[In the following essay, Keefe details how Beauvoir played with the theme of self-deception in each of the novellas in The Woman Destroyed.]

In the latest volume of her autobiography, Tout compte fait,^>1 Simone de Beauvoir observes that in both of the works of fiction that she published during the nineteen-sixties her intention was to do something that she had not previously attempted in her novels, namely to 'faire parler le silence',² or to 'demander au public de lire entre les lignes'.³ She also indicates, however, that whereas in Les Belles Images her principal aim was to portray the 'société technocratique' which she lives in but strongly disapproves of, La Femme rompue arose directly of her desire to illustrate the dilemmas and the mental state of certain married women. Part of her interest in these women centres on the fact that many of them are less than honest or truthful in their appraisal and description of their situation. Indeed, a major theme common to the three stories of La Femme rompue is that of self-deception, and it is for this reason that the reader is called upon to read between the lines in each case. Without systematically pursuing the question of the literary merit of these three stories, I should like to develop in detail the point that each of their narrators is in some measure self-deluded and to show that there is considerable variety and subtlety in Beauvoir's treatment of this fascinating phenomenon.

In the first story, L'Age de discrétion, the unnamed woman narrator—to whom we shall refer as Madame—has four overriding preoccupations: her relations with her son Philippe; her relationship with her husband André; her work as a writer of academic monographs; and the physical and mental consequences of ageing. At one of her lowest points, late on in the tale, she not only acknowledges that she has misunderstood or misjudged her own position in each of these matters, but also implies that self-deception has had a part to play in her misconceptions:

J'ai toujours refusé d'envisager la vie à la manière de Fitzgerald comme 'un processus de dégradation'. Je pensais que mes rapports avec André ne s'altéreraient jamais, que mon œuvre ne cesserait pas de s'enrichir, que Philippe ressemblerait chaque jour davantage à l'homme que j'avais voulu faire de lui. Mon corps, je ne m'en inquiétais pas. Et je croyais que même le silence portait des fruits. Quelle illusion! . . . Mon corps me lâchait. Je n'étais plus capable d'écrire: Philippe avait trahi tous mes espoirs et ce qui me navrait encore davantage c'est qu'entre André et moi les choses étaient en train de se détériorer. Quelle duperie, ce progrès, cette ascension dont je m'étais grisée, puisque vient le moment de la dégringolade! (71-2; my italics)⁴

If this moment of lucidity is, in itself, insufficient to persuade us that Madame really has been guilty of some measure of self-deception, we have a kind of 'external' corroboration of the fact in the form of an earlier comment by André, who is not one to speak lightly or to risk giving offence gratuitously: '"Tu es toujours la même. Par optimisme, par volontarisme, tu te caches la vérité et quand elle te crève enfin les yeux, tu t'effondres ou tu exploses"'. (44) In any case, a close reading of the story is quite enough to establish beyond any doubt that self-deception has been present in her attitudes and reactions to each of her central concerns, even if it leaves room for debate about the extent and the strength of the phenomenon.

When the story opens Madame is eagerly awaiting the return of her son, who has been away for a month on his honeymoon. One of the reasons she gives for having left his room untouched during his absence already suggests that she has been indulging in the kind of self-deception that not infrequently characterizes very intense mother-son relationships: 'cette chambre que je ne me décide pas à transformer parce que je n'ai pas le temps, pas l'argent, parce que je ne veux pas croire que Philippe ait cessé de m'appartenir' (11; my italics). And this impression is confirmed when we learn of her reactions to his arrival with his wife: 'Irène. Toujours je l'oublie; toujours elle est là . . . Je l'ai vite effacée. J'étais seule avec Philippe comme au temps où je le réveillais chaque matin d'une caresse sur le front' (22). What is of particular interest is not so much that she is unable to sustain this illusion even for the duration of a whole evening (the news that he is to give up the university career that she has so much wished him to have forces her to acknowledge that he no longer belongs to her and that Irène really counts in his life), but rather the point that she would long ago have recognised the 'unworthy' side of Philippe's character that now imposes itself upon her, had she not been wilfully blinding herself to all evidence of it.

For one thing, Irène is by no means the first woman whose association with Philippe Madame has deprecated ('Pourquoi Philippe s'est-il toujours lié avec ce genre de femmes élégantes, distantes, snobs?'; 22). More importantly, it soon emerges that, against the advice of her husband as well as Philippe's own inclinations, she has actually had to push her son into an academic career ('un long combat, si dur pour moi, parfois'; 25). And we see that she has had her own personal (though largely suppressed) motives for doing so:

Et pourquoi me suis-je acharnée à faire de Philippe un intellectuel alors qu'André l'aurait laissé s'engager dans d'autres chemins? Enfant, adolescente, les livres m'ont sauvée du désespoir; cela m'a persuadée que la culture est la plus haute des valeurs et je n'arrive pas à considérer cette conviction d'un œil critique. (20; my italics)

We may be inclined to doubt, even at this early stage, whether the 'entente' that she claims to have reached with Philippe after his early resistance was ever an entirely real one. Moreover, it already seems likely that the blame she attaches to Irène is mostly a smokescreen that she sets up in order to hide from herself the fact that she effectively 'lost' her son years ago. Indeed, she is obliged to acknowledge as much once she realises the seriousness of his recent decision:

Il me faut réapprendre que j'ai perdu Philippe. Je devrais le savoir. Il m'a quittée dès l'instant où il m'a annoncé son mariage; dès sa naissance: une nourrice aurait pu me remplacer. Qu'est-ce que j'ai imaginé? Parce qu'il était exigeant je me suis crue indispensable. Parce qu'il se laisse facilement influencer j'ai cru l'avoir créé à mon image. (31)

By this time we have a view of Madame's past relations with her son that is very different from the idealized one suggested by her attitude at the beginning of the story. The evidence that she has to some extent been deceiving herself about Philippe is incontrovertible. In fact, a whole series of formerly suppressed reservations about him on her part are now at last allowed to surface: 'Soudain ça déferlait sur moi, une avalanche de soupçons, de malaises que j'avais refoulés . . . Je n'avais pas voulu me poser de questions' (34).

Her husband, whose general attitude towards their son is a very different one, confirms all of this when he points out that Philippe had, by their standards, been going off the rails for some time, but that she was unwilling to admit it (36). He also sees Madame's self-deception as persisting, for he notices that her reaction to Philippe's decision is essentially an emotional one and later suggests that she is in bad faith in describing it in moral terms: "Tu te places sur un plan moral alors que c'est d'abord sur le plan affectif que tu te sens trahie'" (75). A very great deal in the story, including Madame's own moments of lucidity, bears out this interpretation. It is only at the end, when she is especially sensitive to André's opinion, that she is once again able to think of Philippe 'sans colère' and to admit 'avec bonne volonté' that they have both been rather hard on him in certain respects (79-80).

For the shock over Philippe had in fact triggered off a crisis in the long-standing relationship between Madame and André. (Indeed, Beauvoir herself claims that her main interest in L'Age de discrétion was 'le rapport des parents entre eux'.)⁵ In certain respects this crisis may be regarded as a fortuitous and insignificant one, since it arises out of trivial misunderstandings that are entirely cleared up at the end of the tale. At the same time, it exposes the fact that about this relationship, too, Madame has been deceiving herself in some degree. She begins by claiming that she and André keep nothing of any importance from each other and have no difficulty at all in communicating ('en gros nous n'ignorons rien l'un de l'autre'; 9), but this proves to be self-delusion, for very soon she is admitting that she can no longer communicate her confidence in André and surmising that he secretly believes she will make no further progress in her own work. She also refers to a 'sourde opposition' that has always existed between them over Philippe (29), and comes to acknowledge that they are by no means 'transparents l'un à l'autre, unis, soudés comme des frères siamois' as she had convinced herself they were (41), suspecting that it may have been 'par optimisme buté' that she had believed this (52).

There is, however, a sense in which she now passes from one extreme to the other as her break with Philippe throws a greater strain on relations between herself and her husband. She comes close to blaming André for everything (in the way she had earlier blamed Irène), even considering the possibility that she is just 'une vieille habitude' to him (33) and that things have been wrong between them for some time (47). For a while she sustains a new form of self-deception and self-indulgence that involves seeing André as 'cet étranger' and refusing to discuss matters. While she suspects that something is worrying André himself, she does not wish to know about it (50), and she does nothing at all to discourage him from departing alone when he expresses a wish to go to Villeneuve earlier than planned (53). Yet her attempt to persuade herself that she can survive perfectly well without him is a disaster. Again, it is only near the end of the story, when Madame eventually decides to establish what they mean to each other 'sans tricher', that a kind of balance is achieved. She finally sees through her own tantrums, realising that she may have been expecting too much of her husband and admitting that she has misinterpreted certain of his words and actions (80-1). With her faith in him restored, they should be able to help each other to face a difficult future.

This future will be all the more difficult now that particular circumstances have forced Madame to adopt a rather different view of her work as a writer. At the beginning of the story she is quite convinced that her latest book is her best to date and that there is still better work to come (18-19). The poor reception accorded to her book, therefore, shocks her almost as much as the defection of her son. We are given too little direct evidence to be able to make a firm estimate of the extent to which this is a straightforward case of a misjudgement by the narrator as opposed to a case of self-deception, but a few factors are worth bearing in mind. The way in which (as in relation to the previous topic) Madame swings quickly from one extreme to the other—from believing this is her best book to thinking that she has wasted three years of her life writing 'un livre inutile' (63)—provides a hint that she writes in order to satisfy deep-seated personal needs and consequently has difficulty in assessing her works according to objective criteria. In any case, the general suggestion in the story is that she has failed to keep her values under review. (We have already noted her admission that she is unable to consider critically the view that culture is the highest of values.) It takes André to point out to her, near the end, that she went wrong in her latest book because her concern was simply to do something new: "Tu es partie d'une ambition vide: innover, te dépasser'" (83). He has to remind her that, personal satisfaction apart, she can go on to write books that will be valuable to others. Finally, we know that for some time Madame refused to believe that André was too old to have original ideas in his scientific research (14-15) and there is little doubt that she has been anxiously trying to persuade herself that her own intellectual powers have in no way diminished.

Indeed, underlying each of the preoccupations already discussed is Madame's half-suppressed anxiety about growing old. She suggests, at one point, that it was perhaps thanks to Philippe that she had previously more or less accepted her age, and she is obliged to admit that the crisis in her relationship with André is intimately linked with the fact that he is growing old (42-3). Her attitude towards the physical and mental processes of aging, however, is a complex one. The beginning of the story finds her aware of the passage of time but trying desperately to persuade herself that nothing of significance has changed and that she (unlike André) has adapted well to being in her early sixties (15).⁶ Yet her memory is starting to fail her; virtually everyone now seems young to her; and although she claims to have passed through 'une mauvaise période' some ten years earlier when she eventually resigned herself to physical degeneration, she acknowledges that she has to pay ever more attention to her weight and appearance (21). Furthermore, she has evidently been deceiving herself about the loss of sexuality:

La sexualité pour moi n'existe plus. J'appelais sérénité cette indifférence; soudain je l'ai comprise autrement: c'est une infirmité, c'est la perte d'un sens; elle me rend aveugle aux besoins, aux douleurs, aux joies de ceux qui le possèdent. (27)

And she is later to experience it as a real personal deprivation (48).

In general, Madame looks upon the passage of time very differently after her break with Philippe, and her hollow-sounding argument that there are considerable benefits in growing old (49) is immediately undermined by her irritated reactions to André's awareness of his age. She eventually believes, moreover, that 'le lot de la vieillesse c'est la routine, la morosité, le gâtisme' (62) and that (as we saw early on) she has been stubbornly refusing to see life as it is. But at this very general level as well as in more specific matters the end of the story offers a glimmer of hope. Madame seems quite determined to deceive herself no longer, and once she is reconciled with André she resists the temptation of giving in to 'une impression d'éternité' that she has just had: 'un instant le temps s'était arrêté. Il allait se remettre à couler' (83-4).

The narrator of L'Age de discrétion, then, has indisputably been guilty of self-deception over a fairly long period, but where genuine error on her part ends and self-deception begins is often difficult to determine with certainty. Moreover, in so far as her central problem is that of growing old, it is one so common that any evaluation of her own attitudes would have to be made against the background of general responses to aging in the modern world. Is a tinge of self-deception not 'normal' in one's reactions to aging, as to death? And is there nothing at all to be said for the view that it may even be therapeutic or desirable in certain respects?⁷ In any case, Madame is a broadly sympathetic character who, as Beauvoir points out,⁸ never entirely abandons her love of the truth. We are by no means inclined to judge her harshly for having deceived herself in the past, particularly as she seems to be turning over a new leaf at the end of the story.

None of these extenuating circumstances can be adduced in the case of Murielle, the central figure of the short second story, Monologue. She is an aggressive and unpleasant woman whose bitter, distorted view of others and of the world in general is calculated to alienate the reader to a marked degree. Her whole monologue—broken only by telephone calls that she makes, first to her mother, then to Tristan her second husband, both of whom are driven to hang up on her—is no more than a series of attempts to persuade herself, or to sustain her fragile conviction, that she is in the right and everyone else in the wrong. These attempts are seen to be spurious, for although the confirmatory evidence is of a rather different nature from that in L'Age de discrétion, we know beyond any serious doubt that Murielle must bear a very large share of the blame for the various disasters in her life and that she is, and has been for some time, shot through with self-deception.

This is apparent, above all, in her account of her relations with her daughter Sylvie and of the circumstances of the girl's suicide, which is perhaps the major element in such 'plot' as Monologue has. In spite of Murielle's repeated claim (to herself) that she was a devoted mother who did her very best to bring up her daughter well ('Quand je pense à la mère que j'ai été!'; 108), while Sylvie herself was unresponsive and unco-operative, the facts that emerge from her account speak for themselves: she surreptitiously read Sylvie's private diary; she was evidently jealous of Sylvie's good relations with Tristan and prevented her from seeing him; she would not let Sylvie's father, Albert, buy her presents and dresses, made a fuss over dresses that Sylvie bought for herself, and actually called in the police when Sylvie fled to Albert; she intervened with Sylvie's teacher in a way that caused great embarrassment; she tried to force a 'friend' of her own choosing upon Sylvie; and having doubtless driven the girl to suicide, she tore up the suicide note to Albert ('"Papa, je te demande pardon mais je n'en peux plus"'; 113). And yet such are her powers of self-deception that she can continue to believe that she has been a perfect mother in all respects and that in the end Sylvie would have come to appreciate that fact (94; 99)—a claim which, by its very nature, is conveniently unverifiable.

It is clear that Murielle has been blinding herself over the years to the deep selfishness that underlies her conduct with her own children. Her spontaneous reaction to Sylvie's suicide, for example, is not one of guilt or genuine grief but one which betrays to the reader her disguised egocentrism:

Sylvie est morte sans m'avoir comprise je ne m'en guérirai pas . . . Tant d'efforts de luttes de drames de sacrifices (104);

J'ai hurlé j'ai tourné dans la chambre comme une folle.

Sylvie, Sylvie pourquoi m'as-tu fait ça! (111)

We can glimpse it, too, in connection with her attitude towards her son, Francis, who is now living with his father, Tristan. Murielle has convinced herself that she wants them both back because 'un enfant a besoin de sa mère' (88), yet she is evidently concerned, above all else, with her own needs. On a number of occasions it becomes apparent that she desperately needs the company and protection of a man: 'Crever seule vivre seule non je ne veux pas. Il me faut un homme je veux que Tristan revienne' (96). And she has the additional, largely suppressed hope of either being reintegrated into her family, or at least of forcing them to acknowledge her existence again: 'C'est quelqu'un Tristan ils le respectent. Je veux qu'il témoigne pour moi: ils seront obligés de me rendre justice' (114). Just how little the well-being of Francis really comes into the reckoning is well illustrated near the end by her ominous threat of suicide and worse: '"Et si je me tuais devant lui crois-tu que ça lui ferait un beau souvenir? . . . on voit même des mères qui se suicident avec leur gosse'" (117). (Her attitude towards children in general is also very revealing in this connection: 'Un million d'enfants massacrés et après? les enfants ce n'est jamais que de la graine de salauds'; 102.)

Nor are Murielle's relations with her children by any means the only area in which her powers of self-deception operate. She pretends that she has never been concerned about money and social standing, but it emerges that she contemplates with horror the possibility of anything less than a fairly high standard of living (106-7). The reader is more than a little inclined to believe Tristan when he argues that she married him for his money and status (116-17). And there is no room at all for dispute about the fact that she is simply deceiving herself in her conviction that she is no longer interested in sex and does not think about it any longer, 'pas même en rêve' (105), for her prurience is a notable feature of the monologue and her preoccupations at times amount to lasciviousness or obscenity (91). In fact, Murielle's whole view of herself is a completely false one which she has deluded herself into accepting in order to feel superior to those who have rejected her. While she sees herself as 'trop sentimentale', we know that she is cynical and calculating; while she claims that 'si on avait su m'aimer j'aurais été la tendresse même' (109) or that 'je ne suis pas de ceux qui croient que tout leur est dû' (110), we are convinced that the very opposite is the case; and while she says that she has matured and would never reproach Tristan again if he were to come back to her, we know that she will never change. Far from being, as she claims, 'le merle blanc' or someone made for a better world, she is mean, demanding and quite peculiarly vindictive:

je me promènerai dans les allées du paradis . . . et eux tous ils se tordront dans les flammes de l'envie je les regarderai rôtir et gémir je rirai je rirai . . . Vous me devez cette revanche mon Dieu. J'exige que vous me la donniez. (118)

And most remarkably of all, Murielle, the arch-self-deceiver, accuses others of self-deception, contrasts it with her own honesty, and prides herself on her frankness, lucidity and integrity:

Les gens n'acceptent pas qu'on leur dise leurs vérités . . . Moi je suis lucide je suis franche j'arrache les masques . . . Je suis restée cette petite bonne femme qui dit ce qu'elle pense qui ne triche pas. (102; cf. 89-90, 91, 94, 97)

Indeed, the difficulty about Murielle from the present point of view lies in the fact that she is such an extreme case of self-deception. She clearly suffers from a persecution complex; she has received treatment for what her doctor considered to be a psychosomatic disorder (113); and Beauvoir herself has talked of her paraphrenia:

J'ai choisi un cas extrême . . . J'ai essayé de construire l'ensemble des sophismes, des vaticinations, des fuites par lesquels elle tente de se donner raison. Elle n'y parvient qu'en poussant jusqu'à la paraphrénie sa distorsion de la réalité.⁹

In other words, with Murielle we pass over the indistinct borderline that marks off self-deception in those with the normal range of concerns and aims from mental illness proper. Much of the fascination of Monologue lies in its technical and stylistic features—how does Beauvoir succeed in having her narrator say one thing and simultaneously causing us to believe another?—for Murielle is a pathological case, so confused and deranged that the ordinary reader is bound to find her mentality somewhat alien.

The very opposite appears to be the case with the third and most substantial story in the book, La Femme rompue itself Beauvoir has related how the publication of this tale in Elle occasioned numerous letters from 'femmes rompues, demi rompues, ou en instance de rupture', all of whom strongly identified with its central character, Monique. Interestingly enough, however, the author goes on to claim that the reactions of her correspondents 'reposaient sur un énorme contresens' and that they, like most of the critics, seriously misunderstood the story.¹⁰ While it has a banal plot about 'une femme attachante mais d'une affectivité envahissante' whose husband long ago stopped loving her and is gradually breaking away from her in order to make a new life with a lively woman lawyer of whom he has become enamoured, Beauvoir did not intend our sympathy with Monique to be by any means unqualified:

Il ne s'agissait pas pour moi de raconter en clair cette banale histoire mais de montrer, à travers son journal intime, comment la victime essayait d'en fuir la vérité. La difficulté était encore plus grande que dans Les Belles Images car Laurence cherche timidement la lumière tandis que tout l'effort de Monique tend à l'oblitérer, par des mensonges à soi, des oublis, des erreurs; de page en page le journal se contests: mais à travers de nouvelles fabulations, de nouvelles omissions. Elle tisse elle-même les ténèbres dans lesquelles elle sombre au point de perdre sa propre image. J'aurais voulu que le lecteur lût ce récit comme un roman policier; j'ai semé de-ci de-là des indices qui permettent de trouver la clé du mystère: mais à condition qu'on dépiste Monique comme on dépiste un coupable. Aucune phrase n'a en soi son sens, aucun détail n'a de valeur sinon replacé dans l'ensemble du journal. La vérité n'est jamais avouée: elle se trahit si on y regarde d'assez près.¹¹

In fact, taking the author's indications as a general guide, we have little difficulty in recognising to what extent Monique's is yet another case of culpable self-deception.

Monique has 'renoncé à une carrière personnelle' but it eventually emerges that, in spite of her claim that this has involved a sacrifice on her part, her first encounters with the realities of medicine shocked and horrified her so much that she was more than somewhat predisposed to give up the profession from the very first (194). Together with a hint that she could not bring herself to make the effort to work (196) and the fact that she has 'presque oublié' a specific proposal about a job that Maurice once put to her (204), this suggests that she is deceiving herself in pretending that she would have followed an independent career had Maurice told her the truth about his feelings some years earlier. In fact, when Maurice points out that there is still time and that he could easily find her a post, her claim that she would now have less chance of making a success of it rings quite hollow (205). It seems that Monique has decided in advance that work can do nothing for her and when she does eventually, on the advice of her psychiatrist, take on a job very similar to that proposed by Maurice seven years before, she is determined from the first few days to find it unsatisfactory: 'Je ne sais pas en quoi ça peut résoudre mes problèmes . . . je n'en tire aucune satisfaction' (239). It is no surprise when she gives it up (and possibly all idea of working) only a week later: 'Quelle blague, leur ergothérapiel J'ai quitté ce travail idiot' (240). If, then, we try to 'dépister' Monique, as Beauvoir advises, we find strong reasons for believing that there is far more to the fact that she has not had a career of her own than she admits to herself. Her rational justification of what she calls 'la vocation du foyer' may in itself be a perfectly sound one, but in her case it is underpinned by much less rational and respectable motives that Monique is disguising from herself.

The whole matter is intimately bound up with her past and present attitudes towards Maurice's work, but in order to understand these fully we need to go back to what happened when they first met, as medical students. This period is referred to for the first time when Monique records a conversation with Isabelle, nearly a month after she learns of Maurice's affair: 'C'est tout de même pour moi, m'a-telle dit, qu'il a renoncé à l'internat; il aurait pu être tenté de m'en vouloir' (159). Monique denies Isabelle's charges, saying that Maurice had his own reasons for not wanting to complete his training and that they were 'tous deux responsables' for the pregnancy that precipitated their marriage (ibid.). Maurice himself, in a fit of anger, accuses Monique of having made him give up and claims that he did not wish to get married at the time (185), but then, in a particularly conciliatory mood, he rather bears out Monique's view (205). The ambiguity is never entirely resolved, but in an especially revealing sequence slightly later Monique suddenly offers new information about her first pregnancy when she is reporting a discussion with Marie Lambert:

Elle voudrait savoir qui, de Maurice ou de moi, a été responsable de ma première grossesse. Tous les deux. Enfin moi dans la mesure où j'ai trop fait confiance au calendrier, mais ce n'est pas de ma faute s'il m'a trahie. Ai-je insisté pour garder l'enfant? Non. Pour ne pas le garder? Non. La décision s'est prise d'ellemême. Elle a semblé sceptique. Son idée c'est que Maurice nourrit à mon égard une sérieuse rancune. (210-11)

Small wonder that Marie Lambert is sceptical! This version of the precise circumstances of Monique's marriage, apart from being somewhat dubious in itself, is rather different from her previous account and makes it very difficult for us to avoid the conclusion that there was an element of self-deception in what she wrote earlier. In fact, in the next section of the very same entry in her diary she effectively admits that she has been deluding herself, acknowledging that there is much more truth in Marie Lambert's view than she dared to concede in conversation: 'C'est un peu par hostilité que j'ai contredit Marie Lambert. De la rancune, j'en ai senti plus d'une fois chez Maurice' (212).

The likelihood that Maurice bears a grudge about what happened some twenty years earlier is the main reason why his crucial change of job ten years before the diary began has to be seen against the background of these events. At first Monique claims that Maurice's first job, with Simca, was one to which he was ideally suited and that since the moment when he gave it up against her advice there has been a serious falling off in his work (128). It is very probable, however, that in trying to persuade herself that she understands Maurice's conception of medicine even better than he does, Monique is covering up her attempt to force upon him the ideals that she inherited from her father, who was also a doctor. She talks at one point of the 'vieil idéal qu'avait incarné mon père et qui reste vivant en moi' (138) and later hints that the moment of her father's death may have had an especially important bearing upon her relationship with Maurice (210). In any case, she has eventually had to admit to Marie Lambert that she never quite resigned herself to Maurice's move to a 'polyclinique' and that Maurice was aware of this (194). It is clear, therefore, that there was self-delusion in her idealised portrait of their marriage at the beginning of the diary: Maurice has apparently borne some kind of grudge ever since their student days and this is doubtless why he was prepared to override Monique's strong opposition when the opportunity to leave Simca arose.

Her own reason for pushing that opposition so far, however, takes us back to the fact that she has had no career of her own, She records early on in her diary that while Maurice was working for Simca 'il me signalait des cas intéressants, j'essayais de les aider' (138), and we are given the impression that this kind of interest in those less well off than herself has been a regular feature of Monique's way of life. Indeed, even in the course of the story we see her take on another 'protégée' or 'chien mouillé', the waif Marguerite. But formerly she was able, it seems, to see this side of her life as a substitute for a career and even perhaps to use it to justify herself, in view of her failure to stomach the realities of medicine. The view that she expresses from the beginning of her diary, on the other hand, is that she is now excluded from Maurice's work at the clinic and that his patients no longer need her (138). Yet the point that this was the disguised factor behind her strong resistance to Maurice's desire for a change ten years earlier comes out clearly only when their marriage is breaking up:

Jalouse de son travail: je dois reconnaître que ce n'est pas faux. Pendant dix ans j'ai fait à travers Maurice une expérience qui me passionnait; la relation du médecin avec le malade; je participais; je le conseillais. Ce lien entre nous, si important pour moi, il a choisi de le briser. (190-1; my italics)

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of this frank statement, which explains why the argument ten years earlier was so crucial for Monique and shows another respect in which her claims that she was acting in Maurice's best interests were based on self-deception. The self-deception, moreover, is seen to have a further dimension, for the indications are strong that by displaying indifference towards his work of the last ten years she has been trying to punish her husband for going against her wishes:

Ce n'est pas la première fois qu'il se plaint de mon indifférence à sa carrière, et jusqu'ici, je n'étais pas mécontente qu'elle l'agace un peu. (177-8; cf. 191)

It is true that with the advent of Noëllie she comes to see the dangers of this stance, but Monique never quite reaches the point of acknowledging her petulant refusal to take an interest in Maurice's career for what it really is. She continues to delude herself into thinking that he has somehow deliberately excluded her from his work.

In general, one of the main features of Monique's character is her refusal to acknowledge that things and people change.¹² We have seen how and why she opposed a change in Maurice's career, and in the course of the diary we see her attaching great importance to the fact that Maurice has asserted: 'Il n'y a rien de changé entre nous' (136). This later turns out to be another illustration of her powers of self-deception, for her husband insists that it was she herself who said it and she eventually admits that she may have ascribed the comment to him simply because it was what she wanted to believe (212). It becomes clear that for the past ten years she has been living under a particular kind of illusion about her relationship with Maurice:

Il faut donc croire que l'amour passionné entre nous—du moins de lui à moi—n'a duré que dix ans, dont le souvenir s'est répercuté pendant les dix autres années, donnant aux choses un retentissement qu'elles n'avaient pas vraiment. (222)

Systematically, she has suppressed the little pieces of evidence that would have enabled her to see how things had changed and has deceived herself into believing that all was well between them.

Yet if Monique has had a number of years in which to adopt and harden certain defensive, self-deceptive stances towards her past with Maurice, in her reactions to what actually happens during the period covered by the diary we have the opportunity to see her in the very process of trying to construct procedures for her own self-delusion. The first crucial episode in the story proper is where she learns that Maurice is having an affair, and to begin with we see her struggling with herself in order to assimilate the sexual implications of the situation. She tries to dismiss the affair as 'une histoire de peau' and (inconsistently) consoles herself with the thought that Noëllie is probably frigid (139). But by the following day she is already acknowledging that 'à l'âge de Maurice ça compte, une histoire de peau' (140). And now, far from suspecting that Noëllie is frigid, she is sure about her sexual expertise: 'elle sait certainement comment se conduire au lit' (141). Furthermore, in spite of her previous suggestion that all is perfectly satisfactory in her own sexual life with Maurice, she now makes reference to his 'tiédeur' (ibid.). Later, in conversation with Marie Lambert, she frankly talks as if sex has long constituted some kind of problem between them (195). And later still she definitely comes to accept at least some of the blame for this herself: 'Au lieu de ranimer notre vie sexuelle, je me fascinais sur les souvenirs de nos anciennes nuits' (209-10).

Sexuality as such is, in any case, of relatively little significance to Monique: what matters is what it represents in terms of her 'hold' over Maurice, or rather his drift away from her. In spite of her resistance, she is forced to replace her picture of 'Noëllie Guérard, cette petite arriviste glacée, jouant les amoureuses' with one of a rival who 'envisage une liaison sérieuse avec Maurice' (147). She eventually begins to consider the possibility that Noëllie can be exercising some influence over Maurice, and when Maurice rejects her sexually she has to admit that 'les choses sont beaucoup plus graves que je ne l'imaginais' (164). But, characteristically, she clings to the idea that Maurice still loves her and persuades herself that he is simply allowing his love to take second place to vanity (185). Even after he tells her quite categorically that he stopped loving her some ten years earlier, she refuses to abandon this position altogether. She admits that she was 'figée dans l'attitude de l'idéale épouse d'un mari idéal' (209), but at a very late stage she can still tell Isabelle: '"Au fond Maurice n'a jamais cessé de m'aimer"' (226). Even when she is considering going to New York near the end, she is still trying to convince herself that the old relationship can be restored (234). In short, as we read the diary we watch Monique slipping continuously from one view of the relationship between Maurice and Noëllie to another, graver one, yet doing so without ever entirely giving up her earlier idealistic view of her marriage, and resisting the movement at every stage by trying desperately to delude herself and to backtrack. As we have seen, certain attempts at self-deception fail because of the very force of events, but others are still enjoying some degree of success by the end of the story.

The intensity and complexity of Monique's dilemma on the psychological level generates patterns of behaviour which may also be regarded as evidence that she is self-deluded, even if in some cases the phenomena fall on the misty border between self-deception and sheer confusion. The discrepancies, for example, between her overt actions and what she has previously resolved to do are often not sufficiently clear-cut to enable us to say categorically that she has deceived herself, but suffice to make us feel that there is a certain self-delusion in the resolutions themselves. She sometimes 'decides' to take a tough line with Maurice but ends up giving ground in some respects and having to admit that she is not capable of forcing the issue (148). Or when she does stand firm, she sees herself play-acting as she does so:

Je voulais qu'il parte; je le voulais vraiment, j'étais sincère. Sincère parce que je n'y croyais pas. Cétait comme un affreux psychodrame où on joue à la vérité. C'est la vérité, mais on la joue. (184)

At the same time, she half wishes to adopt a more conciliatory approach, which is scarcely consistent with the first and which again she fails to carry through. She tries to take Isabelle's advice to be patient, 'compréhensive', but on a number of occasions has ill-judged outbursts that cause greater friction than ever and contribute to the general worsening of her situation.

Isabelle's intervention, furthermore, reminds us that more than once Monique deliberately and actively seeks out the advice or comment of others, only to discredit it on general grounds as soon as it has been given. Fairly early on she justifies her rejection of the comments of a graphologist by adducing two reasons that already sit uneasily together: 'Il faudra que je fasse faire une contre-expertise. De toute façon la graphologie n'est pas une science exacte' (200). And when she later obtains results rather more in her favour from a second graphologist, she still finds a reason for rejecting them: 'les résultats étaient faussés parce que certainement elle a compris le sens de cette consultation' (215). This reason is similar to the one she gives for discounting the views of Colette, which she has so anxiously solicited (187-8). The self-deception operating here, then, is not of a crude and obvious kind but has its deeper roots in the persistence of Monique's inconsistent conduct. She suggests that there are questions about oneself that there is no point in asking anyone at all to answer, since certain answers will never be given whatever the truth of the matter (200), yet she continues to ask these questions and goes on convincing herself that there must be some person who knows, and will tell her, the truth. Perhaps the fundamental reason for this is that so long as she can make herself believe it, she can hold out hopes of a positive and permanent solution to her problems with Maurice:

Il doit y avoir une vérité. Je devrais prendre l'avion pour New York et aller demander à Lucienne la vérité. Elle ne m'aime pas: elle me la dira. Alors j'effacerais tout ce qui est mal, tout ce qui me nuit, je remettrais les choses en place entre Maurice et moi. (234)

Needless to say, she eventually rejects Lucienne's comments too, coming to regard as cynicism or 'méchanceté' what she had previously seen as Lucienne's 'sens critique aigu'.

If these are somewhat problematical areas, we can nevertheless come back to the core of the story—Monique's reactions to Maurice's affair with Noëllie—and still find new dimensions within which Monique's self-deception takes effect. We might ask, for instance, whether the revelation of Maurice's affair comes as quite so much of a shock to Monique as we have hitherto assumed. She suggests at one point that she had half suspected something for some time (170) and she links this with the feeling she had even before his confession that Maurice had changed—a change earlier attributed to his work or his age (141). There is no lack of plausibility in this suggestion, but it does open up new regions of self-delusion in Monique's diary. Looking back at her various accounts of the parting with Maurice at Nice aerodrome with which the diary begins, for example, we have no difficulty in finding contradictions. She talks at first of the 'gaieté' and of the 'qualité de joie oubliée' that the unaccustomed solitude and independence brought her (122), but soon goes on to say that the 'bonheur si intense' arose because the holiday together preceding their separation had been so dismal and because she felt closer to Maurice as soon as they were apart (128). She later comes to realise that Maurice's anxiety when they parted was some kind of guilt about Noëllie, and eventually suggests that she had almost guessed what was wrong at the time (170). We are bound to infer from this sequence of comments either that Monique was deceiving herself at the beginning of the diary or that she is doing so when she later reinterprets events (or both).

The net effect of all of this is to call the reliability of Monique's diary into question in a very general way and there is no doubt at all that, as Beauvoir claims, 'de page en page le journal se conteste'. This goes right back to the question of Monique's motives for starting (and continuing) the diary at all. At first she claims, 'je me suis mise à écrire pour moi-même' (122), but then she gives a rather different reason (139). Eventually she acknowledges the discrepancy between her earlier statements as well as her 'real' motive:

si j'ai commencé à le tenir, dans les Salines, ce n'est pas à cause d'une jeunesse soudain retrouvée ni pour peupler ma solitude, mais pour conjurer une certaine anxiété qui ne s'avouait pas. (221)

In a series of earlier asides and isolated comments Monique has hinted at the sort of omissions and lies that her diary may involve, in addition to noting the obvious fact that her memory is sometimes defective; she has even alluded to a mental process whereby she suppresses or 'neutralizes' memories (189). Now, however, she goes still further, claiming that her diary is one long record of delusion and self-deception:

Oh! je ne vais pas me remettre à commenter cette histoire. Il n'y a pas une ligne de ce journal qui n'appelle une correction ou un démenti . . . Oui, tout au long de ces pages je pensais ce que j'écrivais et je pensais le contraire; et en les relisant je me sens complètement perdue. Il y a des phrases qui me font rougir de honte . . . 'J'ai toujours voula la vérité, si je l'ai obtenue, c'est que je la voulais.' Peut-on se gourer à ce pointlà sur sa vie! . . . Je me mentais. Comme je me suis menti! (221)

Her account of events and her honesty with herself in the diary could hardly be more seriously discredited than this, and it is small wonder that Monique soon begins to break down and abandons the diary for a while, only to take it up again for a final month on the insistence of her psychiatrist (237).

And yet, paradoxically, even as we reach this extreme point in our understanding of Monique's self-deception, certain qualifications to the picture of her that we have taken over from Beauvoir's own comments bring themselves most forcefully to our attention. Monique's diary is certainly in large part a record of chronic self-deception, and we have found no difficulty in illustrating this under the headings supplied by the author: 'des mensonges à soi, des oublis, des erreurs'. The fact is, however, that it is by no means literally true that all of Monique's energy goes into fleeing from the truth. It is easy to neglect the significance of the fact that the harsh comments about the 'dishonesty' of her diary that we have just examined come from Monique herself She undoubtedly comes to see that she has been deceiving herself extensively, but that she comes to see this at all can only be taken as an advance towards the truth. La Femme rompue would be a very different story indeed—and in more than one respect—if Monique did not from time to time catch a glimpse of the light. And quite apart from the moments of lucidity that we have already referred to in our effort to 'dépister' Monique, there are occasions when she sees that she is on the point of deceiving herself and pulls herself up (155; 174; 206); when she is rather remarkably clear-headed and honest about her own 'unique flirt', with Quillan (137; 168-70); and when she accepts that she has been a victim of the 'aveuglement' that has so astonished her in other women (193). Monique is not absolutely shot through with self-deception, but a complex (and thoroughly plausible) mixture of self-deception on the one hand and lucidity about herself on the other.

The point receives a certain kind of confirmation if we rectify a surprising omission in Beauvoir's comments on the story by referring to the fact that Monique and Maurice have children. For, so far as we can tell, Monique (unlike the central figures of the first two stories) has been guilty of no serious self-deception in relation to her two daughters. She seems never to have hidden from herself the point that her devotion to them is 'une forme d'égoïsme' (143). And although her earlier conviction that they are both leading outstandingly fulfilled and happy lives is slightly shaken by the end of the story, this shows only that she has been indulging in a little wishful thinking about them: it certainly goes no way towards demonstrating that their upbringing has not been, in very large measure, a success. In any case, Maurice himself would have to bear his fair share of responsibility for any deficiencies in the raising of their daughters.¹³ Indeed, we do well to remind ourselves at this point that Maurice is very far from blameless in the whole matter of the breakdown of their marriage. While we need to keep Monique's self-deception firmly in view, we should not simply forget Maurice's deception over a period of years: part of the resemblance between La Femme rompue and a 'roman policier' is to be accounted for by the fact that Monique herself has to 'dépister' Maurice in much the way that the reader has to catch her out. In short, seizing the vitally important point that Monique is self-deceived is no reason—whatever the author may imply—for failing either to assess the diarist's character as a whole or to ask to what extent her husband is to blame for her eventual plight.

It would be interesting as well as feasible to develop these qualifications to Beauvoir's own description of Monique in more detail and, indeed, to question other aspects of the author's comments on the three stories of La Femme rompue.¹⁴ More generally, there would be considerable value in a reasoned assessment of the technical advantages and disadvantages of Beauvoir's decision to treat the theme of self-deception in stories that have only one 'narrator' and are either cast in the form of a diary or approximate to it. However, if the narrower aims of the present inquiry preclude full discussion of these issues, it is already possible to say, on the basis of the foregoing analyses, that one of the outstanding features of the stories collected in La Femme rompue is the sensitivity and subtlety with which they illustrate and explore the phenomenon of self-deception. And because of this, whatever the different, less sophisticated levels at which these stories may be appreciated, it remains one of the major merits of the book that it encourages us to read between the lines, to judge for ourselves and to participate as we engage with the text. As far back as 1946 Beauvoir was arguing that the reader of fiction must eventually 'formuler des jugements qu'il tire de lui-même sans qu'on ait la présomption de les lui dicter'.¹⁵

But while this shows continuity in the author's basic literary aims over a long period, another aspect of the material examined is that it constitutes a certain kind of development in her views and concerns. More precisely, it pulls together particularly tightly two pre-existent strands in her writings. Beauvoir has evidently always been intrigued by self-deception (although without previously giving it quite the emphasis and prominence that it has in La Femme rompue), and it is well known that she developed a deep concern with the distinctive situation of women in modern society during the late nineteen-forties. In La Femme rompue these two interests converge (together, of course, with later preoccupations like aging), not exactly for the first time in her fiction, but in an especially felicitous way that enables her to concentrate sharply on both at the same time. The results are stimulating, since the convergence obliges us to look at 'la condition féminine' from a slightly different angle, as well as to re-consider the elaborate mental process whereby human beings delude themselves. Certainly, the range of examples of self-deception in the book is accordingly a restricted one: all three narrators are married women of forty or more who have children and are undergoing some kind of crisis in the family relationships that matter most to them. Yet within this narrow range Beauvoir skilfully rings the changes with regard to both the main factors impinging upon the lives of such women (faithful or unfaithful husband; personal career or none; number and sex of children; etc, etc) and to the nature and strength of the self-deception involved, which covers what might be considered one fairly 'normal' case, a definitely pathological one, and one where the process is particularly pervasive and debilitating without, perhaps, excluding all hope for the future.

Moreover, all three instances graphically draw our attention to, or remind us of, certain rather neglected characteristics of self-deception, notably its fragility (mostly, we are able to detect it only when the victim is forced by circumstances to face the truth), its elusiveness (often there is great difficulty in distinguishing it from misjudgement or error), and its complex moral implications. 'Self-deception' is frequently used as a term of moral disapproval, and yet our recognition that the 'aveuglement' of certain women is often, though in varying degrees, self-inflicted cannot automatically be taken to imply that we wish above all to censure them; nor indeed that their plight is any the less real or heart-rending for that. Beauvoir is seeking, after all, to 'donner à voir leur nuit',¹⁶ and she does so all the more memorably and convincingly as a result of identifying the self-imposed element in their dilemma. At the same time, to acknowledge the existence of self-deception in such cases (at least, where it is non-pathological) is presumably to suggest that the women concerned have it in some sense within their power to alleviate their own suffering, so that a particular kind of judgement on them seems to be involved. These are all intrinsically important matters, which potentially bear upon our attitudes towards others in general as well as towards some 'femmes rompues'. They also raise complex and difficult questions, however, which admit of no easy resolution at either the practical or the theoretical level. It is to Beauvoir's credit that she sees the work of fiction as being at least as appropriate a genre in which to broach and explore them as the philosophical essay:

Le lecteur s'interroge, il doute, il prend parti et cette élaboration hésitante de sa pensée lui est un enrichissement qu'aucun enseignement doctrinal ne pourrait remplacer.¹⁷

Notes

¹Tout compte fait, Gallimard, 1972 (hereafter TCF).

² TCF, p. 139.

³ TCF, p. 141.

⁴ All page-references to the stories given in brackets in the body of the text are to the standard Gallimard edition of La Femme rompue (1967), from which the 'Folio' edition differs only slightly in pagination.

⁵ TCF, p. 143.

⁶ The function of Manette, André's mother, in the story is to show by contrast how badly Madame is reacting to aging, for Manette has clearly adjusted perfectly to her old age: 'C'est un des cas où la vieillesse est un âge heureux' (70).

⁷ Beauvoir herself would certainly answer no to this second question: her purpose in La Vieillesse (Gallimard, 1970) is, precisely, to expose and attack such self-deception.

⁸ TCF, p. 143.

⁹ TCF, p. 142.

¹⁰ TCF, p. 143-4.

¹¹ TCF, p. 141-2.

¹² In this respect, of course, she is like the narrator of L Age de discrétion. But one is reminded just as strongly of Paule in Les Mandarins, whose situation and state of mind have certain very close parallels with those of Monique.

¹³ There is a fascinating parallel between the way in which Monique has pressed Maurice to practise medicine in just the way that her father did and the way in which Maurice apparently wanted his daughters either to pursue an academic career having affinities with his own work or even to collaborate in his work (161).

¹⁴ It seems that she somewhat understimates the self-deception of the narrator of L'Age de discrétion, just as she rather overemphasises that of Monique. It may also be worth mentioning, on a more trivial level, that on p. 143 of Tout compte fait she once writes 'Laurence' instead of 'Monique' and misspells the name of Murielle.

¹⁵ 'Littérature et métaphysique' in L'Existentialisme et la sagesse des nations (Nagel, 1948, Coll. 'Pensées'): p. 92. (This essay was originally published in Les Temps Modernes, April 1946, pp. 1153-63.)

¹⁶ TCF, p. 141.

¹⁷ 'Littérature et métaphysique', p. 92.