and ‘Men choose the easiest solution: it's easier to stay with your wife than to launch out into a new life’.¹⁴ What these infantilising generalisations do is to compensate for the women's actual lack of power over men, and to construct in their attempts to guess at Maurice's likely motivations and behaviour a Maurice who is above all a man, above all, in other words, a member of another species. Maurice becomes the unknowable ‘other’ whose behaviour and remarks Monique must spend hours trying to decode. Here we have an almost pathological—and highly unexistential—construction of sexual difference, again an element crucial to the romantic code.¹⁵

On the basis of these suppositions about men and about the ground rules of the battle for men, Monique adopts what she calls the ‘smile tactic’. Faced for example with the request that Maurice be allowed to spend the whole night out when he sees the other woman, Monique swallows hard and writes in her diary: ‘No confrontations. If I ruin this affair for him it will look even more attractive to him from a distance, he'll feel he's missed out on something. If I let him go through with it properly he'll soon get tired of it. That's what Isabelle says’.¹⁶ Bolstering herself with her tactic, Monique increasingly positions herself as a women's magazine reader, feeling optimistic the day that her stars tell her Sagittarians will be lucky in love this week and sending off examples of the handwriting of all three of them to be analysed—interestingly the results are made to be accurate, so that the text supports a belief in graphology, though Monique then has to lose her faith in it at this point in order to be able to avoid facing up to what the results tell her.

Monique's tactic, however, is not allowed to succeed, and in a reversal of the happy end of the genre, she is left alone at the end of the story without her husband. As she writes her diary, she begins to see that she has spent years constructing a mythology of the perfect couple, the perfect wife and mother, the perfect husband, and has refused all other perceptions. She comes, in a half-conscious kind of way, to blame herself for engineering a pregnancy in order to press Maurice into marriage and in order to give up a career in medicine which she found too demanding. She blames herself for having been too stifling as a mother, and Maurice accuses her of moulding one daughter into an exact replica of herself and forcing the other daughter to flee to the US to escape her attentions. In one sense the message of the text is clear and uncompromising—by making a career out of marriage and motherhood, Monique has made a mess of her life and possibly that of others.

So far so good—it is clear that Beauvoir's intention is to exploit the conventions of the romance to make them express different meanings, and to offer a salutary warning to the women reader. However, as Beauvoir writes in the last volume of her autobiography All Said and Done, it is dangerous to ask the reader to read between the lines.¹⁷ We have already seen how closely the story mimics the genre. The ending does leave Monique on her own, but it also leaves her still in thraldom to the handsome Maurice, despite the lies he has told and the way in which he has used Monique as a domestic support (and in fact he has to be left looking like a nice sort of chap in order to allow the reader to focus on Monique's mistakes). Monique is thus left at the end of the story as the loser of the eternal female battle for the man. She does not feel that this particular man was not worth having. On the contrary, what she has learned is that her weapons in the battle were the wrong ones, and that her rival—who is a successful lawyer and takes care to follow Maurice's own career with eager interest—is using the right ones. Monique loses and her rival wins—the man remains the prize.

Even more problematically, perhaps, the use of the diary form and the individual confessional style of the narrative means that the text echoes the assumption of all romantic fiction, which is that Monique's situation is an individual matter. It is not absolutely impossible to squeeze out some social elements from the story, but we are a long way here from Les Belles Images, in which Simone de Beauvoir so strongly stresses the social forces contributing to the creation of the subject. In Les Belles Images the characters are seen to be constituted by the discourse of their group; in ‘The Woman Destroyed’ Monique is clearly held responsible for her refusal to go beyond the vocabulary of the romantic cliché, her insistence that phrases such as ‘Two and two make four’ and ‘I love you, I love only you’ have the same status.

The rules of romantic fiction, which Beauvoir tried to bend to her own purposes, turn out then to be insidiously recuperative. But the structures of the story are not the only thing working against Beauvoir's subversive enterprise. There is also the question of the readers. In All Said and Done Beauvoir describes how ‘writers, students and teachers' wrote to her ‘having fully appreciated my meaning’, but after the serialisation in Elle she received shoals of a different kind of letter:

I was overwhelmed with letters from women destroyed, half-destroyed or in the act of being destroyed. They identified themselves with the heroine; they attributed all possible virtues to her and they were astonished that she should remain attached to a man so unworthy of her. Their partiality made it evident that as far as their husbands, their rivals and they themselves were concerned, they shared Monique's blindness. Their reactions were based upon an immense incomprehension.¹⁸

But to be surprised by the reaction of the Elle readers is to fail to recognise the elements which the story has in common with the conventions of romance fiction, and to dismiss the implications of publishing in Elle. It is of course true that to publish in Elle was not at all the same thing as to publish in the more populist presse du coeur type of women's magazine like Confidences and Intimité. Evelyne Sullerot, in her study of French women's magazines carried out in the early 1960s, identifies Elle readers as having a level of education well above average, coming overwhelmingly from the middle classes and living almost exclusively in Paris or large towns. As a consequence, Elle readers of the sixties were far less conservative than the less well-educated, more rural and Catholic readers of the populist press, and Elle, which knew its readership well, was far more able to overstep limits and question conventions. It was the first French women's magazine to deal with issues of sexuality and contraception before even the advent of the sixties, and it had a highly distinctive agony column, reigned over by Marcelle Ségal. Her style was not the sympathetic, rather saccharine tone adopted by many of her peers in this period but was frequently abrasive and ironic, designed to shake her readers out of the somewhat narcissistic torpor into which many of her correspondents seemed sunk.¹⁹

However, despite this relatively energetic tone and the encouragement which Elle gave its readers to extend their interests outside the home, the Elle readership could not read Beauvoir's texts in the way that the ‘writers, students and teachers’ to whom Simone de Beauvoir refers in All Said and Done read it. Publishing in Elle meant entering the mass market—Sullerot estimates Elle's readership in the 1960s as in the order of three million women, the majority of whom were unlikely to have read any of Beauvoir's earlier fiction. What they would have had experience of, however, was the magazine fiction genre in which she appeared to be writing, and they clearly read it according to the conventions of the genre, identifying with the heroine whose comfortable middle-class Parisian lifestyle reflected the readers' own, and recognising the how-to-win-a-husband-back vocabulary which Monique clings to. This reading is encouraged by Elle's presentation of the text as ‘an analysis of what happens in the mind, in the heart of a woman when the man she loves, and whom she trusts, deceives her’. The adultery of Maurice, understandable or even desirable perhaps in St Germain circles, was likely to be perceived primarily as a threat to domestic stability by the readers of a magazine which, for all its avant-garde reputation, devoted a considerable number of its pages to the domestic arts. The 1975 new law on divorce, replacing the 1889 Naquet law, was still more than six years in the future, and even the realist Marcelle Ségal advised her readers to stick with domestic fidelity and avoid breaking up the home.²⁰ The reaction of the Elle readers demonstrates that reading habits and expectations are not to be changed by a single text. When taken together with the other doubts about the text expressed by readers perfectly aware of Beauvoir's intentions, the difficulties of subverting a highly established and ideological script become evident.²¹ However, the reaction of the Elle readership was not the only consequence for Beauvoir of the serialisation. In discussing the quality or rather lack of quality of the fiction published in magazines like Elle and Marie-Claire, relative to the quality of their other articles, Evelyne Sullerot points to the extreme reluctance of writers to sign work appearing in women's magazines, because of the damage to the author's literary reputation likely to ensue.²² The reception of ‘The Woman Destroyed’ was heavily marked by its appearance in Elle. Bernard Pivot, at that time still a humble columnist for the Figaro Littéraire, wrote the book off as a ‘shop-girls’ romance with pink bows on it’ on the strength of a single instalment.²³ Jacqueline Piatier in Le Monde was equally exultant to be able to damn the story as women's romance. Her review ends with the following line, in which she underlines the gulf between what she takes to be the philosophical pretensions of Simone de Beauvoir and the concerns of the story: ‘Can it be that when philosophers start solving problems instead of posing them that they begin producing agony columns?’²⁴ No other fictional text by Beauvoir met with such a dismissive response on publication as The Woman Destroyed, despite the fact that the book quickly became a best-seller. It seems that Beauvoir may have underestimated the dangers of writing between the lines, especially when the lines are those of the romance script.

Most analysts of romantic fiction point to its ideological force, though opinions vary about the actual impact of this force on readers, just as, to look at the issue in a wider scope, commentators on ideology generally are divided about the extent to which it can be resisted. Janice Radway, for example, argues that despite its constant reworking of structures which confine women, romantic fiction can have an integrative and enabling effect on women's lives. Lennard Davis equally urges us to become resisting readers but is more inclined to the view that the novel is a form which ‘by and large, is one that fundamentally resists change’.²⁵ Thus, even if we posit resisting readers, we are still left with the problem of the extent to which it is possible for the writer to subvert the conventions of such a strongly established genre.

To what extent can the writer carry out a demystifying task and become a critic of ideology, while attempting to work within the formal structures of that ideology? Is Beauvoir herself not bound by the very values which she perceives as destroying women? The demands of Beauvoir's own deeply-seated attachment to the value of the couple, the formal and ideological constraints of the genre and the habits of the readership seem, in the case of ‘The Woman Destroyed’, to have all weighed in the balance against this particular attempt to resist romance. Optimism about the scope for revising the romance plot and criticism of a writer on the grounds that she has apparently failed to rewrite the script have to be viewed in the context of these formidable odds.

Notes

1. See for example the chapter on relations between male and female characters in Mary Evans, Simone de Beauvoir: A Feminist Mandarin (London: Tavistock, 1985).

2. Rachel Blau Duplessis, Writing Beyond the Ending. Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), p. 5.

3. Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, trans. James Kirkup (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), pp. 142-3.

4. Force of Circumstance, trans. Richard Howard (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 659.

5. Les Belles Images, trans. Patrick O'Brian (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), p. 81; translation adapted.

6. In an article entitled ‘What Love Is and Isn't’ published in English in the American magazine McCall only the year before the publication of Les Belles Images, Beauvoir stressed what she describes as the revolutionary and liberating force of love and suggests that it is doubtful whether a person too much in harmony with society could experience love. From this perspective, the characters of Les Belles Images are clearly too other-directed and too anxious to conform to social pressures to allow themselves to experience a potentially revolutionary force. The article is reprinted in Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier, Les Ecrits de Simone de Beauvoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), pp. 413-21.

7. Blau Duplessis, Writing Beyond, p. 20.

8. Michelle Coquillat, Romans d'amour (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1989), pp. 10-12.

9. The photographs of Simone de Beauvoir are in fact much more prominent than the illustrations, an indication of the extent to which Elle was keen to promote the fact that it was publishing ‘the greatest French woman writer of our day’. During the latter part of the sixties, circulation figures for women's magazines fell rapidly; Bonvoisin and Maignien attribute this fall in part to the radical changes taking place in French society affecting women's roles which magazines were unable to keep pace with. Perhaps Elle saw the publication of Beauvoir in its pages as a useful tactic at this stage, despite the conservative reaction of readers to earlier extracts from The Prime of Life. See Evelyne Sullerot, La Presse féminine (Paris: Armand Colin, 1963), p. 138; S-M. Bonvoisin and M. Maignien, La Presse féminine (Paris: Armand Colin, 1986), pp. 26-7.

10. Jean Emelina, ‘La Nouvelle dans la presse du cœur: étude à partir d'un exemple’, in Hommage à Pierre Nardin (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1977), pp. 291-303. I am grateful to Béatrice Damamme-Gilbert for drawing this article to my attention.

11. Coquillat, Romans d'amour, p. 34.

12. The Woman Destroyed, trans. Patrick O'Brian (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), p. 117. All subsequent references are to this edition.

13. Ibid., p. 118; translation adapted.

14. Ibid., p. 165; translation adapted.

15. See Anne Barr Snitow, ‘Mass Market Romance: Pornography for Women is Different’ in Anne Snitow, Christine Stansell, Sharon Thompson (eds.), Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983).

16. Woman Destroyed, pp. 121-2; translation adapted.

17. Beauvoir goes on in this paragraph to construct her imaginary reader as a detective: ‘I hoped that people would read the books as a detective-story; here and there I scattered clues that would allow the reader to find the key to the mystery - but only if he tracked Monique down as one tracks down the guilty character’, All Said and Done, trans. Patrick O'Brian (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), p. 140. Subsequent references are to this edition. However, as Toril Moi points out, it is in fact Monique who actually becomes the detective in her frenzied quest for reliable knowledge. See Toril Moi, Feminist Theory and Simone de Beauvoir (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 80.

18. Ibid., p. 142.

19. See Sullerot, Presse féminine, pp. 193-5, and Bonvoisin and Maignien, Presse féminine, pp. 28-9.

20. A letter from ‘Jacky’ in the issue of 19 October in which serialisation of ‘The Woman Destroyed’ was begun, urges the reader to enjoy her lover on a temporary basis while hanging on to her husband. Marcelle Ségal replies: ‘No, Jacky, this is not possible. My profession has its obligations, so does marriage, begging your pardon’.

21. See Toril Moi's excellent analysis of the rhetorical effects undermining authorial intentions in the story in Feminist Theory and Simone de Beauvoir, cited above.

22. Sullerot, Presse féminine, p. 129.

23. See Beauvoir, All Said and Done, p. 142.

24. Jacqueline Piatier, Le Monde (des livres), 24 janvier 1968, pp. I-II.

25. See Lennard J. Davis, Resisting Novels: Ideology and Fiction (London: Methuen, 1987), p. 227. Davis is particularly sceptical about the possibility of subverting romance fiction: ‘It is unlikely that this major genre can have any radical political effect, crippled as it is by the weight of tradition and the demands of the audience’ (p. 234).