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

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

Simone de Beauvoir's death in 1986 refocused attention on one of France's most admired yet controversial figures. Long identified as Jean-Paul Sartre's amenuensis, and thus intellectually bound to existential humanism, de Beauvoir eventually came to occupy a very particular ideological space in French culture. Rarely has an individual—woman or man—elicited such extremes of feeling and opinion. But rarely has anyone embodied so completely the diverse faces of a society in transition as has she. It has been said that de Beauvoir represented all sides of the deep-seated conflicts that erupted in 1968. Having inaugurated a pragmatic feminist outlook in 1949 with Le Deuxième Sexe, a work in many ways ahead of its time, de Beauvoir became a symbol of reaction during the political and theoretical explosion of the sixties and seventies. Despite her expression of solidarity with the increasingly separatist feminist movement in France, de Beauvoir was both mocked and denigrated as much as she had been revered. She was seen as a product of an earlier generation that was rooted in post-war idealist philosophy, a philosophy considered to be constitutive of cultural imperialism and patriarchy.

For some contemporary feminists, de Beauvoir has been an inappropriate model because she shares neither the psychoanalytical preoccupations of writers such as Kristeva and Irigaray, nor the explicit interest in gender and language that many feel to be necessary for the struggle against the patriarchal culture. Her writing has generally been considered "classical," placing her apart from authors such as Marguerite Duras and Hélène Cixous, whose stylistic innovations or "écriture féminine" have altered the way the public thinks about literary language.

Because her narrative voice has always been exceptionally lucid, unsentimental, and self-assured, de Beauvoir's writing is viewed as expressive of the rationalist mentality of an earlier epoch, one that ignores both the reality of the unconscious and the dynamics of a language that is connected to the body. Even her later work does not seem to have been influenced by recent theory on the crisis of the subject and its relation to language. In an essay that accurately situates de Beauvoir at the intersection of differing generations and changing epistemological perspectives, Dorothy Kaufmann expresses a criticism of de Beauvoir shared by many contemporary feminists:

De Beauvoir's repression of the feminine, perhaps the deepest limitation of her writing, produces the kind of rationalist framing of her thought, the ordering of painful and ambiguous experiences into neat and manageable categories, that theoreticians of difference now characterize as masculine.¹

Recent feminist theory has made us conscious of the ways in which cultural attitudes are encoded in linguistic structures, and, specifically, of how language articulates cultural myths about gender and cultural difference. We have also come to acknowledge that in art and literature practice generally precedes theory, and that distinctions which later serve as prescriptive models may often be seen at work in the artifacts themselves. De Beauvoir's writing is most often appreciated for its referential orientation—its vision of a social era—and its thematics rather than for its poetics or technique. In spite of this critical consensus, I submit that de Beauvoir's iconoclastic feminist vision is in fact most operative at the linguistic and rhetorical level, and that beneath the rational surface of her prose there is ample evidence of a more complex grasp of the relation of language to cultural and sexual identity.

At times accused of being insufficiently political, de Beauvoir has also been criticized for concerning herself exclusively with concrete social solutions to problems of inequality rather than with the roots of that inequality. She has been condemned for treating women's biological nature as a primary source of oppression, and therefore to be "overcome" or denied. In contrast to feminists who claim that feminine difference is the key to women's practical and spiritual liberation, de Beauvoir has been reproached for denying her "maternal" heritage in life just as she represses her "feminine" nature in her writing.

De Beauvoir's reputation as a "phallic feminist" issues in part from her own admission of an inner conflict between her need for autonomy and her need for affirmation from men. While this may be understood as a consequence of growing up in a patriarchal culture, it also represents a universal problem for the subject according to Jacques Lacan, the theoretician whose work, besides that of Melanie Klein, informs much of contemporary feminist theory. This paradox of interdependence—although not formulated according to the male/female paradigm—lies at the heart of Lacan's theory of "subjectivity," which claims that the desire of all subjects is mediated, and hence conditioned, by the desire of the Other. While it may be argued that this dialectic is an artificial construct of paternalistic culture and that it weighs far more heavily upon women than on men, one may also argue that we are limited in our ability to step outside it; any attempt to reformulate feminine identity will largely be determined by the epistemological categories available to us. In any case, it seems futile to try to assess de Beauvoir's writing in the light of perspectives or positions that may not have been available to her or to most women of her generation. The present, subject to a different set of attitudes and concrete choices, tends to judge the past by present standards, failing to imagine the relativity of its own positions.

In support of de Beauvoir, certain critics have ventured to assert that whatever her limitations—or even because of them—de Beauvoir may be able to illuminate our own situation by virtue of her avowed "ambiguous" position with respect to the culture of her time. We cannot declare ourselves to be entirely "free" of the myths that influenced de Beauvoir's generation, and regarding her with respect in no way implies that we are prepared to return to the society in which she lived. To dismiss her as an anachronism is not only naive but detrimental to our own situation. As Jacques Ehrmann points out in an essay on the "Related Destinies of Woman and Intellectual," de Beauvoir's investment in changing the concrete, historical conditions of women reminds us that "commitment has no precise meaning until it is placed in its historical and political context."²

The controversy surrounding de Beauvoir's position with respect to feminism is fueled by her own works, which are situated across the generic boundaries of memoir, autobiography, and fiction. In a certain sense, all of her writing is autobiographical in that it is primarily a vehicle of self-reflection. She has suggested that her purpose was to reach a level of sincerity difficult to attain in a society built upon false images of itself. This very assertion, however, may be said to betray her ignorance of the human, and especially the female, psyche. Yet whether we choose to see de Beauvoir's enterprise as issuing from either fear or disdain of "bad faith" as formulated by existentialism, or from a desire to bridge the gap between her subjective view of experience and the concrete results of her actions upon others, her need to objectify her existence, while obviously impossible in any absolute sense, is not automatically a sign of a denial of her femininity or her desire.³ That she tends to articulate her experience in a rhetoric that we see as the obsolete language of humanistic philosophy is more an indication of the limited expressive modalities available to her generation than it is proof of her willful espousal of them.⁴

Certain of de Beauvoir's texts have become the focus of recent feminist attention as evidence of a less than "transparent" relation to both men and women. Specifically, the account of her mother's death, Une Mort très douce, which appeared in 1964, has been cited as a revelation of de Beauvoir's negation of her biological mother because she lacked the authenticating phallus.⁵La Vieillesse (1970), a text in which de Beauvoir examines her attitudes towards her own mortality and that of others, is sometimes considered indicative of her alienation from her biological self, and expressive of a narcissistic fantasy of transcendence of the laws of desire and of physical existence. La Cérémonie des adieux (1981), in which de Beauvoir chronicles the disintegration of her friend and mentor, Jean-Paul Sartre, has been read as a disguised murder of the phallic mother. Alice Jardine, in an essay of considerable insight and wit, cites de Beauvoir's desire to place her body against Sartre's decaying flesh after his death as a sign of her submerged longing to merge with the "maternal body" that she has always disdained.⁶ Certainly, it is true that these later works exhibit de Beauvoir's altered relation to herself as a physical being. But the ambivalence they reflect is not always fully accounted for by the assertions of some contemporary feminists. For example, observing the decline of someone who has been at once a loved one, an ideal, and a peer, might well engender complex feelings of estrangement and disgust that are directed as much against oneself—knowing that one is also aging—as towards the other. It is, I think, prejudicial to dismiss the possibility that de Beauvoir was aware of the ironic implications of her feelings of distance from the dying Sartre, or that she was conscious of the mixed emotions—such as her needs for both affirmation and nurturance—involved in her attachment to him as a source of identification. Rather than see her as the blind victim of unconscious longings, it is equally valid to assume that she understood the causes of her dissociation at the spectacle of her friend's death.

It may be (and has been) argued that de Beauvoir has ceaselessly dared to confront her vulnerability and the vulgar side of her most cherished ideals.⁷ In the early novel, L'Invitée, published in 1943, she described the dark side of her illusions about liberated love, and in La Femme rompue, published in 1967, she recounted the despair and personal disintegration resulting from women's excessive dependence upon men, showing how it poisons everyone around them.⁸ This work, a collection of three stories, has been translated as Woman Destroyed, a title that unfortunately expresses only one aspect of de Beauvoir's unconventional treatment of the theme of betrayal. These stories also chronicle the loss of an illusion of plenitude and transcendence that encompasses a variety of attitudes towards others and the world. La Femme rompue, often cited as a feminist protest against male dominance, is in fact an indictment of some of the attitudes assumed by women to defend themselves against their objective subordination. I would suggest further that the illusions dismantled in the work are those that have often been criticized in de Beauvoir herself. La Femme rompue, therefore, may serve to reveal to what extent de Beauvoir was acutely aware of her own "excesses."

I have chosen to examine the three short narratives published under the title La Femme rompue: L'Age de discrétion, Monologue, and the work bearing the name of the collection. Each story focuses realistically on the problem of woman's separation from husbands, lovers, or children. They all situate a particular conflict sharply within the social and psychological boundaries of middle-class life and alert us to the victimization and depersonalization that women suffer as almost a condition of their existence. My own reading of these texts, however, will emphasize a more general kind of separation experienced by de Beauvoir's female protagonists, one that charts the movement from an imagined state of harmony and centeredness to dissonance and doubt. Each of the stories tells of an experience of certainty that is gradually revealed to be an illusion perpetuated by self-deception. De Beauvoir's narrators all believe themselves to be at the center of a world of their own making, while at the same time, ironically, they do not have, nor can they take, possession of their own lives.

The process of separation in the narratives displays itself as a shift from a logical discourse, characterized by descriptions that abound in visual clarity, to one in which syntactical structures break apart and images give way to sensory associations. Such a discursive change implies that the subject of the narrative no longer has mastery over her world through language but instead that language exerts its own power over the subject, signaling the breakdown of her narcissistic defenses. Epistemologically, de Beauvoir's protagonists are all made to confront a reality that, because of their narrow categories of perception, was previously invisible to them.

Accordingly, the stories of La Femme rompue could be read as overlapping narratives, in that each considers the nature and limits of knowledge from a different perspective. One might even read them as different versions of a single narrative about one woman in various stages of consciousness and in a changing relation to the world. All the stories are told in the first person, so the narrator and the protagonist are one and the drama occurs at the level of narrative voice. In L'Age de discrétion and Monologue, the narrators occupy respectively the opposing positions of control and victimization; in La Femme rompue the protagonist recapitulates aspects of the previous experiences and predicaments, but moves beyond them to exhibit self-awareness and, in contrast to her predecessors, a heightened sensitivity to difference.

While de Beauvoir's texts at first glance might appear to address primarily the suffering of sensitive women at the hands of insensitive men—a conventional if frequently valid theme—they in fact concern themselves with different conceptions of reality and ways of ordering these experiences through language. What makes the particular narratives so compelling is that de Beauvoir employs them in formulating a critique not only of "virile" discourse and the vision it articulates, but also of the dangers present in the improper "genderization" of certain perceptions and uses of language as if they were the exclusive property of men or women. She suggests that to label as feminine or masculine certain visions of reality only reinforces the existing structures by displacing the problem from politics to sex. Furthermore, she exposes the fallacy of idealizing the cultural norm as an objective reality simply because it happens to be the dominant model. In La Femme rompue, de Beauvoir succeeds in inverting conventional power relations by revealing to what extent that cultural ideal is predicated upon an illusion.

In L'Age de discrétion, the narrator is convinced she inhabits an immutable present in which she, her husband, and friends are fully known to one another. Having breakfast with her husband, she sees him as eternally the same:

. . . mon regard ne lui connaît pas d'âge. Une longue vie avec des rires, des larmes, des colères, des étreintes, des aveux, des silences, des élans, et il semble parfois que le temps n'a pas coulé. L'avenir s'étend à l'infini. (10)

Even as she watches her husband leave the house, she feels him to be wholly in her possession. As his shadow moves away, "la rue semble vide mais en vérité c'est un champ de forces qui le reconduira vers moi comme à son lieu naturel" (11). Everything in her surroundings appears "natural" to her, as if ordained.

The protagonist is a study in certitude. She views the world as intrinsically meaningful—a space that she herself has created and over which she has control; in it she is both the observer and the poet who transposes nature's order into a verbal one: "Le monde se crée sous mes yeux dans un éternel présent" (ibid).

The woman's vision is gradually destabilized as it comes into conflict with the multifaceted reality of others. In fact, the text opens with a question about time that exposes the woman's refusal to acknowledge a reality that does not conform to her desire: "Ma montre est-elle arrêtée?" (9). She dispels the anxiety of waiting by reminding herself of the predictable order in her domestic life. She believes her relationship with her husband to be ideal, feeling that they share a respect for truth that exempts them from the problems of most couples. She is absolute in her attachments to both her family and her principles. Like the heroes of classical tragedy, she is resolute in her self-assurance, in her assumptions about the world, and resists any suggestion that things might be different from the way she chooses to view them.

The narrative voice used in the early part of the novel is predominantly clear, cogent, and articulated with an ease typical of classical realism. Events are causally connected, and the visual sense dominates. Logic connects all the elements in her descriptions. Levels of discourse remain discrete and clearly formulated. Reality is organized so that everything seems to be the result of divine will. The picture is one of an apparently seamless whole that is present and immanently significant to the observer, as it is to the reader. The narrator's past most often informs her present in visual terms:

J'ai découvert la douceur d'avoir derrière moi un long passé. Je n'ai pas le temps de me le raconter, mais souvent à l'improviste je l'aperçois en transparence au fond du moment présent; il lui donne sa couleur, sa lumière comme les roches où les sables se reflètent dans le chatoiement de la mer. (17)

At this stage all phenomena conceal for the narrator a depth of meaning; the world has an essential dimension that connects its most disparate details.

Because she thinks her assumptions about the world are correct and universal, she proceeds easily to categorical judgments of others' behavior. She can only see behavior that does not confirm her ideals as an aberration: she considers her husband's mid-life crisis to be a sign of weakness and moral lassitude and her son's desire for happiness to be his submission to a crass bourgeois ethic. Her rigid integrity inhibits all compassion. When she accuses her son of betraying their "shared" goal of an academic career, she is blind to the possibility that he may have different but equally valid personal goals that are more appropriate to his temperament. She can only see her son as an extension of herself. In this instance the narrator proceeds much the way absolute authority does in the face of resistance: she rejects him, dismissing his reality. He responds as a person whose identity has been cancelled: "Tu as des mots qui me tuent" (56).

The implied correspondence between word and act in this statement reveals an important feature of the narrator's relation to language. For her, words are organically related to their referents. This presumed cohesion is but one aspect of the narrator's monolithic reality. Her language is like her love: it seeks absolute possession of everything around it. Just as the narrator pretends to care only for her family, dictating their needs and ordering their life for them, her language describes the world as if it were an emanation of her desire.

After a series of confrontations in which her family assails her intransigence, the narrator struggles with a contradiction that she perceives to apply to her husband rather than to herself, seeing him as a kind of monster: "Le visage d'André, sa voix; la même, un autre, aimé, haï, cette contradiction descendait dans mon corps; mes nerfs, mes muscles se contractaient dans un espèce de tetanos" (44). Her husband's "other" self provokes a violent physical reaction that betrays her deep intolerance of inconsistency or difference, a posture indispensable to her illusion of mastery.

When, under sustained assault, the protagonist's edifice begins to crumble, her clear, well-defined speech loses its boundaries and becomes fluid, and the objects it describes take on a vivid sensuality:

Dans l'océan du temps j'étais un rocher battu de vagues toujours neuves et qui ne bouge pas, et qui ne s'use pas. Et soudain le flux m'emporte et m'emportera jusqu'à ce que j'échoue dans la mort. Tragiquement ma vie se précipite. Et cependant elle s'égoutte en ce moment avec quelle lenteur. . . . (65)

In this passage the narrator, rather than being the "mover," is herself "moved." The image she creates is rhythmic and sensual without conveying a clear visual picture. Intimations of mortality have replaced the rhetoric of eternal presence, and the allusions to the sea suggest a state of flux instead of stasis. The narrator's universe assumes a different cast: "La terre est autour de moi une vaste hypothèse que plus jamais je ne vérifie" (58). Familiar modes of apprehending the world have betrayed her. The very choice of the term "hypothèse" implies that her binary, Cartesian framework is inadequate when applied to human experience.

Towards the end of the story, the narrator speaks in a way that reflects the breakdown of cause and effect and a loss of power to influence reality. Her sentences become fragmented, often lacking a grammatical subject:

Ne pas préjuger l'avenir. Facile à dire. Je le voyais. Il s'étendait devant moi à perte de vue, plat, nu. Pas un projet, pas un désir. Je n'écrirais plus. Alors, que ferais-je? Quel vide en moi, autour de moi. Inutile. (65)

The very opposite of affirmation, these words convey the loss of plenitude and purpose that formerly characterized the narrator's experience. It articulates her dispossession from both the present and the past: "Je suis capable de réciter des noms, des dates, comme un écolier qui débite une leçon bien apprise sur un sujet qui lui est étranger" (ibid.).

The narrator has discovered that language is no longer magically tied to experience. Words are merely words rather than guarantors of meaning or signs of reality. Once the means of appropriating the world, language is now the symbol of the narrator's alienation. Unable to play the privileged roles of both director and central character in her monotonous drama, she finds herself outside in every sense: outside the boundaries of rational discourse, outside the structures of middle-class morality, and, finally, outside the rigid identity she has so tirelessly created. In L'Age de discrétion, de Beauvoir demonstrates several important facts about the relation of language and perception to power. First, she reveals the cultural ideal of explicit, rational discourse to be the expression of a unitary, hierarchical and exclusionist vision of reality that is predicted upon a narcissistic desire for centrality and control. Second, she points out that such an outlook, although more frequently held by men (because of the cultural support for male authority), is not necessarily gender-related. Finally, she suggests that the breakdown of linguistic structures, rather than always signaling mental instability, may well indicate a more comprehensive vision of reality—a reality that cannot be articulated adequately according to those verbal conventions we consider appropriate and normal. De Beauvoir seems to see something absurd in our tendency to take such language as a model for a reality that it can never truly represent.

The second story of the collection, Monologue, addresses the question of cognition and reference from a different perspective. The title, at one level purely descriptive of first-person narrative, is at another an allusion to how all the narrators give structure to their limited worlds. Being unable to acknowledge true difference, they have what might be described as binocular vision: they shape their world into a unitary system of meanings that resolves disparity into identity. Their perspective might more accurately be termed "monocular," in that it is organized in behalf of a single homogeneous ideal. Their adherence to this artificial construction is both unconscious and absolute.

In Monologue, the narrator, Murielle, is obsessed with the cruelty of others, particularly that of her husband who has abandoned her. She represents an inversion of the narrator in the first story in that instead of viewing the world as a perfect reflection of her desire, she is mired in self-pity, seeing evil in everything outside her. But her posture is no less "authoritarian" than that of the first protagonist: this woman has surrendered all moral agency in order to retain her innocent image of herself. Her need for control is equally intense: she manipulates people the way a self-styled victim does, by projecting her own feelings of guilt onto others.⁹

The narrator's speech in Monologue is the language of blasphemy; it expresses the woman's need to desacralize everything she cannot possess. Like the character in Dostoievski's Notes from Underground, she wants to assert power by defiling the concepts and values that she feels have been used against her. Her speech is intended to subvert the ideological discourse of her society, and as such takes the form of a systematic dislocation of conventional syntax and rhetoric. The very form of the text indicates the degree to which language is being used as a means of aggression, not to change others' behavior, but to invalidate their ideals. The title suggests another aspect of Murielle's speech if we read it as an ironic form of mono logos: a verbal attack on those uniform structures of culture expressed in platitudes:

. . . Je m'amenais avec mes gros sabots leurs grands mots je les leur dégonflais: le progrès la prospérité l'avenir de l'homme le bonheur de l'humanité . . . je m'en branle de l'humanité qu'est-ce qu'elle a fait pour moi je me le demande. . . . (103)

Isolated from what she imagines is the plenitude of others' lives, Murielle exhibits paranoid symptoms and borderline behavior. Yet the psychological drama is less important than the linguistic and epistemological conflict. The narrator's experience is primarily verbal, her feelings mediated by the power of words rather than by direct contact with others. She is alone, and her one link to the outside is the telephone. She handles her pain by blocking out sound from outside by using earplugs and by speaking in unbroken syntax. Her language reflects a kind of "regression," or return to rudimentary signifying procedures. Ironically, her use of slang and vulgar clichés is just as conventional as the official stereotyped discourse of the culture which she feels is the source of her oppression:

Les cons! . . . Salauds ils me déchirent le tympans et je n'ai plus de boules Quies les deux dernières coincent le timbre du téléphone elles sont complètement dégeux et j'aime mieux avoir les oreilles cassées que d'entendre que le téléphone ne sonne pas. (87)

The lack of punctuation in this passage articulates her desire to close off the possibility of open dialogue.¹⁰ The final contorted negative, while semantically suggestive of the pain of solitude, asserts syntactically a need to silence all other discourses. It is also evident that her speech proceeds according to metonymical rather than metaphorical associations. In contrast to the voice heard early in the first story, this woman's speech contains few visual images and slips erratically between normally discreet levels of discourse. The contamination across logical boundaries reflects a mental state apparently far removed from the illusion of objectivity seen in the first narrator. Yet this protagonist is equally convicted that she alone is in possession of the truth: "Lucide, trop lucide moi je suis vraie je ne joue pas le jeu j'arrache les masques" (102). Her vision is no less distorted, but her means of apprehending the world is quite the opposite of that of the first narrator. Instead of viewing the world through a prism of visual symmetry, Murielle grasps the world primarily through her sense of hearing. Consequently, her language exhibits traits characteristic of a different type of personality, but one no less despotic than the first. Despite her apparent victimization, Murielle controls difference by eliding it rather than placing it in a hierarchical framework.

These two seemingly disparate positions may be understood as complimentary according to the two axes of meaning described by Roman Jakobson. In his Essais de linguistique générale, Jakobson distinguishes between the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic axis of language, identifying the former as the axis of substitution or metaphor, and the latter as that of contiguity or metonymy. In normal language, he says, the two axes are interdependent, so that all speech is the result of a compromise between the two. Although the axis of substitution tends to determine selections along the axis of contiguity, neither axis can operate in isolation. In his chapter on aphasia, Jakobson observes that the loss of one axis or the dominance of one over the other in human speech indicates a lapsus or absence of structure that corresponds to a psychic difficulty. Although Jakobson himself does not speculate on nor analyze the psychological problems accompanying aphasia, he identifies the two types of difficulty as a problem with the naming of entities, on the one hand, and a problem with logical and hierarchical relations, on the other.¹¹

If we consider the first narrator's predicament as one of hyper-rationality and idealism, the second narrator embodies a profane extreme. Her position expresses itself in a language in which semantic values surrender to phonetic associations. The second narrator's speech moves relentlessly from one syntactical unit to the next, never fully articulating any fact or idea. Her means of subverting the discourse of authority is to refuse to articulate entities which stand for conventional concepts and values, and instead to elide them to other parts of speech so that they gradually lose their semantic identity.

The aversion to naming and the lack of metaphorical descriptions in Monologue is also symptomatic of this narrator's reluctance to contemplate, or to "look at" her own actions. Obsessed by her status as victim, she effectively defers recognition of her role in her daughter's death until the very end of the story. Only then do we understand that she has contributed directly to her daughter's suicide and to her own suffering. The irony of her position is that while she desires power, she fears its correlate, responsibility. Her ideal image of herself is so rigid that any real engagement threatens o compromise her. She resigns herself to a negative protest in which she will have the illusion of cognitive mastery but never be required to act in a responsible manner. The girl's suicide is not devastating primarily because it means the loss of her child, but because it represents a limitation on her influence. She cannot affect the girl's behavior or feelings, and she cannot know all the reasons for her act. If we consider suicide the one gesture that obliges us to acknowledge the limits of our power over others, we may understand the girl's death as a tragic example of the reality of difference.

Throughout the story the narrator dwells on questions of duplicity, envy, and displacement, attesting to the difficulty she has accepting the separate reality of others. She creates a hermetically sealed space without light or air, where sound drowns out silence. Immured in her apartment, drinking heavily, she will prevent others from knowing her reality: "Derrière la porte ils trouveront une charogne je puerai j'aurai chié sous moi des rats m'auront bouffé le nez" (96).

The description of her own disintegration reflects the inner dissociation that paradoxically results from attempting to secure her integrity by blocking out the world. She describes herself both as object ("une charogne") and subject ("je puerai," etc.). Her reference to defecation ("j'aurai chié") suggests a regression to infantile sexuality, and, juxtaposed to her decaying adult form ("les rats m'auront bouffé le nez"), it expresses a bizarre biological synthesis that corresponds to her mental disorder. The absence of punctuation signals a loss of syntactical structure intended to undermine the ideological structures that are the cause of her demise.

Like Lucifer after his expulsion from paradise, the narrator of Monologue is nonetheless attached to the very image of power that caused her exile:

Faites qu'il y ait un ciel et un enfer je me promènerai dans les allées du paradis avec mon petit garçon et ma fille chérie et eux tous ils se tordront dans les flammes de l'envie je les regarderai rôtir et gémir je rirai et les enfants riront avec moi. Vous me devez cette revanche mon Dieu. J'exige que vous me la donniez. (118)

This passage testifies to the fact that, however contrary and subversive Murielle desires to be, she is unable to imagine the world in terms other than those of a binary structure, and is thus finally tied to those very ideals she seeks to destroy. Her final imprecation indicates that her fantasy of absolute power is as strong as that of the first protagonist: the subjunctive ("vous me la donniez") is the perfect grammatical equivalent of imperious constraint. Yet this sophisticated linguistic construction cannot obscure the fact that Murielle has a vision of the world that is both archaic and syncretistic, one which dissolves difference and denies the reality of others any logical validity.

In L'Age de discrétion and Monologue, de Beauvoir presents two equally distorted epistemological positions. According to the conventions of our culture, we tend to perceive the first as a stance of legitimate power, generally occupied by men, and the second as a posture of victimization, generally associated with women or other disenfranchised individuals. But de Beauvoir has illustrated just how tyrannical and inauthentic both positions are, by demonstrating how each in its own way denies the reality of difference. Seen in this light, the two postures assume an aspect of complicity, not unlike the master-slave dialectic described by Hegel. Mutually exclusive, the two positions are ironically interdependent, implying one another in a blind dialectic that in fact deprives each of real power to effect change, because each is predicated on a rejection of the reality of the other.

The third story of the collection, La Femme rompue, uses the apparently melodramatic theme of adultery to explore further the epistemological dilemma introduced in the previous texts. The protagonist of the third story, Monique, shares at moments certain traits with each of the preceding women, yet she finally moves beyond their entrenched positions to a more comprehensive acceptance of her own place in a world of relative values and inperfect understanding. The title—at first suggestive of the fate of "a woman betrayed" according to conventional morality—is finally ironic, expressing the breakdown of a false image of woman, and of power in general.

La Femme rompue is structured like a journal, implying the existence of an internal dialogue whereby the subject examines her actions and reactions over time. The journal chronicles the narrator's movement from a state of self-confidence to one of doubt, in which she gradually surrenders illusions of identity and coherence as the reality of others assumes a legitimacy independent of her own. When the story begins, the woman feels herself in complete harmony with nature and assumes that this experience is a universal one. Delighting in a moment of solitude, she describes the world as one of ideal unity: "C'est un de ces instants émouvants où la terre est si bien accordée aux hommes qu'il semble impossible que tous ne soient pas heureux" (123). This ecstatic vision is reminiscent of the first narrator's perception that she is at the center of a perfectly ordered universe.

Like that of the first protagonist, this woman's conception of time bathes the world in an eternal present. She becomes aware of the discontinuity between chronological and psychological time only when obliged to wait for her husband's return: "Minuit . . . je garde les yeux fixés sur la pendulette. L'aiguille ne s'avance pas; je m'énerve. L'image de Maurice se décompose . . ." (129).

Monique's static image of her husband dissolves because she cannot make his actions conform to her desire. At this point a space opens between her desire and its object, and this rift finds its counterpart in the way she begins to use words. Almost imperceptibly, she starts to search for the appropriate expression, because the reality of her existence has begun to exceed her linguistic categories.

In the journal's next entry, de Beauvoir conveys her character's impending loss of power through the use of a grammatical structure that places her in the position of object: "Ainsi c'est arrivée. Ça m'est arrivée" (130). When Monique's husband tells her directly that he is involved with another woman, the narrator suddenly retreats to a kind of edenesque reverie:

Tout était blue au-dessus de notre tête et sous nos pieds; on apercevait à travers le détroit la côte africaine. . . . Deux et deux font quatre. Je t'aime, je n'aime que toi. La vérité est indestructible, le temps n'y change rien. (131)

This passage graphically conveys the prelapsarian nature of the narrator's orientation. The simple arithmetic placed against a background of primeval splendor reveals the reductive logic that the narrator has tried to apply to a complex reality. The need for certainty and stability in the face of her husband's betrayal leads her to invoke an image that ends in stasis.

Monique's reaction to her husband's infidelity focuses less on the act of adultery than on the act of lying. Like the first protagonist, this narrator is obsessed with authenticity. Lying menaces the entire structure of her existence because it mocks the notion of an absolute truth. Her husband's lies assert a relative truth, and signal the severing of words from the reality they are charged to describe. Ironically, this woman will only be able to speak truthfully when she understands that all language inevitably lies to some degree. Later, reflecting on her own difficulty in knowing the truth, she acknowledges that she has lied in her own journal: "J'ai déformé les faits."

Monique's response to her husband's adultery also takes the form of a desperate search for the primary cause of the betrayal. She desires to grasp cognitively that which she cannot manage emotionally, but every "fact" she discovers requires further interpretation, and only leads to others. Even old photographs, instead of revealing a univocal, unchanging truth, present an ambiguous vision of the past, and thus serve to exacerbate her doubt.

As this narrator is displaced from her privileged position with her husband, she passes from a dualistic, imaginary relation (in the Lacanian sense) to a triadic or symbolic relation in which she must recognize that her attachments are mediated and her desires dictated by the Other. Monique tries to imagine her husband and his lover in bed together, but founders because the images she calls up are replicas of her own intimacy with him. The difficulty of imagining the gestures of a loved one with another serves as an image for the paradox of language as a system of signs which always bear the traces of previous referents. In Proust et les signes, Gilles Deleuze uses this experience to describe the slipping of the signifier in the function of the sign, explaining how gestures of love are always both true and false, signs of fidelity and infidelity because contaminated by prior attachments.¹² De Beauvoir uses the situation of adultery to illustrate an epistemological crisis in which the subject must pass from an illusion of "exclusivity" to one of plurality. It means a shift from a state in which language seems to be a transparent film over reality, to one in which language becomes opaque and displays a constantly changing relation to experience.

As Monique becomes less certain of who she is, and of the implications of others' behavior, her familiar surroundings appear increasingly strange. Once reflections of her identity and of the security of her domestic life, they now take on a gratuitous life of their own. Originally evocative of plenitude and presence, they have become signs of absence:

Je perds pied. Je ne reconnais plus l'appartement. Les objets ont l'air d'imitation d'euxmêmes. La lourde table du living-room: elle est creuse. Comme si on avait projeté la maison et moi-même dans une quatrième dimension. (152)

Formerly obsessed with authenticity, the narrator now moves in a world where objects, people, situations, all seem grotesquely artificial.

Monique passes through stages similar to those of the first two narrators. When her husband leaves to spend a two-week holiday with his lover, she begins to regress to a state analogous to that of the narrator of Monologue. She takes refuge in her bed where she lies amid her own disorder and filth. She begins having abnormal menstrual bleeding. This withdrawal constitutes the physical counterpart of her mental and emotional breakdown. Monique's decline and the collapse of her daily routines is an ironic reflection of her epistemological imprisonment. It is ironic only in that her withdrawal actually signals a shift away from her initial position and will make possible her recognition of the independent reality of those around her. There is a corresponding change in the way she speaks:

Je ne sais plus rien. Ma vie derrière moi s'est tout entière effondrée, comme dans ces tremblements de terre où le sol se dévore lui-même; il s'engloutit dans votre dos au fur et à mesure que vous fuyez. Il n'y a pas de retour. (193)

Unlike earlier idyllic descriptions of nature, this image of cosmic upheaval is visually less defined and more kinesthetic and sensual. The verbs "se dévorer" and "s'engloutir" do not rely primarily on sight but on other senses as well. The mixing of personal pronouns within the same utterance ("Je," "il," "vous") attests to the fragmentation of her once-solid identity. In addition to the lexical changes accompanying the narrator's loss of illusions, there is a change in syntax that results in a phrasing that more closely resembles the rhythms of her breathing and natural movement. Yet her speech no longer describes a reality that reflects only her desire; it now can imagine reality from other perspectives and in other modes:

Je regarde les gouttes d'eau glisser sur la vitre que battait tout à l'heure la pluie. Elles ne tombent pas verticalement; on dirait des animacules qui pour des raisons mystérieuses obliquent à droite, à gauche, se faufilant entre d'autres gouttes immobiles, s'arrêtant, repartant comme si elles cherchaient quelque chose. . . . (210)

The world no longer emanates from the subject, but instead seems to articulate itself through her. She alludes to things she cannot understand ("raisons mystérieuses") and seems content merely to describe, rather than to analyze them. This passage expresses a significant change in the narrator's outlook. It suggests not simply a crisis of belief, but a momentous epistemological shift.

The protagonist once delighted in "la gaieté: une transparence de l'air, une fluidité du temps, une facilité à respirer" (218), but now is encumbered by a dimension that escapes her conscious control: "Désormais, toujours, partout, derrière mes paroles et mes actes il y a un envers qui m'échappe" (218). This "envers" is the otherness or unknowable in both herself and those around her. She will never know the reasons for her husband's betrayal; it simply happened. She has been dispossessed of the entire structure of meaning she deemed to be absolute: "Je prenais tout pour accordé": "C'est si lisse une vie, c'est clair, ça coule de source, quand tout va bien. Et il suffit d'un accrochage. On découvre que c'est opaque, qu'on ne sait rien sur personne, ni sur soi ni sur les autres . . ." (248).

This passage sums up stylistically this narrator's "fall from grace." The phonetic fluidity of the first phrases is in marked contrast to the last ones, which abound in negatives. The crisis, both linguistic and epistemological, is indicative of a widening gap between herself as a speaking subject and the verbal concepts used to define herself and her relationships. No longer a transparent emanation of the world, language has become a screen on which flickering shadows inhibit any fixed perception or universal formulation. The psychological and emotional rift between Monique and her husband is symptomatic of a more profound process of detachment: Monique has moved from a position of presumed control to a position that is not truly that of victimization: despite her fear, she is poised on a threshold—"le seuil" expressing a relative or intermediate position—prepared to engage herself without certainties or rationalizations:

Je ne sais plus rien. Non seulement qui je suis mais comment il faut être. Le noir et le blanc se confondent, le monde est un magma et je n'ai plus de contours . . . Une porte fermée, quelque chose qui guette derrière . . . C'est l'avenir. La porte de l'avenir va s'ouvrir. Lentement. Implacablement. Je suis sur le seuil . . . J'ai peur. (252)

Monique's recognition that there are no absolute principles to guide her effectively dissolves the binary structure (here expressed as "noir/blanc") that once defined her narrow perception of reality. She can no longer visualize herself as a figure with clear outlines because her identity is no longer based upon a rigid, unitary ideal. Reality is not to be captured as in a photograph any more than it can be readily verbalized in conventional formulas. Her fear issues from her awareness that reality obeys a variety of laws other than those of her desire. The writing of her journal, instead of objectifying the meaning of her life, has dismantled the structure upon which it has been built. Rather than having confirmed her narcissistic longings for unity, her writing has set her adrift in a system of differences. The narrator's language documents this change by becoming less rationalistic, less declarative, more sensual and more reflexive. Her world is no longer a dream of identity, but a reality of difference.

In the three narratives that comprise La Femme rompue, de Beauvoir has used typical situations to reveal the complexity of the structures sustaining them. In exploring different epistemological positions, de Beauvoir has demonstrated that the two postures that our culture conceptualizes according to the binary opposition masculine/feminine, and validates as powerful/weak, are both in a sense "weak," in that they are both based on a fantasy of power rather than on a knowledge of reality. Our culture erroneously polarizes the two because they require each other for support and perpetuation.

Furthermore, de Beauvoir illustrates that these reciprocal positions reflect certain epistemological assumptions that are not necessarily tied to gender, despite the ideological advantages to the culture of seeing them as such. As the first two narratives indicate, both positions are predicated upon a view of reality that excludes difference either by placing it within a hierarchical frame or by absorbing it to erase its distinctiveness. Like a photograph and its negative, however, both views reveal the same fixed structure of meaning. The language used to articulate these extremes tends towards visual clarity on the one hand, and towards auditory associations on the other. The first narrative voice is explicit, rational, and respects conventional grammatical structure; the second is affective, sensory, and often violates the laws of syntax to assert uncommon semantic connections. Each implies that words are tied to universal meanings with objective validity. The first voice exalts them, the second degrades them, but each confirms their existence. Each posture categorically denies the value of alternative ways of interpreting reality.

De Beauvoir has revealed a startling fact about the relation of language to the structures of power. She has shown us that distinctions such as that of virile/feminine are cultural notions of difference created and maintained to serve a false conception of power. She has demonstrated how language reflects (and upon analysis betrays) the specious epistemological assumptions that sustain these positions. De Beauvoir makes narrative voice, conventionally a vehicle for creating fictional identity, a means of envisioning true difference.

Notes

¹ Dorothy Kaufmann, "Simone de Beauvoir. Questions of Difference and Generation," Yale French Studies 72 (1986): 127.

² Jacques Ehrmann, "Simone de Beauvoir and the Related Destinies of Woman and Intellectual," Yale French Studies 27 (1961): 26-32; rpt. in Critical Essays on Simone de Beauvoir, ed. Elaine Marks (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1987) 92.

³ In her essay "Simone de Beauvoir. Feminine Sexuality and Liberation," in Critical Essays on Simone de Beauvoir: 218-34, Béatrice Slama examines de Beauvoir's apparently contradictory Statements about sexuality. Citing Le Deuxième Sexe, she observes that its author differentiates between female and male sexuality, and even deplores the inadequacy of language to describe certain aspects of feminine eroticism. Slama also notes the paradox inherent in women's sexual experience according to de Beauvoir: women long for a relation of parity and reciprocity with a man, but are biologically conditioned to be objects of penetration, etc.

⁴ See Deirdre Bair, "Simone de Beauvoir. Politics, Language, and Feminist Identity," Yale French Studies 72 (1986): 50.

⁵ In a gracious essay entitled "Peelings of the Real," in Critical Essays on Simone de Beauvor: 168-71. Catherine Clément argues for de Beauvoir's grief as well as shock at her mother's death. Clément chooses to see as "reserve" that which other critics call "denial" of emotion in de Beauvoir.

⁶ Alice Jardine, "Death Sentence. Writing Couples and Ideology," in The Female Body in Western Culture, ed. Susan Suleiman (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1986) 94.

⁷ See Francis Jeanson, "'Autobiographism,' 'Narcissism,' and Images of the Self," in Critical Essays on Simone de Beauvoir: 106.

⁸ Simone de Beauvoir, La Femme rompue (Paris: Gallimard, 1967). Page numbers appearing in the text refer to this edition.

⁹ In "Simone de Beauvoir and the Demystification of Motherhood," Yale French Studies 72 (1986): 87-105. Yolanda Patterson aptly characterizes this narrator as a monstrous caricature of the selfless, loving mother, relating it to de Beauvoir's portraits of motherhood in general. According to Patterson, these reflect the writer's deeply ambivalent attachment to her own mother (91-92).

¹⁰ As an epigraph for "Monologue," de Beauvoir cites Flaubert's Madame Bovary: "Elle se venge par le monologue," to underscore the fact that this narrator uses language, normally a tool of communication, as a weapon for distancing others.

¹¹ Roman Jakobson, Essais de linguistique générale (Paris: Minuit, 1963).

¹² Gilles Deleuze, Proust et les signes (Paris: PUF, 1970).