Simone de Beauvoir World Literature Analysis
France has a long tradition of women writers, such as Madame de La Fayette, Madame de Staël, George Sand, Colette, and Marguerite Duras. Simone de Beauvoir’s work is perhaps most like that of Staël and Sand in terms of her preference for a large readership among her contemporaries and of her admission to the literary canon. De Beauvoir considered herself not to be a woman writer but a writer who happened to be a woman. She never sought to develop a particularly feminine language and was more influenced byÉmile Zola and Ernest Hemingway than by Colette or Virginia Woolf. Indeed, she defined herself largely by her differences from bourgeois women: She insisted on not becoming a wife, mother, homemaker, or follower of fashion.
Yet de Beauvoir wrote on, and did political work for, women’s issues. She showed that a woman could perform with distinction in the areas of philosophy and political theory, fields traditionally dominated by men. She insisted that women should become linked to their work, just as men always had been. In her fiction, from L’Invitée (1943; She Came to Stay, 1949) through Les Belles images (1966; English translation, 1968), she dramatized situations in which women deny their freedom to be their authentic selves, using their sex as an excuse and distorting their sense of themselves in relation to husbands and lovers. While Les Belles Images and La Femme rompue (1967; The Woman Destroyed, 1969) have female protagonists, her early work includes central characters of both sexes, and in her long and ambitious novel The Mandarins, the four most important characters are three men and one woman.
In The Second Sex, de Beauvoir used existential notions of people’s need to establish their freedom in a purposeless, absurd universe to encourage women to resign themselves no longer to the role of the weaker and inferior person in relation to a man. She sought to show that false myths concerning women’s nature had been created by both men and women. This book has acquired landmark status, inspiring women’s movements throughout the world and making de Beauvoir one of the symbolic leaders of contemporary feminism. In this book and in many other essays and interviews, she tirelessly addressed issues of concern to women, advocating equality with men and total sexual freedom. When she visited Egypt in 1967, de Beauvoir criticized the Egyptian government’s failure to put into practice the sexual equality decreed by its constitution. When in Israel, she noted that Israeli women had equal responsibilities during the nation’s wars but were largely relegated to lower-paying, menial jobs in peacetime. She did not hesitate to incur displeasure among her compatriots by hailing the humiliating French defeat by the North Vietnamese at Dien Bien Phu, which ended France’s role as a power in Indochina.
She asserted over and over again that her goal was to strip away the hypocrisies, prejudices, lies, and mystifications that prevented people from perceiving the truth. She sought to contribute to the intellectual and ethical elevation of humanity.
The Second Sex
First published: Le Deuxième Sexe, 1949 (English translation, 1953)
Type of work: Treatise
In a massive treatise, de Beauvoir describes women’s historic victimization and advances feminist theories to establish women’s equality with men.
The text is divided into two parts. In part 1, the more academic section, de Beauvoir discusses instances of women being oppressed throughout history, from early nomadic societies until the surprisingly late grant of suffrage in France in 1947. She draws impressively from a wide range of disciplines, including biology, psychology, sociology, anthropology, literature, and, of course, history....
(This entire section contains 2035 words.)
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She attempts to assess women’s biological and historical circumstances and the myths by which these have been explained, denied, or distorted. She recognizes that men have been able to maintain dominant roles in virtually all cultures because women have resigned themselves to, instead of rebelling against, their assigned subordinate status.
The Second Sex has two major premises. First, that man, considering himself as the essential being, or subject, has treated woman as the unessential being, or object. The second, more controversial premise, is that much of woman’s psychological self is socially constructed, with very few physiologically rooted feminine qualities or values. De Beauvoir denies the existence of a feminine temperament or nature—to her, all notions of femininity are artificial concepts. In one of her most telling aphorisms she declares, “One is not born a woman; rather, one becomes one.”
De Beauvoir derives her chief postulates from Sartre’s philosophic work, L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness, 1947). In existentialist fashion, she argues that women are the sum of their actions. To be sure, a woman’s situation is partly determined by menstruation and childbearing. She becomes human, rather than a “mere animal,” to the extent that she transcends her biological characteristics and assumes her liberty in a social context.
In part 2, de Beauvoir undertakes a sociological and psychological survey of women in the mid-twentieth century, concentrating on France and the United States. She analyzes the roles women widely adopt, seeing many of these roles (wife, mother, prostitute) as images that men have imposed on women. She deplores most marriages as demeaning to women, enslaving them in child-rearing and housekeeping tasks. Prostitution is a state of female enslavement. Only “kept” women—mistresses—have occasionally asserted free choices.
De Beauvoir describes her vision of a free woman who will find emancipation through meaningful work, thereby gaining equal standing with men. Economic freedom is, for de Beauvoir, the key to woman’s emancipation. Unless a woman can affirm her freedom by doing constructive work, she lives only marginally. The total liberation of women will come about, de Beauvoir insists, only with the establishment of an authentically socialist society as conceived by Karl Marx, since capitalism prevents proletarian women from finding satisfaction in their labor.
The Second Sex has received considerable negative criticism for its bias against marriage and motherhood, its Marxism, its rejection of psychoanalysis, and its oversimplifications based on careless use of data. The study has nevertheless proved to be an inspirational text for countless women throughout the world and may well be the most powerful argument for women’s rights to have appeared in the twentieth century.
The Mandarins
First published: Les Mandarins, 1954 (English translation, 1956)
Type of work: Novel
This panoramic novel tells of a small group of leftist French intellectuals trying to remake their country between 1944 and 1950.
This long, intricate novel, for which de Beauvoir received the prestigious Goncourt Prize in 1954, was her favorite. The book is part autobiography, part social and political history, and part love story. It is in many respects autobiographical, with the psychiatrist Anne Dubreuilh standing in for de Beauvoir. Anne has been married for twenty years to an older man, Robert (Sartre), an author who has assumed the role of a good, dependable friend. Anne also has a passionate affair with an American writer, Lewis Brogan (Nelson Algren). She has a troubled relationship with an adult daughter, Nadine, a composite of two of Sartre’s young mistresses. Then there are the journalist Henri Perron (Albert Camus) and a dislikably truculent writer, Scriassine (Arthur Koestler).
The novel’s complicated plot covers a wide range of personal and ideological issues and is too dense with events for a detailed summary. It begins by dramatizing the rapturous joy with which French intellectuals welcomed the liberation of Paris in 1944. Robert, Henri, and Anne soon become conscious of the political complexities of the postwar situation, and their ardent hopes of a better world are shattered in the next six years. Friendships that flourished during the German Occupation founder on ideological and personal recriminations as the Cold War begins to dominate European politics. Perron, editor of a liberal newspaper, hopes to remain unattached to any political party. Yet Robert Dubreuilh has founded an existentialist-revolutionary party and seeks the support of Perron’s paper for his organization.
As the clear-cut choices of wartime give way to the ambiguous options of peacetime, several of the leading personages are drawn into dilemmas in which a simple ethic of right or wrong no longer holds valid. Perron, for example, perjures himself in court to save a woman of whom he is enamored from being exposed as the former mistress of a Nazi officer—even though Perron is a Resistance hero. Robert Dubreuilh and Perron hold long conversations during which the formerly close friends find themselves increasingly polarized (as Sartre and Camus did), separated by Perron’s militant anti-Stalinism and Dubreuilh’s adherence to left-wing solidarity. Political power eludes these friends as they find themselves on the edge of social events instead of at their hub. Clearly the title, The Mandarins, can only be taken ironically.
Interwoven into the work’s stories are several liaisons, of which the one between Anne Dubreuilh and Lewis Brogan is the most important. Based on the de Beauvoir-Algren attachment, it is not factually rendered. After Anne’s affair with Lewis ends, she falls into deep depression and almost commits suicide. Through Anne’s travails de Beauvoir seeks to depict a woman’s problems of personal responsibility—to her husband, daughter, lover, profession, and self. These problems translate the intellectual and political difficulties of the male characters into emotional terms.
The novel falls short of its grand design because de Beauvoir lacks sufficient imaginative intensity and command of dialogue, tone, and style to enable her to transform her ideas into convincing art. Yet her high intelligence and breadth of historical perspective deserve praise.
The Prime of Life
First published: La Force de l’âge, 1960 (English translation, 1962)
Type of work: Memoir
This intellectual memoir describes de Beauvoir’s life from 1929 to 1944.
This is the second installment of de Beauvoir’s autobiographical series. It begins on a note of relief at her emancipation from her rigidly conservative family and ends on an even higher note of joy at France’s deliverance from German Occupation. Dominating the work is de Beauvoir’s friendship and alliance with Jean-Paul Sartre.
In July, 1929, she was a philosophy student at France’s most distinguished university, the École Normale Supérieure, when she met Sartre, a fellow student, while preparing for comprehensive orals. By the fall they had begun a friendship that was to become a lifelong union. They agreed that, while theirs was an “essential” love, it should not be allowed to degenerate into constraint or mere habit; nor should their partnership prevent them from experiencing contingent affairs with others. By the mid-to-late 1930’s they had become the core couple, while teaching philosophy in Paris, of a group they termed “the Family.” This was a social network of current and former students, friends, and lovers. It took the place of marriage and children for de Beauvoir and Sartre.
The 1930’s were extremely active for de Beauvoir. She read voraciously in literature as well as philosophy and frequented, usually with Sartre, theaters, cinemas, art galleries, cafés, jazz clubs, and many lively, long-lasting parties. Often to the urban Sartre’s discomfort, she loved to hike and climb rocks, touring most European countries. As World War II approached and then engulfed her, Sartre, and their friends, she and Sartre abandoned their apolitical individualism. Nazi atrocities convinced them, by mid-1939, that they needed to commit themselves to political action and social concerns. After some largely unsuccessful Resistance work, however, they decided to concentrate on their writing and made their literary reputations during the German Occupation. With the Allies’ entry into Paris in the summer of 1944, de Beauvoir ends her book by expressing an ardent appetite for further challenges that the world may offer her.
At its best, The Prime of Life is a hymn to individual freedom and to the importance of the intellectual life. The dominant note of de Beauvoir’s book is her uncompromising honesty about herself. She reveals her many extraordinary virtues: a splendid mind, acute sensitivity, high moral principles and conduct, courage, and a zest for virtually all experiences. She also displays her flaws: a lack of humor, wit, or tolerance, a tendency to intellectualize all behavior, and an inclination to sermonize. The book is an admirable testimony to crucial stages in the life of a great woman.
