SOURCE: "The Short Story Cycles: When Things of the Spirit Come First and The Woman Destroyed," in The Novels of Simone de Beauvoir, Routledge, 1988, pp. 143-74.

[In the essay below, Fallaize compares Beauvoir's two short fiction collections to demonstrate her narrative development.]

To read Simone de Beauvoir's two short story cycles together is to span the whole breadth of her published fiction, since When Things of the Spirit Come First was written in 1935-37, before any of her published novels, and The Woman Destroyed came last, written in 1967-68 after all the novels. Opening and closing Beauvoir's fictional production in this way, and separated by more than 30 years, the broadly similar form of the two works offers a unique opportunity to consider developments in Beauvoir's use of narrative strategies.

When Beauvoir wrote The Woman Destroyed, her first collection of short stories lay in the back of a drawer, a fate to which Beauvoir had firmly consigned the manuscript in 1938 after it had been turned down by both Gallimard and Grasset.¹ It was not until 1979, 11 years after the publication of The Woman Destroyed, that Beauvoir eventually published When Things of the Spirit Come First. It is perhaps therefore hardly surprising that Beauvoir did not consciously think back to her first short stories in her elaboration of The Woman Destroyed.² Nevertheless, the two works do have a great deal in common. Both focus on the lives of women, with male characters presented almost exclusively from a female point of view; both present women enmeshed in dilemmas and illusions from which there appears, with few exceptions, to be little hope of their escape. Both take the bourgeoisie as the social context, though When Things of the Spirit Come First is largely set 40 years earlier and has a much harsher social critique. The theme of the constraints of the family and the despotic powers of the mother in the mother-daughter relationship are treated in a very similar way in both—indeed, the monologue of Murielle in The Woman Destroyed reads almost like a sequel to the monologue of the mother in the earlier story 'Anne'.

In terms of form, When Things of the Spirit Come First has a much firmer claim than The Woman Destroyed to constitute a short story cycle: its five stories are linked not only by theme but by recurring characters, and its title (or, to be more precise, its original title) is echoed in the opening line of the final story.³ The three stories of The Woman Destroyed, though they were written to be published together, are much more loosely linked by theme and situation, by their single narrative focus through a woman in crisis and by the variations each offers on the theme of The Woman Destroyed, the title not only of the collection but of the last story. In both cycles, therefore, the last story is the source of the title of the collection, and is important to the interpretation of the cycle as a whole. Nevertheless, there is a marked difference between the conception of the cycle in the two works.⁴ An equally significant difference is to be found in the range of narrative situation employed; though a very similar use is made in both of monologue and of the diary form, When Things of the Spirit Come First does not restrict itself to the first-person narrative employed in all the stories of The Woman Destroyed.

When Things of the Spirit Come First

The five short stories of When Things of the Spirit Come First form a strongly interlocking whole. The situation set up in the first story, 'Marcelle', is re-exploited in the final story where the effect of the arrival in the household of Marcelle's husband is explored from the point of view of the younger sister Marguerite. 'Marguerite' thus draws on 'Marcelle' and completes it, since it offers a further twist in the saga of Marcelle's relations with her erring husband. Both these stories plunge into the central character's childhood, taking us back into the pre-First World War era before focusing more closely on events taking place in the 1920s. Events of the middle three stories are kept roughly contemporaneous with the end of 'Marcelle', giving characters in each story the opportunity to react to events in the other stories of which they are made to be aware, with the last story reaching a few years beyond the other narratives and able, as a result, to offer news of the fate of the other principal characters. In this way, stories which individually appear to be left openended ('Marcelle', 'Chantal') are somewhat brutally closed off at the end of the cycle: 'Chantal married a wealthy physician, Marcelle has just published a slim volume of verse, and the other day an archaeological journal mentioned Pascal's name with praise. They are not discontented with their lot' (WTS p. 202). Anne's fate is closed within 'Anne' by her death, and the heroine of 'Lisa' seems unlikely to survive for long, so that only the vigorous and positive Marguerite is left with an open future at the end of the volume.

Each of the heroines is the 'more or less consenting victim', as Beauvoir puts it in the preface to the French edition, of what she calls spiritualism—in other words, of a mystical belief in a religious, intellectual or aesthetic absolute held to be superior to the material world.⁵ Its practitioners essentially try to 'be' rather than to act. Such a belief necessarily involves, Beauvoir argues in the French preface, a degree of self-deception (bad faith) which in the stories tips the balance towards complicity and away from victimisation. The narrative mode, varying from the veiled irony of a somewhat supercilious external narrator to the intimate first-person voice of the prayer and the diary, also contributes to this balance.

The agents of the victimisation process are principally shown to be the bourgeoisie, the family (especially the mother), and educational institutions. The stifling world which the bourgeoisie of the period imposed on their daughters is drawn in the first story, 'Marcelle'. Even though Marcelle is relatively free from maternal despotism, she suffers from the constraints and isolation of her childhood and is led by her parents to consider herself as an exceptional person. She interprets the respectful attitude which the working-class boys at the social centre she runs adopt towards her as a homage to her personal qualities rather than as the automatic privilege of a social class. Adult life is a disappointment to someone who had expected to live amongst geniuses, and she falls easy prey to Denis Charval, the penniless poet who claims to live only for 'a few pure, precious impressions that he could not translate into words without betraying them' (WTS p. 26). When she is eventually abandoned, she draws no lesson in realism from her experience but adopts a new sublime ideal and aspires, as the reader later learns in 'Anne', to transmit to humanity through her writing the meaning of suffering.

Marcelle's self-delusions are insisted upon in the story—her belief in herself as a genius, her naive conviction that 'the barriers between the classes were brought into being by hatred and prejudice alone' (WTS p. 18), and her apparently complete inability to recognise her own strong sexuality—a failing which Denis exploits with ease. Marcelle is thus posited as a case in which complicity is strong; her sexual masochism underlines this point heavily. The external narrative stance adopted enables the degree of Marcelle's guilt to be made clear; this third-person narrative voice focuses through Marcelle to the exclusion of the other characters, but enjoys a much higher degree of autonomy than the external narrators of Beauvoir's novels, qualifying Marcelle for example from the outside as a 'dreamy, precocious little girl' (WTS p. 9) in the first line, and sweeping through long time periods without reference to the character's framework.

This rather unfamiliar narrator adopts a more formal tone and vocabulary than the narrators of the novels, and creates an air of superiority and veiled irony which are one of the main indications to the reader that Marcelle is not on the right path. In The Prime of Life Beauvoir describes the narrative voice of 'Marcelle' and 'Lisa' as 'employing a certain concealed irony which I had borrowed from John Dos Passos' (POL p. 223).⁶ In particular, the constant use of superlatives of the type 'extraordinarily sensitive' (WTS p. 9) and 'the wonderful revelation' (WTS p. 43) indicate this ironic distance, together with the use of comic disjunctions such as the detail that of all the places Marcelle liked crying, 'she liked crying in churches best' (WTS p. 9). Though Marcelle loses her religious faith, her early religious experiences are clearly held to have prepared a fertile ground for her later illusions.

The use of this external narrator in the first story of the volume is important to Beauvoir's demystifying intentions. Having clearly established Marcelle's delusions, she is able to proceed, in the second story, 'Chantal', to a more covert and more complex approach. 'Chantal' opens with a series of diary entries covering the first seven weeks of Chantal's exile to provincial Rougement for her first teaching ing post. The diary is essentially a means whereby the character can construct and polish a highly indulgent (and unconsciously comic) self-image—that of the liberated, sophisticated young woman with a highly cultured approach to life. Despite her apparent independence, the rather self-consciously literary style of the diary, and the constant attempt to describe the reality around her in terms of her cultural baggage (focusing comically on a holiday in Italy) quickly make it apparent that Chantal is a sister of Marcelle in her double cultivation of estheticism and of her own persona. But Chantal's self-image is more fragile than Marcelle's; faced with a pitying letter from a Parisian friend she breaks down and admits in the last diary extract of Part 1 that she feels buried alive in the desert of Rougemont.

The second part of the story introduces an external narrator, but the ironic, distancing element of the narrative voice of 'Marcelle' has disappeared in favour of a more covert voice which focuses fairly closely on Chantal. Despite this focus, the shift to external narrator permits a more direct introduction of the two pupils, Monique and Andrée, than the diary form had allowed. In the third part the external narrator abandons Chantal for Andrée, focusing on her first from the outside ('Andrée was neither frivolous nor inattentive; she accepted reproof politely; she did not chatter in class; and she had an excellent reputation in the lycée'; WTS p. 61) before gradually moving closer and closer to the character's perspective. Chantal becomes 'Plattard'—the name by which Andrée thinks of her—and the distance between Chantal's view of herself and the view her pupils have of her comes sharply into focus. Her youth and sincerity make of Andrée a more positive character than the self-indulgent Chantal; from this point on in the story Andrée becomes a rival focus of attention and the dominant source of information about events. Part 4 offers only a brief further incursion into Chantal's diary, in which she enters the predictable but nevertheless splendid confession that 'I see my life as a novel of which I am the heroine' (WTS p. 72), before returning to the external narrator and Andrée's perspective in the fifth part. It is thus Andrée's perspective that controls the central drama of the story, which breaks in Part 5, and from Andrée's critical perspective that Chantal's reaction to Monique's pregnancy is narrated. We have to wait until the final part, in which the external narrator focuses first through Chantal and then through Andrée, to witness Chantal, badly shaken and frightened by her complete misinterpretation of events, finally succeeding in the resurrection of her own image:

All at once her sadness vanished. At the dawn of these young lives her form would stand out forever, her slim form, so well set off in a tailored suit—a somewhat enigmatic, paradoxical form, whose appearance in an old provincial town had been so dazzling (WTS p. 87).

Chantal is once again the heroine of her own life story.

Chantal's illusions inevitably involve other people to a much greater extent than Marcelle's, since Chantal is so dependent on the opinion and admiration of others, and the variation of narrative viewpoint enables the discrepancy between Chantal's illusion of how others see her and the reality to come into play. Her careerism, social snobbery and puritanism are not motivated within the story by reference to her childhood and adolescence, as are Marcelle's traits (though some details do emerge later in 'Anne'); this lack of immediate context, together with Andrée's condemnation of the character leave Chantal as firmly denounced as by any ironical external narrator.

A strong element of 'Chantal' is the portrait offered of an institution, and its role in the fate of the two adolescent girls. The narrative follows the shape of the school year, beginning in October and ending with the annual prize-giving ceremony. The narrow lives of the teachers, the teaching methods and examination systems which stifle any element of intellectual enquiry, the constant stress given to dress and conduct, are shown to conspire in the oppression of Andrée and Monique into a sterile world from which any attempt at escape is doomed to lead, like Monique's adventure, to further entanglement.

The real tragedies of the cycle take place in the second and fourth stories, which are also linked by the presence of Chantal in both. Intervening between 'Chantal' and 'Anne' is the brief third story, 'Lisa', which continues the theme of institutional oppression. Lisa arrives in Paris as a student teacher at the Catholic college of the Institution Saint-Ange, with a robust constitution and a lively intelligence; after four years: 'Intellectual work had mined her body, and far from enriching this thin and unproductive soil, cultivation had made it barren (...) . She would never pass an agrégation; she would never write a book' (WTS p. 92). This is the view of Lisa offered by Mademoiselle Lambert, in charge of the student teachers at the college; its bleak prognostications for Lisa's future are confirmed by Lisa herself. She knows that her only hope of earning a living is to study for the competitive examinations that would allow her to become a fully fledged teacher, but hates the idea of 'using one's brain as though it were a machine for grinding knowledge' (WTS p. 94). The constraints of life in the college, an institution which allows only one day a week to be spent outside its walls, and which keeps its pensionnaires in almost complete penury, make the present as bleak as the future.⁷ Lisa's only escape is to the Bibliothèque Nationale—another institution, frequented by 'the scholars, the students, the cranks and the respectable tramps—the usual frequenters of the library' (WTS p. 94).

The drawing in of this oppressive context makes of Lisa a victim rather than a focus of blame, but the external narrative voice conveys more a sense of distaste for Lisa than pity. In the opening section of the story, in which the external narrator exercises a great deal of autonomy, a clearly ironical tone is perceptible at the expense of the Institute, described as 'both a money-making and a charitable concern' (WTS p. 91). After presenting Mademoiselle Lambert in a similarly sardonic tone, the narrative voice adopts the view of Mademoiselle Lambert to present the unflattering portrait of Lisa referred to above before eventually moving to Lisa's perspective. Little is done, however, to correct the first impression. Demanding and suspicious, Lisa is shown behaving badly even with her friend Marguerite. Her obsession with Pascal, the brother of Marguerite and Marcelle, who she regards as a superior being able to perceive Lisa's own true worth, makes her into a figure of ridicule and pathos. After the disappointment of a banal conversation with him, Lisa's need for admiration is so great that she allows herself to take at face value the professional badinage of her dentist.

In the final page of the story the narrative dissolves into an incoherent monologue of sexual fantasy, in which Lisa mixes the dentist, Pascal and the figure of an archangel. The mysticism of her attitude and the vocabulary of this final section again point to the influence of a religious upbringing on the retreat into spiritualism, even for those who have lost their actual religious faith. One other interesting aspect of the story is its stress on body image. Taught not to look at her naked body in childhood, Lisa hates her appearance, and assumes it to be unattractive. When a woman mistakes her in the street for her husband's mistress, Lisa is at first amused and irritated, but later, looking at herself in the mirror, sees that with the right clothes and make-up she could be thought elegant.

'Lisa' is less than half the length of most of the other stories, and it extends in time over less than a single day. Though the characters of Marguerite and Pascal appear in it, it does not share in the strong structural relationship which the first story has with the last, or the third with the fifth, and constitutes a strangely retreating centre to the volume.⁸ It is followed by 'Anne', the longest story of the collection, in which Beauvoir transposed the tragedy of her schoolfriend Elisabeth.⁹ Structurally, 'Anne' resembles 'Chantal' in its use of a variety of narrative situations and its division into numbered parts. Part 1 opens on a striking use of monologue in a long prayer by Anne's mother, Madame Vignon; the blatant bad faith of this devout mother emerges strongly as she elaborates, within the structure of her prayer, her plans to shunt her eldest daughter off into an unwanted marriage, and her strategy to recover her younger daughter for herself by cutting off Anne's friendship with Chantal, her correspondence with Pascal and her contact with any form of intellectual stimulation. Her constant self-justification of her behaviour in terms of the rights and duties of motherhood ('When it is a question of her daughter's soul, a mother has the right to commit an impropriety; but even using steam it is hard not to leave a trace'; WTS p. 111), combined with an evident dislike of her daughter Lucette, strongly anticipates the claims of Murielle, the mother in one of the stories of The Woman Destroyed who drives her daughter to suicide whilst claiming to be a devoted mother.

At the end of the prayer an external narrative voice is introduced which, like the external narrator in sections of 'Chantal', retains a certain autonomy of exposition whilst generally focusing through a character, here Madame Vignon. In the rest of the section, Madame Vignon's absolute power is wielded to good effect, as she drives Lucette into marriage by a mixture of threats and appeals to Christian principles, and tortures the fragile Anne by throwing into question Anne's faith and morality. In Part 2 the external narrative voice switches focus to Chantal—a dramatic and interesting switch, not only because it allows us to see what has become of Chantal but because Chantal is the principal combatant, with Anne's mother, in the battle over Anne's destiny. Madame Vignon nourishes ambitions for Anne to become a saint, whilst Chantal plans to rid Anne of beliefs which she sees as preventing Anne's happiness and marry her off to Pascal.

The portrait of the mother is so malevolent that Chantal might appear as the knight in shining armour ready to take up arms in defence of her friend. However, the external narrator suffuses the text with sufficient irony for it to be immediately apparent that Chantal has her own interests at heart. The narrative slips from free indirect speech to evident ironical interpretation:

Anne must have been brought very low for her mother to have reversed her decision: it was a real stepping-down on the part of Madame Vignon. Chantal felt quite moved at the notion that she was bringing her friend treasures of hope and joy and happiness. (WTS p. 125)

Chantal turns out to be as expert in jesuitical argumentation as the mother: '"Even from the Christian point of view passiveness and inertia have never been virtues," said Chantal. "You have told me yourself that this total submission to the divine will is often only a cover for laziness and cowardice"' (WTS p. 132). Anne is caught between the guilt she feels if she goes against her mother's wishes, and the self-hatred she feels if she bows to them. Chantal sees this conflict as a 'stage required' (WTS p. 133) in Anne's development whilst Madame Vignon asks God to harden her heart in Anne's own interest.

The final protagonist in the battle for Anne comes into play in Part 3 of the story, as the external narrative focuses through Pascal. However, Pascal, like Madame Vignon and Chantal, fails to put Anne first, and the narrative voice retains an expository and ironical function to underline the guilt of all the major players in Anne's tragedy. When Pascal receives an urgent telegram from Anne expressing her distress, the narrator comments: 'the urgent tone of the appeal astonished him, and with Pascal astonishment was always close to reprobation' (WTS p. 139). While Anne aspires to passion and happiness, Pascal tells her gravely that 'of all the diversions men have discovered, happiness is without doubt the most illusory' (WTS p. 144); for him, the couple's 'silent, mystic communion was the highest peak a love could reach' (WTS p. 144). Anne has to go without the embrace which 'would have seemed to him too coarse to translate their hearts' inexpressible harmony' (WTS p. 145). Here, and in the explanation that in his youth Pascal 'had had some rather squalid adventures' which 'had left him with a sense of great disgust' (WTS pp. 147-48), we can clearly hear the external narrator's voice.

The fourth and final part sees the narrative focus passing from one to the other of all the main participants, as each in turn attempts to salvage his or her own interests from the wreck of their projects. The presentation of Anne entirely from other people's points of view—though her speech is frequently presented directly in dialogue with the other characters—emphasises the pressures under which she suffers and tilts the balance of responsibility away from her. There is no evidence in fact that she shares the bad faith of the heroines of the previous stories, despite the fact that her fate and her strong religious belief place her under the banner of spiritualism. The inseparability' of spiritualism and self-deception to which Beauvoir refers in the preface is not made clear in the story of Anne-Elisabeth, an account of a tragedy in which Beauvoir evidently retained a strong personal investment.

'Anne', the penultimate story in the volume, brings back into play the characters of Chantal, Pascal and Marcelle. Pascal plays his biggest role here. He is in fact the only man in the whole volume who is viewed from the inside, and this privileged view is far from making him appear sympathetic. Chantal's role is interesting; in a way she repeats the pattern of the earlier story, intervening in the lives of others without any real desire to see her plans through or any appreciation of the effect her behaviour might have, and demonstrating an admirable capacity to recover from other peoples' disasters. Set against the monstrous behaviour of the mother, however, Chantal appears less guilty of treachery towards her friend, and Beauvoir draws on her own experiences of a summer holiday visit to her friend Elisabeth's family to convey the character's status as disliked outsider.¹⁰ The story also offers some indications of an unhappy, poverty-stricken childhood, which go some way towards explaining Chantal's social ambitions.

The final story, 'Marguerite', draws together again Marcelle, Pascal and Charval, and seems to take upon itself the role of tying up the loose ends, since it also gives news in the last lines of Chantal, otherwise in no way involved in 'Marguerite'. This poses something of a problem, since the narrator of the story is Marguerite herself. At the end of her fairly formal first-person narrative, after disassociating herself from Pascal and Marcelle, Marguerite declares:

But that is a story I do not intend to tell. All I have wished to do was to show how I was brought to try to look things straight in the face, without accepting oracles or ready-made values. I had to rediscover everything myself, and sometimes it was disconcerting—furthermore, not everything is clear even now. But in any case what I do know is that Marcelle and Chantal and Pascal will die without ever having known or loved anything real and that I do not want to be like them. Chantal married a wealthy physician, Marcelle has just published a slim volume of verse, and the other day an archaeological journal mentioned Pascal's name with praise. They are not discontented with their lot. (WTS p. 202)

Marguerite seems to be not only aware of the dramas of all three characters, but actually conscious of the need to bring them all into play at the end of her narrative, as if she herself had read (or written) the preceding stories. She gives news of them almost as if they were her own fictional creatures, and concludes, 'They are not discontended with their lot' with exactly the sense of superiority and irony displayed by the external narrator in other stories. What is the motivation, in fact, for this first-person narrative? None is given at the beginning; the final paragraph given above, however, makes it clear that Marguerite intends her narrative to 'show' how she had come to abandon spiritualism—in other words, her narrative is addressed to a reader, the reader who she informs that there is another story which she does 'not intend to tell'. This is no journey of self-discovery, but a formally composed account with a single flow of narrative time, and in which the first lines anticipate the last. In both the French and English prefaces to the collection, Beauvoir refers to the strongly autobiographical basis of the story; the authority and powers lent to Marguerite's voice presumably originate in this identification between character and author, both motivated by the desire to 'show' their revolt against the spiritualism of which they themselves had been the prey.

With the exception of Andrée, whose fate is left uncertain, Marguerite is the only positive heroine of the volume, neither victim nor self-deceived, standing for 'the real' and for 'acts' in the place of dreams, for courage and self-reliance in the place of 'cowardice' and 'hypocrisy' (WTS pp. 201-2). On her way to this discovery, Marguerite easily rejects Marcelle's cult of beauty, and Pascal's cult of 'the inner life' (WTS p. 159), but has considerably more difficulty in rejecting Denis's mysticism, his cult of the bizarre and the immoral. The sections set in the bars of Montparnasse amidst prostitutes and pimps see Marguerite ecstatically worshipping vice, just as in her childhood she had approached the Holy Sacrament: 'in my own way I too was serving the things of the spirit,' writes Marguerite (WTS p. 173), evidently delighted by the audacity of her parallel. The temptations of sexuality, strongly outlined in 'Marcelle' and suggested in 'Lisa', are however beyond the ken of this would-be practitioner of vice; accepting invitations from strange men and sharing the bed of a lesbian, Marguerite takes flight when 'acts' threaten. In the 1970s Beauvoir suggested to Alice Schwarzer that sexual relations could be a great trap for women, and indicated that the frigid woman in her view was perhaps fortunate in being less vulnerable to this trap.¹¹ Forty years earlier in When Things of the Spirit Come First there is already a strong feeling that female sexuality can work against women, as the puritanical Chantal and Marguerite are found faring considerably better than Marcelle or the schoolgirl Monique.

The cycle thus ends on a positive, almost edifying note. Marguerite seizes the pen to write her success story in a way that no woman character in Beauvoir's novels ever achieves. In stylistic terms, Marguerite's use of a formally composed first-person narrative does not reappear either; instead, the narrative forms of bad faith—the diary, the interior monologue of the prayer—are taken up and developed in The Woman Destroyed. The external narrative voice is purged of its irony, its autonomy, its distance and its formality when it reappears in the novels. When Things of the Spirit Come First shows a concern and a desire for experimentation in narrative voice and structure that looks forward to later developments in Beauvoir's fiction.

The Woman Destroyed

The Woman Destroyed is the last of Beauvoir's fictional works. Published in 1967, only a year after Les Belles Images, it has much in common with this novel as well as with the much earlier When Things of the Spirit Come First The heroines of The Woman Destroyed are the older sisters of Laurence and of the young women of When Things of the Spirit Come First, not only in terms of the illusions with which they struggle, but also in terms of the largely bourgeois milieu in which they are situated.

Beauvoir has described the three stories as presenting 'the voices of three women who use words in their struggle with a situation in which all exits are blocked'.¹² The struggle with words, already apparent in Les Belles Images, where Laurence intermittently formulates her T, takes place in The Woman Destroyed without the presence of an external narrative voice. Each woman produces a monologue, each of a different type but each performing essentially the same function, which is to provide her with an erroneous and self-justified reading of her situation. Reality breaks into these discourses in varying degrees; the forms and strategies of Chantal's diary and Madame Vignon's prayer are re-adopted and elaborated to present the reader with the materials of a detective story: 'I hoped that people would read the book as a detective story; here and there I scattered clues that would allow the reader to find the key to the mystery,' writes Beauvoir of one of the stories in All Said and Done (ASD p. 140). Since the subject of each story is essentially a demonstration of the ways in which each woman produces a self-justifying discourse in the face of a mountain of evidence against them, the wider issue of the relationship of women to language is also approached.

Though each story is kept formally closed in on itself, the adoption of the title of the last and longest of the three stories as the title of the volume produces a particular pattern of expectations about the cycle. There is a two-way process in which the reader feels that the first two stories are a preparation for the last, and that, in reverse, the reading of the last story may reveal something affecting the decoding of the stories as a whole. Another rather striking aspect of the title is the way in which it draws attention to the sex of the narrator-protagonists; the fact that the stories are about women, and about women in difficulties, is underlined from the outset. Finally a third, less immediately apparent aspect, is that the title permits the direct expression of an authorial view; a glimpse all the more interesting since the use of monologue within the stories themselves does not offer any scope to overt comments by an author or narrator. Unlike When Things of the Spirit Come First, the title of The Woman Destroyed (La Femme rompue) offers no indication of the source of the characters' problems; instead, it offers a categorisation, a use of a conventional statement with a rather dismissive definite article, which fixes the characters inescapably into place and carries at least a hint of an ironic distancing between the author and her three femmes rompues.¹³

The Age of Discretion

Within the volume itself the first story also has a title employed with ironic intention, though the object of the irony is not necessarily the woman. The title of The Age of Discretion (L'Age de discrétion) sets up a conventional view of old age which is exploded during the course of the story.¹⁴ The woman narrator is supremely confident that retirement is the last pleasant phase of a happy and successful life; behind her in her mind's eye she sees a successful career, a long and happy relationship with her husband, and an exemplary devotion to her son, whose education and career she has personally guided. Gradually, the discrepancy between the woman's affirmations about the success of her retirement on the one hand, and the realities of old age on the other, force her monologue into question. The present, she discovers, cannot be defined by the past even when the past stretches out much further than an inevitably short future; she cannot rely on communication with her husband as she has always done because he too is growing old; worst of all, she cannot count on laying claim to the future through her stake in her son's life, as she has to give up the role of possessive and dominating mother. Even the aging of her body, which she imagines she has come to terms with, eventually disrupts her view of herself and forces itself upon her attention.¹⁵

However, the focus of the story is not so much on these problems in themselves as on the woman's mythmaking resistance to recognition of them. Of the three stories of the volume, the monologue of The Age of Discretion is the most conventionally organised. It is divided into three narrative blocks, based on three narrative moments: the opening block begins with the woman looking at her watch and consists of her reflections as she awaits the arrival of her son in her flat, ending just before his actual arrival (TWD p. 18); in the second block she goes over her son's visit and connected problems in her mind while lying awake in bed the following morning (the narrative moment is TWD pp. 26-27); the third and most substantial block is less clearly situated in terms of narrative time and does not return to a narrative present until the series of questions which close the story. Each block therefore consists in principle of a block of interior monologue, but in practice the feeling of interior monologue is considerably reduced by the strong element of narrative of events. Though each block begins and ends in the present tense, with narrative and story time coinciding, each block quickly moves into the past tense (the perfect tense nevertheless in the French text, not the past historic) to offer a clear and consecutive account of events. The use of three separate narrative blocks instead of one also tends to reduce the feeling of interior monologue, since it draws attention to an organising presence external to the character; however, the spaces between the blocks permit the development of events which eventually force the narrative into question.

The Age of Discretion demands rather less of the reader than the other two stories in the sense that the narrator herself eventually begins to admit some of her own errors—and the reader is clearly invited by her doubts and admissions to seek out further flaws in her analyses. As in When Things of the Spirit Come First, the first story of the cycle thus invites a reading practice which will serve in the other stories. However, the woman's narrative begins to look suspicious long before she makes any admissions. Early clues largely centre on discrepancies between the level and tone of her vocabulary on the one hand, and her claims on the other. Thus, for example, her claim to have come to terms with retirement is undermined by her commentary on the sound of the word retirement (la retraite); the word, she muses, had always struck her as sounding just like on the scrap heap (au rebut) (TWD p. 10). A few lines later she adds that retirement is one of those lines in life which once crossed has the rigidity of an iron curtain.

Other illusions are signalled by the categorical tone in which the woman rehearses her convictions. She declares of a book on the subject of communication between people: 'What a bore, all this going on about non-communication! If you really want to communicate you manage, somehow or other' (TWD p. 7). Equally firmly fixed in her mind is her feeling that the book she has just completed is her best yet. Dismissing her husband's doubts she declares, 'I know he is wrong. I have just written my best book and the second volume will go even further' (TWD p. 16). The reader can hardly be surprised when, later in the story, the woman falls into a morass of misunderstandings with those around her and eventually asks in disbelief, 'Might all one heard about noncommunication perhaps be true, then?' (TWD p. 44). More shattering still is what she finally has to admit about her book: 'I had produced nothing new, absolutely nothing. And I knew that the second volume would only prolong this stagnation. There it was then; I had spent three years writing a useless book. Not just a failure (...) . Useless. Only fit for burning' (TWD p. 53).

In the example of the book what is immediately noticeable is the tone of the woman's new version of the truth; it is no less categorical than her earlier view, and the reader is all the more inclined to view it with suspicion now that the woman has already proved to be wrong. Where else can the reader now turn for evidence to bolster these suspicions? The views of other characters have to be treated with caution, since we only know what the woman believes them to say or think. Nevertheless, a number of other characters do serve as a corrective to the woman's illusions. Martine, the former pupil, is used to deliver the truth about the merits of the woman's book ('an excellent synthesis' but 'nothing new'; TWD p. 50). Manette, embodying the appetite for life which has made of her retirement 'a delight' (TWD p. 18), counterbalances the image of the horrors of old age which the woman posits on the last page. Even Irène, the daughter-in-law straight from the world of Les Belles Images, serves to point up the absolutism of the woman's social and political values ('Anyone would think he had become a burglar'; TWD, p. 32).

However, other characters apart, there is a further clue embodied in the text to the mechanisms which operate in the woman's construction of her self-deceiving discourse, and this is what might be termed the degree of literarity of the text. Words are naturally crucial to the woman's construction process, firstly through the very frequent recourse which, as a teacher of literature, she has to literary works, and secondly through her habit of using words in a heightened manner to construct both her idylls and her disappointments. Both these factors are present in her contrasting views of the past, exemplified in the following two extracts. In the first, taken from the opening passages of the story, the woman has just prepared the couple's breakfast tea:

I poured out the China tea, very hot, very strong. We drank it as we looked through our post: the July sunshine came flooding into the room. How many times had we sat there opposite one another at that little table, our very hot, very strong cups of tea in front of us? And we would be sitting there again tomorrow, and in a year's time, and in ten years' time. . . . That moment had the sweet taste of memory, and the warmth of a promise. Were we thirty or sixty? (TWD tr. adap. p. 7)

In the second, she goes to meet her friend Martine:

As I came into the gardens the smell of cut grass wrung my heart—the smell of the Alpine pastures where I had walked, a haversack on my back, with André, a smell so moving because it was the smell of the fields of my childhood. Reflections, echoes, reverberating in infinity: I have discovered the pleasures of having a long past behind me. I haven't got time to recount it to myself, but often, quite unexpectedly, I catch a glimpse of it, a luminous background to the present; a background that gives the present its colour and its light, as rocks and sand are reflected in the shifting, glistening mirror of the sea. (TWD tr. adap. p. 14)

Both of these extracts are highly polished mythical moments which the woman constructs for herself to maintain her illusion that time passes with no destructive effect, that she and her husband remain the same at 60 as they were at 30, that the past is a kind of sunny country walk which she can choose to take at her leisure. If the highly literary nature of the writing in these passages were not sufficient to alert us to their suspect nature, further clues emerge from the way the woman perceives the subject through a screen of literary culture. This teacher of literature values nothing more highly than culture, and, like Chantal of When Things of the Spirit Come First, she draws on it to bolster her myths, quoting Valery, Hugo, Montesquieu, Sainte-Beuve, Bachelard, Freud, Hans Christian Andersen and others. In the tea-drinking cameo quoted above it is difficult to miss the allusion to Proustian privileged moments. When these images of the nature of the past are eventually counterbalanced by apparent 'discoveries' of illusion, the new position is expressed in terms as mythical and self-consciously literary as the original image. Thus, after an attempt to literally return to the scenes of her childhood, the woman is faced with the shattering of her polished image of the past; she therefore replaces her image of 'the sweet taste of memory' and the sunny countryside walk by Chateaubriand's phrase, 'the desert of time past' (le désert du passé) to express her rejection of the past as no more than a series of stereotypical images, which fade with use. The sunny countryside or the desert? Proust or Chateaubriand? At the end of the story the woman appears to have completely abandoned her view of pleasant retirement; in the last paragraph she replaces her ideal of a period in which values, relationships and preoccupations remain essentially unchanged by a vision of a future of increasing withdrawal from others and from the world, a future dominated by mental and physical decay.

Has the woman abandoned her illusions for realism? Or has she simply gone from one extreme to another, substituting an impossibly black view for an overly rosy one? The period which the woman spends alone in the flat, painfully confronting her attitude to her work and to her son, appears to indicate her progress towards realism. Regretfully, she rejects the comfort of the phrase that an adult is no more than 'a child puffed with age' (TWD p. 47), and accepts that the age of her privileged relationship with her son is over. The adjustment to her body is less successful. Convinced that she made the adjustment to her physical ageing ten years earlier, the woman actually copes with the loss of attractiveness by failing to identify with her body, describing it as 'an old friend who needed my help' (TWD p. 17). On the swimming expedition with André this apparent tranquillity is exploded by her shame at her 'ghastly' old woman's body and by her anger at not being able to take the climb back up the path as easily as she used to (TWD p. 59). She concludes in disgust that her body is 'letting me down' (TWD p. 60), and a strong element of her nightmarish vision of the years ahead with which the story closes is the notion of physical decay.

The most positive element of the end of the story is the re-establishment of the woman's dialogue with André; the two are shown reacting very differently to their age, but they manage to reaffirm the things they have in common. The re-establishment of this dialogue is closely linked to communion with nature and a reconfirmation of the value of culture. Earlier in the story the woman had found that language was breaking down, 'words came to pieces in my mind' (TWD p. 55), that paintings, books and museums no longer had anything to offer her (TWD pp. 54, 64-65). Now, citing a line from the thirteenth century Aucassin et Nicolette, the woman gazes at the moon and feels reunited with the world as it was centuries ago. "That's the great thing about writing," I said. "Pictures lose their shape; their colours fade. But words you carry away with you'" (TWD p. 68). Literature is re-established as a privileged activity. Thus, although many of the woman's assumptions are challenged in the story, others are reconfirmed: the value of the couple, of communication and of the woman's commitment to her work and to culture remain. Though she has faced up to a certain number of her illusions and declares herself determined to face reality, she remains enmeshed in a special use of words.

Monologue

The title of the second story, together with the epigraph from Flaubert (The monologue is her form of revenge'), focuses the reader's attention from the beginning on the use of interior monologue, thus reinforcing the tendency of this narrative mode to emphasise by its very nature the narrative itself. In strong contrast to The Age of Discretion, the second story, Monologue, immerses the reader in a single stretch of interior monologue. Ignoring the rules of punctuation and the syntax of written French, largely observed in the first story, Monologue proceeds by the logic of associations and transitions dependent on the flow of consciousness. Sudden changes of subject and unexplained references to new characters and events constantly hinder the reader and prevent identification with the speaker. The violence and crudity of the language appear designed to alienate from the first line; at times the text engages not only in a challenge but virtually an assault on the reader, most notably when the speaker Murielle begins to shout, 'I'm sick of it I'm sick of it sick sick sick . . .' TWD p. 83), where sick is then repeated on the page 81 times. The reader is left embarrassed, bewildered, confronted with the responsibility as reader and uncertain whether to conscientiously read the words, contemplate them on the page or fall back on counting them (a surprisingly frequent reaction).

Procedures such as this inevitably draw attention to the highly self-conscious nature of the interior monologue. Both the title and the story's epigraph also underline the narrative mode itself. Though the title simply identifies it in a neutral way, this neutrality is balanced out by the epigraph (The monologue is her form of revenge'), though which the author is able to establish the link between language and violence in her text. Despite the violence and apparent chaos of the narrative, however, the Monologue gradually assumes structure and meaning; the crisis of desperation expressed by the monologue is gradually understood by the reader to be an anticipation of the visit of Murielle's son Francis and her second husband Tristan, during which she plans to try to persuade them to set up house again with her. Much of Murielle's unconnected ramblings are in fact a rehearsal of the arguments which she intends putting to Tristan, and a rebuttal of the charges which she knows her family level against her over the death of her daughter Sylvie. Whilst she prepares her case in her mind, her neighbours and people outside in the street celebrate New Year's Eve; the passing of time during the evening and the part of the night which the monologue lasts is marked out by the stages which the festivities reach outside and in the flat above. Inside Murielle's flat her desperation is also patterned by a series of crises. The first, fed by a macabre vision of herself dying alone in her flat, leads her into the wave of self-pity which reaches its height with the series of 'sicks' (TWD p. 83). Shortly afterwards, she makes her first gesture towards the outside world as she tries to ring Tristan, driven to seek human contact by her memories of her daughter's funeral. The lack of any reply plunges her deeper into her guilt and pain at Sylvie's death and she tries to contact her own mother, who thrusts her back into solitude by putting the phone down (TWD p. 90).

A long passage of the monologue then circles round her mother, and mother-child relationships, with her thoughts inevitably returning again to Sylvie. Reliving all the details of the circumstances of Sylvie's death, and the reactions of others to it, she concludes with an absolute affirmation of her own innocence: 'Looking deep into the eyes of my seventeen-year-old girl they murdered I say, "I was the best of mothers." You would have thanked me later on' (TWD p. 98). A break in the monologue follows (unfortunately not indicated typographically in the English translation) as Murielle cries. After this break she appears calmer, snaps back into battling mood and takes the decision not to wait until the following morning but to telephone Tristan and put her case at once. Her 'dialogue' with Tristan is the only sustained contact Murielle makes within the story—but it does not permit escape from the monologue. The reader does not hear Tristan, and nor, it seems, does Murielle, as she launches into an unstoppable tirade. When Tristan too cuts the contact, Murielle enters into a paroxysm of rage and hysteria which brings the monologue to a close.

Within this structure, the theme of the mother-child relationship is constantly returned to. 'A child needs its mother' (TWD p. 75)—Murielle pronounces the maxim which she regards as the central plank of her case for her husband and son to take up life with her again on the first page of her monologue. It is repeated many times in the story, in varying forms, and the unmasking of Murielle necessarily implies the unmasking of this truism, deliberately embedded in a context which subverts it. In the interests of producing this context, Murielle is established as a highly unreliable narrator and as a person whose behaviour towards her children (in contrast to her claims) has been alarming in the extreme. 'A kid deprived of his mother always ends up by going to the bad he'll turn into a hooligan or a fairy,' declares Murielle of her son at one moment (TWD pp. 79-80), whilst threatening to commit suicide in front of him at another. In the case of Sylvie, the daughter who committed suicide, Murielle is prepared to defend the fact that she was in the habit of reading her daughter's diary ('I look things straight in the face'; TWD p. 81), and searching her room for letters ('I was doing my duty as a mother'; TWD p. 84); that she called the police when Sylvie tried to go and live with her father ('Was I supposed to put on kid gloves?'; TWD p. 84), interfered in a friendship which Sylvie had with a woman teacher at school ('these brainy types are all lesbians'; TWD p. 85, tr. adap.), punished her when Sylvie refused friends of Murielle's choosing and finally, when the girl was driven to suicide, tore up the suicide note addressed to the father ('it didn't mean a thing . . . a mother knows her own daughter'; TWD p. 96).

Murielle's behaviour is so appalling, her justifications so clearly inadequate, that the kinds of ambiguities about the truth which subsist in the first story appear to have little place in this one. The reader is in no doubt that it is their task to contest Murielle's assessment of herself as 'the best of mothers' (TWD p. 98) by uncovering the gaps and discrepancies in her discourse and unravelling the plot, or perhaps one should say series of sub-plots (What were the circumstances of the death of Murielle's daughter? What was the traumatic incident which occurred one 14 July in Murielle's childhood which appears to have had a traumatic effect on her? Why is the day following the monologue one of such importance to Murielle?). The stance that the reader is invited to adopt is demanding but clear. Having once adopted this detective stance, however, we find ourselves investigating, amongst all the other evidence of Murielle's illusions and unreliability, a network of maxims and ideas about the relationship of a mother to her children which are so much a part of accepted wisdom that the reader might well be inclined to pass over them or even positively accept them if they were not so insistently formulated by a character whom we have been led to profoundly mistrust.

Murielle frequently vaunts her disciplinary system which 'breaks in' children as one might an animal.¹⁶ Her ideal of a child is Jeanne—a tearful, timid, affection-starved little girl who has been slapped by her mother into submission, and who is willing to run all the little errands which Murielle demands. The child is viewed as a kind of clay for the mother to model as she thinks fit: 'I'll make a splendid child of Francis they'll see what kind of a mother I am,' she says of her son (TWD p. 93); and of her daughter's death she declares in even more extreme terms, 'My life's work gone up in smoke' (TWD p. 90). Murielle's elaboration of the power which society accords to the mother into a demagogic system, her erection of her idea of herself as a mother into a self-justifying role in life, constitute the key threads of a discourse which we are invited to unpick and which, despite its exaggeration, is based on perfectly commonplace ideas ('A mother knows her child'; 'A boy needs his mother a mother can't do without her child'; TWD p. 86; 'From an educational point of view it's disastrous for one parent to side against the other'; TWD p. 89, tr. adap.)

In one of the last images of the Monologue Murielle calls on God to prepare a paradise for her in which she can walk hand in hand with her children whilst the rest of the world burns in hell. To what extent can Murielle's obsession with creating an image of herself as the perfect mother be seen as a response to her situation, to what extent can her notions of motherhood be seen as having been responsible for creating her situation? In other words, where is the balance made to come down between victim and accomplice? Like that other authoritarian mother, Madame Vignon, it is not easy to elicit the case for Murielle's defence from the story. She does face problems of solitude, low social status as a divorced woman in the France of the 1960s, and financial problems. Her discourse of herself as perfect mother could be read as a terrified response to the harsh verdict generally returned by society on the mother who reveals herself to be less than perfect, and of which she is well aware. The very notion that her monologue is the discourse of revenge, suggested by the epigraph, in itself implies that Murielle has been wronged. She is the only one of the three women of The Woman Destroyed for whom a childhood background is drawn in—an element which suggests that a connection between her situation and her childhood is to be sought. The traumatic July 14 experience in which the brother is lifted up on the father's shoulders while she is left on the ground 'squashed between them just at prick level and that randy crowd's smell of sex' (TWD p. 76), suggests in one the secondary status of the girl in the family situation and the problematic assumption of sexuality by the girl, caught between the father and the mother. In her monologue, Murielle feels the need to present herself as disinterested in sex, pure as the white blackbird, and to project an image of purity and cleanliness onto external objects like the moon and her domestic surroundings. Yet her whole vision is crudely sexual, her monologue vulgar and obscene in a way which Beauvoir's earlier 'negative' women characters barely approach.

The story does contain, therefore, the bones of a 'situation'. Murielle is not presented as unintelligent and it is possible to sympathise with her criticisms of a society which can devise a moon rocket programme but not a satisfactory central heating system, or with her concern about pollution. But possible points of contact with Murielle inevitably break down. For her, fear of pollution extends to not wanting to breathe air that others have breathed; a well-founded scepticism about the real meaning of terms such as the 'progress' and 'prosperity' of humanity leads her to see the massacre of children as an answer to the overcrowding of the planet (see TWD p. 88). Not only what she says about herself as a mother, but virtually everything else she says is subverted within the narrative as her maxims are exploded, her ideas of what is 'normal' or 'natural' turned in on themselves and shown to be in direct contradiction to reality. Nowhere does this monologue succeed in opening out to a dialogue with reality or with others.

There is a point in her narrative at which Murielle imagines writing a book about herself—a book which will force 'the others' to accept her version of events.¹⁷ In the same way she imagines having a photograph of herself in which she would look perfect published in Vogue. Her monologue derives from the same need to impose an image of herself, to use words to impose herself on others. Like Chantal in her diary, like Monique of the last story, Murielle uses words to create herself. The power and rage of the character is directed into a discourse of folly and delusion, of violence and sexual fantasy which the reader is forced to embrace all the better to reject it.

The Woman Destroyed

The reader's approach to the last and longest of the stories is inevitably pre-ordered by the experience of the first two. We expect the woman of the third monologue to have things in common with the first two, and indeed she does. Like them, she is in crisis, like them she weaves a web of specious interpretations and mystifications in an attempt to protect herself from an unpalatable truth: in this case the fact that her marriage is at an end, that her children are grown up and no longer need her, and that she herself has a large burden of responsibility to bear for the ruins of her life which she contemplates lying about her.

However, there is a difference in the status of her discourse in the sense that she produces not simply thoughts or words but a written narrative in the form of a diary, covering not hours or weeks but just over six months of her life. Monique is the first woman in Beauvoir's fiction since When Things of the Spirit Come First to achieve the status of writer-narrator, and arguably the only character for whom the process of writing itself eventually brings about a measure of change. The use of the diary form inevitably brings to the fore the subject of the activity of writing, since the diarist is perceived by the reader—and perceives herself—as writer, as the source of the narrative as well as its subject. Monique is aware of the highly self-conscious nature of diary writing, a writing which she had already used as an adolescent and which she calls in the first entry a writing that is 'just for myself. By the fifth entry she is more or less able to admit that her desire to write is connected to her unease about her relationship with Maurice and notes, 'What an odd thing a diary is: the things you omit are more important than those you put in' (TWD p. 111).

The crisis breaks in the very next entry, confirming the reader's suspicion that a great deal has not been put in, and from this point on Monique herself begins feverishly using the diary to construct a series of shifting hypotheses, on two fronts. One series concerns the images she constructs of Maurice's liaison with Noëllie—images which are necessarily hypothetical and which are clouded by both Monique's desire to minimise the relationship as much as possible, and by the fact that Maurice continues lying to her even after he has begun telling the truth. Monique is thus forced to adjust her readings as each further bit of truth emerges. On a second front, Monique uses the diary to 're-examine' her life with Maurice, making small admissions and concessions but largely devoting herself to the construction of an image of herself and Maurice as a perfect couple, easily able to withstand the pressure of an unimportant liaison, and to the reinforcement of her self-image as a loving, genuine person—a person of 'quality' whom no one in their right mind would reject in favour of the 'superficial' Noëllie.

However, an important shift of position occurs in the diary entry of 15 January. Up to this point, Monique sees herself primarily as narrator, as producer of what is essentially discourse. When, like the woman of the first story, she spends a period in the wilderness alone in the flat while Maurice is away with Noëllie, Monique does not like the earlier woman simply review certain of her attitudes in her own mind—she re-reads her diary. At a stroke. Monique is able to perceive herself not only as producer, as narrator, but as actor in what has gradually become a story with characters and a plot (récit).18 Monique as reader is stunned by the evidence of the flagrant self-deception of her narrated self: 'There is not a single line in this diary that does not call for a correction or a denial ( . . . ) Is it possible to be so mistaken about one's own life as all that? Is everybody as blind as this or am I a half-wit?' (TWD p. 194). The main functions of the diary for Monique have been to tranquillise herself, to let as little as possible of the truth about the affair between Noëllie and Maurice filter through to her consciousness, and to confirm her self-image. As reader she perceives this, and incidentally, indicates to us as reader the position we should take up. How can she then continue writing, knowing to what purpose she has put it? 'I have taken to my pen again not to go back over the same ground but because the emptiness within me, around me, is so vast that this movement of my hand is necessary to tell myself that I am still alive' (TWD p. 194). The creation of a sense of identity has become an urgent problem, and writing is seized on as a possible means to achieve this. As she sinks further into the vacuum of loss of identity the diary entries falter. In an undated entry for February she writes:

There was once a man who lost his shadow. I forget what happened to him, but it was dreadful. As for me, I've lost my own image (...) Maurice had drawn it for me. A straight-forward, genuine, 'authentic' woman, without mean-mindedness, uncompromising, but at the same time understanding, indulgent, sensitive, deeply feeling, intensely aware of things and of people, passionately devoted to those she loved and creating happiness for them. A fine life, serene, full, 'harmonious'. It is dark: I cannot see myself any more. And what do the others see? Maybe something hideous. (TWD pp. 207-8)

With her values Monique loses the vocabulary inherited from her father and her husband; terms she has valued such as 'authenticity', 'sincerity', become empty; and with the collapse of her values comes the disintegration even of her sense of self. In the past, Monique has allowed her idea of herself to coincide with the view of her which she had supposed Maurice to hold, and to be couched in terms of Maurice's values and vocabulary ('authentic', 'harmonious'). Maurice's valorisation of the ambitious, showy, liberated Noëllie explodes this vocabulary, explodes the values which Monique had thought she shared with him, explodes Monique's sense of self. 'Maurice has murdered all the words,' (TWD p. 218), Monique writes after the psychiatrist persuades her to take up the diary again 'trying to get me to take an interest in myself, to reconstruct my identity for me' (TWD p. 208).

Monique's crisis of identity is closely bound up with Noëllie—in fact, in some ways, one could say that the central thread of the narrative becomes Monique's encounter with Noëllie as Monique's values are increasingly held up against and thrown into question by those of her rival and counterpart. In existentialist terms, Noëllie takes on the menacing face of the Other who obliges Monique to take cognisance of her image, just as Xavière does for Françoise in She Came to Stay. Maurice becomes a go-between through whom Monique is led to discover first another woman, and then herself. Noëllie has a career, works hard, is ambitious, is interested in what is going on in the world around her. She tries to teach her daughter 'to manage by herself, and to stand on her own feet' (TWD p. 154). Faced with this contrast, Monique becomes aware of her own intellectual stagnation, of her immersion in domestic matters, of the egotistic aspect of her desire to 'create happiness for those around me'. Worse still, she sees that she has not even succeeded in this aim, that instead of equipping her daughters with the means to make lives of their own, that she has weighed heavily on them, and pressed one into conforming to her own image, the other into rebelling and moving away. Like the woman of the first story, the temptation for Monique is to replace one extreme self-image by another: 'Perhaps a kind of leech that feeds on the life of others (...) An egoist who will not let go ( . . . ) Completely phoney through and through' (TWD p. 207). Other characters, particularly the realist daughter Lucienne, are used to counteract this assessment, and to prevent the slide into self-indulgent guilt. "You've always had a very exaggerated notion of your own responsibilities,' comments Lucienne crisply (TWD p. 218).

It is clear from the narrative that Monique is credited with many errors—she forced Maurice's hand on marriage with a pregnancy, which she more or less engineered because she found the realities of a medical career too much to take; she tried to confine her husband in a career which she herself describes as 'unexciting, run-of-the-mill, poorly paid' (TWD p. 119); she has been a dominating and possessive mother. Bolstering herself up with her image of herself as the perfect wife and mother, she has refused to interest herself in things outside the home, refused to face up to her deteriorating relationship with her husband, and clung to memories of the past. Realising despite herself that her memories are 15 years old, Monique asks herself in desperation, 'What do fifteen years count? Twice two is four. I love you, I love you alone. Truth cannot be destroyed, time has no effect on it' (TWD p. 114). Monique's desperate attempts to refuse to see that truth is not indestructible and that time does change everything, her attempt to build a myth of the couple in which Maurice would be her husband in the same necessary sense in which Colette is her daughter, closely resemble the illusions of the women in the first two stories. It is in this sense that the theme implicit in the first two stories of the use and abuse of language, the analysis of the mechanisms of the myth-making discourse which is itself a form of 'writing', becomes more explicit in The Woman Destroyed.

However, the diary is not just the record of Monique's errors—it is also the record of her pain, and this brings us to the crux of the problem of reading this story. Many readers, after immersion in Monique's narrative, emerge more with a strong sense of sympathy for a suffering fellow human being than with the sense that Monique ought not to have got herself into the position where she can declare to her husband, 'Here I am at forty-four, empty-handed, with no occupation, no other interest in life apart from you' (TWD pp. 178-79). Instead of seeing Monique as an object lesson in failure, an indication of how women weave myths to work themselves into the stereotype of the abandoned wife, many readers have preferred instead either to see Monique as the blame-less victim of a wicked husband, or to deliberately reject the object lesson, pointing to the collusion which the husband and society itself offer to a woman like Monique who asks nothing more than to live her life through others. In All Said and Done, Beauvoir recorded her astonishment at the enormous post which she received on publication of her stories:

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 (. . .). They shared Monique's blindness. (ASD p. 142)

On the more feminist front, Beauvoir defends her choice not to use positive heroines before adding that There is no reason at all why one should not draw a feminist conclusion from The Woman Destroyed' (ASD p. 144).

What elements of the story might be used for this feminist conclusion? How clearly are the victimising forces so apparent in When Things of the Spirit Come First drawn in here? A great deal turns on the portrait of the husband. Like the other characters, he is viewed only through Monique's eyes, and by keeping Monique in love with Maurice to the last, Beauvoir inevitably tilts the portrait towards the favourable. Yet the facts of his behaviour are made less than attractive—benefiting from Monique's support and work in the home while he has built up his career, he has waited ten years while Monique continues to be of need as a home-maker before announcing that he no longer loves her. Ten years earlier, Monique would have had a much better chance of remaking her life, and, as she says, would have agreed to take a job if she had known why Maurice was pressing her to do so (TWD p. 179). His lies about the seriousness of his relationship with Noëllie only encourage Monique not to face the truth. There is evidence of his manipulation of Monique's state of mind to suit himself. It is he who begs her to see a psychiatrist and allows her to recover some strength before announcing his departure from their flat (see TWD pp. 206, 210). Maurice's inability to face up to his own guilt seems to make him incapable of admitting the whole truth to Monique, except when he is angry and loses control. There are many parallels with Henri's treatment of Paule in The Mandarins, and Beauvoir seems just as indulgent. Maurice has the right to make a new life, she said in an interview in 1985, and in the story only two of the many people Monique consults express even a whisper of blame for Maurice (Marie-Lambert is critical of Maurice's silence and Colette blames Maurice's angry attack on Monique).¹⁹ Monique herself underlines Maurice's own suffering as frequently as she blames him, despite his persistent manoeuvres and lies. Other friends, both male and female, appear all to agree that Maurice's behaviour is 'perfectly usual' and that 'a faithfulness lasting twenty years is an impossibility for a man' (TWD p. 164); these claims are not questioned or extended to women within the narrative.

The possibilities in the story for placing blame on Maurice have clearly not been much exploited. However, there are two—perhaps three—elements which can be used for the feminist reading of the story to which Beauvoir refers. The first is the confrontation Monique's experience brings about with the traditional wisdom of what one might call the women's magazine ethic: This evening I am going out with Maurice. The advice of Isabelle and of Miss Lonely-hearts column—to get your husband back, be cheerful and elegant and go out with him, just the two of you' (TWD p. 117). It becomes painful to witness Monique endeavouring to hide her anger, to be 'more understanding, more detached, more full of smiles' (TWD p. 128), visiting the beauty parlour and worrying that she should have gone to the hairdresser more often, should have kept her weight in check, should have tried to revive (single-handedly) the couple's sex life.²⁰ As she consults her stars in the newspaper and sends off handwriting extracts to a graphologist, a chasm opens up between the futility of all these activities, all based on the notion that women must use their guile and charms to hook their man and then to keep him on the leash, and the increasingly evident truth that the game is not worth the candle. The other couples in the story seem little happier than Monique and Maurice; at times Monique begins to question the whole notion of the couple as a romantic ideal (at the Club 46, for example; TWD p. 189).

A second element derives from Beauvoir's strategy in choosing a negative heroine—the reverse of a role model—in both this and the other two stories. To posit women as helpless victims is to do nothing to transform the attitudes of women themselves. In choosing to emphasise the element of complicity rather than the element of oppression Beauvoir is working on the elements of their situation which it is within women's own power to change. To accuse her of being unsympathetic to women in these stories is to fail to see that Beauvoir is always extremely severe with women because she regards as criminal the encouragement which women are habitually offered to flee their freedom and their responsibility.

A third basis, finally, for a more positive reading of this story is the hope offered by the progression of the narrative itself. Monique discovers the power of words, and after using them to weave her myths in the first part of the diary, moves cautiously towards using them to face reality and construct a new, more independent identity. 'I am afraid,' declares Monique in the last line of her diary, but like Marguerite at the end of When Things of the Spirit Come First, she knows that she has to look things in the face and to depend only on herself.

Monique's writing closes the cycle of The Woman Destroyed in which three women blocked into situations with no immediately discernible exit elaborate discourses to conceal their situations from themselves. Taken separately, the sources of their errors may appear individual; taken together, however, the ways in which these three women use words to build myths about their roles as wives and mothers, to conceal from themselves the passage of time, to cover over the difficulties that they have in relating to their bodies, becomes an insistent pattern—an indication of a common 'situation' as women. The fate of the woman of the first story may appear the most optimistic, as she comes to terms with certain elements of her life, and is not alone.²¹ However, there is a dependence on the husband and a bitterness about the loss of her maternal illusions about her son which hang heavily over the woman's future. Her book is a failure and she retains her habit of using words and culture to create mythical moments. The second story is the bleakest portrait of a woman anywhere in Beauvoir's fiction. Murielle's power and anger precipitate her into folly; the madness and delusions at the centre of this volume provide a chilling image of the madness which stalks so many of Beauvoir's women characters, and of which the retreat into the flat of each of the women of The Woman Destroyed is the shadow.²² There is no communication for the woman of Monologue, no use of words to work towards reality. Monique's case is more banal than the other women's situation—more banal and more familiar, as the response in Beauvoir's postbag showed. More than the other women, Monique is the traditional representative of the middle-aged, middle-class woman who believes in the couple, who aspires to be a perfect wife and mother, and who succumbs to the appeal of the security of domestic preoccupations.²³ Monique's struggle with writing is the formalisation of the struggle with labels like 'mother' which all three women undergo, with the formulae based on the 'common sensical' and the 'normal' to which Murielle clings, with the cultural screen which the woman of The Age of Discretion interposes between herself and reality. Monique's pain is intense, but the passage to writing seems to permit a hesitant move beyond the myth-making discourse, beyond the words which Maurice has 'murdered' to words which more nearly approach her own reality. Monique both closes the cycle of the woman destroyed, and opens it up.

Notes

¹ See The Prime of Life, p. 328.

² In my interview with Beauvoir (1985) in reply to the question, 'When you wrote The Woman Destroyed did you think back to the short-story collection which had been refused at the beginning of your career?' Beauvoir replied, 'Oh no, not at all. I didn't think about that at all.'

³ The original title of the collection, as Beauvoir reminds us in the French preface, was La Primauté du spirituel (The primacy of the spiritual)—intended to be an ironic reference to a work of that title by Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, which argues for the primacy of the spiritual in human affairs. Maritain's book refers sympathetically to both Maurras and Mussolini. I refer to the French preface because it is not the same as the preface to the English translation.

⁴ Forrest Ingram defines a short-story cycle as 'a set of stories so linked to one another that the reader's experience of each one is modified by his experience of the others'. See Representative Short Story Cycles of the Twentieth Century, p. 9. Beauvoir confirmed in my 1985 interview with her that she did write the three stories of The Woman Destroyed to be published together.

⁵ By 'spiritualism' Beauvoir is not referring to the belief that the spirits of the dead can make contact with the living, which is one of the senses of the English word.

⁶ See also A.-M. Celeux, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir: Une expérience commune, deux écritures, p. 49.

⁷ Beauvoir based the story on her knowledge of the Institut Sainte-Marie, which she attended before going on to the Sorbonne. The names of the original model for Lisa, and of Mademoiselle Lambert, are not even changed. See The Prime of Life, p. 222.

⁸ The account given of the collection in The Prime of Life (p. 222) suggests that 'Lisa' was in fact originally the first story of the cycle.

⁹ Recounted in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, pp. 349-60.

¹⁰ See Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, pp. 254-59.

¹¹ See Alice Schwarzer, Simone de Beauvoir aujourd'hui, p. 81.

¹² In her presentation of the novel in the Gallimard 1967 edition (also noted by Anne Ophir in Regards féminins, p. 60).

¹³ Although the phrase la femme rompu is not in itself a recognisable cliché—or was not before Beauvoir used it—the word rompu is frequently used metaphorically to mean 'worn out'. The element of destruction foregrounded in the English title represents only one of the meanings of rompue which also has associations with being 'broken in'—an association permitting a rather different perspective since it points to the social pressures on women to conform to their allotted role.

¹⁴ In French as in English, the term 'discretion' encompasses both the positive meaning 'discernment' or 'judgement', and the more ambiguous qualities of tact, self-effacement—even 'silence'. Conventional wisdom seems to have it that age will bring, paradoxically, both these things about.

¹⁵ Many of these themes are taken up in Beauvoir's essay Old Age, published in 1970 (see my Chapter 1). The problems of health and the body, sexuality, relationship with time, and the problem of creativity treated at length in Old Age are all raised in 'The Age of Discretion', sometimes in such similar terms that it is clear that the story is a source of the essay, or a dramatisation of aspects of the subject which Beauvoir had already thought out.

¹⁶ In the French text Murielle uses the verb dresser, for which 'train' is offered in the English text. However, whereas dresser is not an acceptable word in French to describe the bringing up of children, English 'train' is acceptable in some contexts. A more accurate translation would therefore be 'break in' or 'bring to heel'.

¹⁷ See Ophir, p. 42. Anne Ophir's analyses of all three stories are perceptive and suggestive.

¹⁸ See Valerie Raoul, The French Fictional Journal, p. 10, for a theoretical discussion of the transformation of discours into récit in the fictional diary form.

¹⁹ When I suggested to Beauvoir that the story appears to approve Maurice's desire to leave Monique and find another woman she replied, 'Yes, he might have his reasons. Another more outgoing woman . . . Yes, of course.'

²⁰ The escape of her body from Monique's control is accentuated when she begins to experience continual bleeding: 'I was afraid of my blood, and the way it flowed from me' (TWD p. 208).

²¹ Beauvoir herself suggests this in All Said and Done. The text of the autobiography is ambiguous because Beauvoir writes that 'in the last tale the failure is overcome' (ASD p. 141), but when I asked her which story she meant she replied, 'Oh it was "The Age of Discretion'".

²² Monique's suspicions that there are 'plottings that go on behind my back' (TWD p. 208) begin to resemble Murielle's delusions of persecution.

²³ See Anne Ophir (p. 60), who sees Monique as a kind of generic woman destroyed.