[Here, Westbrook examines Beauvoir's novellas as existential works.]

Simone de Beauvoir's The Woman Destroyed (La Femme Rompue), currently a best-seller in France, consists of three nouvelles each of which reveals the inner struggle of a woman undergoing spiritual or emotional collapse. Told with high artistry, each tale employs a different variation of the first-person narrative point of view. The first, The Age of Discretion; a story of a woman scholar-author, is told with a skill worthy of a James or of a Flaubert. Concurrently with her account of her present actions and despair, the protagonist divulges bit by bit the relevant facts of her past and the conditions of her family relationships. The total effect, conveyed with exceptional economy of incident and detail, is one of harrowing crisis. The second story, Monologue, which is the shortest of the three, is a stream-of-consciousness narrative about a lower-class virago as she consecrates a New Year's Eve to lonely and hateful reverie about the men in her earlier life, her children, and humanity in general. The final story, the title piece, makes use of the hoary but, as it turns out, still serviceable device of a diary to record the step-by-step disintegration of the personality of a physician's wife.

Aesthetically, at least, these three tales are a joy to read. There is, however, a slight blemish in their English translation. As was pointed out in a review in The New Statesman (January 10, 1969), much of the dialogue and other informal French has been rendered into a mixture of British and American colloquialisms and slang. This attempt to accommodate English-speaking readers on both sides of the Atlantic is less than successful; indeed, it produces an effect of inauthenticity that could well be distressing to the book's existentialist author. The translator would have done better if he had made a choice, rather than a compromise. Most literate British and Americans are familiar enough with the speech of both countries to make the choice of either mutually acceptable.

Thematically, the nouvelles in this volume continue and add to what Simone de Beauvoir, as an existentialist philosopher and novelist, has already said about the human, and especially the feminine, condition. What is the root of the "destruction" of these three women from such widely differing strata of society? Are all three the victims of the same forces and circumstances? To arrive at answers, one needs to bear in mind several of the basic doctrines of existentialism—especially its insistence on engagement, on free choice, and on the danger of losing one's identity and freedom in one's involvements with others. More specifically, one needs to recall Simone de Beauvoir's views, as developed in Le Deuxième Sexe (1949), as to the peculiar difficulties experienced by women in achieving an existential liberation, especially from the Other. The existentialist view of marriage or of a love relationship is that it should be freely entered into by both parties, that each should be accorded full liberty of action within the union, that having children should be a matter of free choice by both, and that the woman, wherever possible, should have an "engagement" other than marriage or motherhood, though these may be entered into as "engagements."

But these ideals have seldom been realized, either in the past or the present. Owing to her child-bearing function, woman is peculiarly vulnerable to being made a thing, an object, in her relationship with her mate, who too frequently tends to value her mainly for her youth, her beauty, her usefulness to the race and to himself—in other words, for her flesh, her physiology, her thingness. Moreover, woman is prone to fall in with these masculine tendencies, trading her selfhood for the security that for a time a man's proprietorship over her brings. Thus, so unfavorable is the position of a woman, so strong is her temptation—bolstered by social pressures—to merge her being into that of a man that it would seem almost impossible to attain permanent liberation of self. Such indeed is the rather dismal suggestion conveyed by the stories in Simone de Beauvoir's volume. The vulgarian in Monologuehas not even been aware of a way of life other than serving as bedfellow of some man. No other choice has ever occurred to her. Having been cast off by her men and by a daughter whose rejection takes the form of suicide, she is being consumed by a conflagration of hate of herself and of all humanity. A parasite herself, she wonders how the earth can tolerate the mass of parasitical human vermin on its surface.

The other two women are of a finer grain. The narrator in The Age of Discretion has written books on Rousseau and Montesquieu, has held a lectureship in the Sorbonne, and has fought for social and political justice. She and her scientist husband have apparently respected each other's liberty and have lived together by free choice rather than under any economic or biological compulsion. But she has become too involved with her son—too closely identified with him and dependent on him for her own welfare—and thus she has lost a measure of her freedom. When he gives up a university career that she has planned for him and goes to work for the hated Gaullist Ministry of Culture, she is outraged. To the existentialist, love is ideally the communion of two liberties—two totally free individuals. But this mother has pushed her son, from babyhood, into her own patterns of life and thought. When he marries and goes his own way, the father points out that a child too must make his own choices after he has grown up, but the mother can not accord the young man the liberty she has demanded for herself. To add to her woes, her most recent book has been panned by the critics, she is growing old, and her husband has lost his enthusiasm for his work. She feels herself "destroyed." She finds the future uncertain, opaque. Old age and death loom before her and her husband. They "have no choice in the matter"—an existentialist's hell.

How far is the woman responsible for her plight? Aging and the accompanying decline in her intellectual powers are surely beyond her control. But her chief affliction—her disillusionment with her son—is attributable to her lifelong symbiotic relationship with him, in which she fell short accepting his full and independent humanity and made him an object for her own gratification.

Monique, the woman in the title story, had entered into her marriage freely also, with full respect for her own and her husband's liberty. But she fails to fashion a career on her own and thus becomes dependent on, and demanding of, her husband. Of her two daughters, one flees to New York to escape her mother's parasitism, and the other remains in France under the overprotective parental wing. When Monique loses her physical attractiveness, her husband takes a mistress. Gradually Monique succumbs to jealousy, anger, and self-pity, though she struggles against these humiliating emotions. At the end, she confronts the blankness that in this book invariably awaits the lived-out feminine existence. Theoretically, if we may believe what Simone de Beauvoir wrote in Le Deuxième Sexe, it is possible for a woman to live serenely and usefully to the end, but in The Woman Destroyed no such achievement is recorded.