[In the following assessment of the collection The Woman Destroyed, Culligan briefly comments on the theme of suffering in the novellas.]

Truer words were never written than those on the jacket of Simone de Beauvoir's new book. This trio of novellas is indeed "a masterpiece of feminine suffering," although it should be understood that the operative words are the ultimate and penultimate units of the phrase.

To some readers, of course, the achievement may be more liability than asset. Because the erudite historian of "the second sex" is notoriously free from levity, ironic intention seems unlikely, although the insensitivity of each narrator to her human environment verges on caricature. The first suspects her husband of indifference and her son of betraying her values, but after a prolonged siege of self-pity she grudgingly accepts these erosions. The second has passed the point of no return in bitchy self-indulgence. Having exhausted several husbands and driven a daughter to suicide, she reiterates her crazed complaint: "They are killing me the bastards." More moderate in tone, the final voice echoes banalities found in advice-to-the-love-lorn columns. Like so many outraged wives, Monique holds love to be an inalienable right, hence never understands its loss.

In any other context these stories could be construed as an absorbing study of self-deception. Each heroine represents a point on a curve of illusion that ranges from normal to monstrous. Despite their differences, these stubborn, self-righteous ladies are sisters under the skin—and rather thick skin at that. All protest (and protest too much) their devotion to "the truth" while busily ignoring it. Impartial readers may see a sharp-eyed justice at work in their several fates.

In the context of Simone de Beauvoir's previous writing, it is much less certain that these masterful feminine sufferers are offered as object lessons. Without relying on the conspicuous real-life parallels of The Mandarins, these novellas do suggest elaborate moods or incidents found in the memoirs. We remember that the Simonesque heroine of The Mandarins was also addicted to "the truth" and convinced of her power to discern it. In fact, "she saw through it." She too had a talent for self-pity, certified by the novel's terminal line: "Perhaps one day I'll be happy again. Who knows?"

The novelist's more subtle technique in her present work thus cannot obscure the theme it shares with all her writing since 1945, expressed in the plaintive passive voice of the title. Nor can it stifle our desire to ask "who done it" when we read about so many women "destroyed."

In these pages the answer is not clear. It is hard to think of such aggressive women as victims. It is just as hard to find evidence in the author's past work of enough humor to classify her self-portraits as satiric in the manner of Elizabeth Bowen or Mary McCarthy. On the contrary, the last line of her 1963 memoir sounded an equally grim note: "I realize with stupor how much I was gypped." From a woman famed as teacher, philosopher, novelist and companion to a man of genius, that summation seems startling. If, as Carlyle once suggested, it was presumptuous of Margaret Fuller to accept the universe, is it not equally so for Simone de Beauvoir to write it off?

Her oddly grating colloquialism in that last line of Force of Circumstance also provokes thought. Can one be "gypped" without first holding a firm contract? What human or divine agent pledged benefits that have not been delivered to this embittered customer, instilling in her what R. W. B. Lewis elsewhere calls "the sense of existence as suffering" and provoking only resentment in response?

We recall that to the "dutiful daughter" of the earliest reminiscences the Gospel was "more amusing than Perrault's fairy tales because the miracles it related really happened"; in that golden dawn "the righteous" were invariably rewarded. Again, to the fictional Jean Blomart in The Blood of Others the very atmosphere wafted a promise: "The blue velvet upholstery was soft . . . the kitchen exuded a good smell of fat and caramel; from the drawing room came the murmur of silk-smooth voices."

Such were the intimations of cosmic good housekeeping in those bourgeois drawing rooms, only later dispelled by bad tidings from the undisciplined outer world. To the solemn young scholar who sampled the consolations of philosophy and of Sartre, the unadmitted sense of loss must have been profound. The exchange of that security for a dubious and double-edged freedom may explain the sense of exploitation that afflicts the historian of the second sex no less than her heroines. "I was gypped." "They are killing me." Like a ball fan booing the umpire, Simone de Beauvoir was robbed.