[In the following excerpt, Keefe studies characterization in Beauvoir's stories.]

On a number of occasions in the early nineteen-thirties Beauvoir began writing novels, but she abandoned each of her attempts before producing anything that she might submit to a publisher. In 1935, however, she embarked upon a series of five interlinked stories, the unifying theme of which was 'la profusion de crimes, minuscules ou énormes, que couvrent les mystifications spiritualistes' (FA, 256). The collection was ironically entitled La Primauté du spirituel. She herself was in revolt against the spiritualism that had oppressed her for so long and wished to express her disgust 'à travers l'histoire de jeunes femmes que je connaissais et qui en avaient été les victimes plus ou moins consentantes' (QPS, vii). Beauvoir completed the work in 1937, but by the time it had been turned down by both Gallimard and Grasset she had other projects in hand and was content enough to forget it. It was finally published under the modified title Quand prime le spirituel in 1979, when she decided that it was not without its qualities and shed a certain light on her other writings.

The first story, 'Marcelle', sketches the childhood, adolescence and early aspirations of the heroine, then describes in rather more detail the nature and failure of her marriage to a worthless, playboy 'poet'. Marcelle's self-indulgence as a child soon becomes thoroughgoing self-deception as she covers up her strong sensuality, first with fantasies and then with a belief in the special destiny that governs her life. Her job as a social worker is little more than a way of biding her time until the right man comes along, as is her involvement with the movement attempting to bring culture to the working classes. As her 'mystérieuse féminité' asserts itself more, she becomes engaged to one of the organisers of the movement. Although she still fails to acknowledge her sensuality, when her fiancé proves not to have a passionate nature she loses interest in him and becomes infatuated with an aspiring poet, whom she takes to be her man of destiny. They marry and for a while her voluptuousness receives full, if somewhat tormented, expression. Denis, however, soon turns out to be an indolent parasite and eventually leaves her for someone else. Undeterred, Marcelle immediately chooses martyrdom, constructing another personal image with which to maintain her self-deception:

peut-être la souffrance seule pourrait-elle combler enfin son cœur. 'Plus haut que le bonheur', murmura-t-elle . . . Pour la seconde fois elle eut la merveilleuse révélation de son destin. 'Je suis une femme de génie', décida-t-elle. (44)

The strength of 'Marcelle' lies in its portrayal of the persistent 'mauvaise foi' of a shallow young woman of bourgeois origins. Since the story is narrated for the most part from the viewpoint of the central figure herself, this theme cannot be spelled out explicitly and Beauvoir's technique consists in juxtaposing details which fit together only on the assumption that Marcelle's motives and ideals are not what she claims they are. At some points the device is rather too obvious, but on the whole Beauvoir manages this main feature of the tale with skill, and her examination of the self-deception of her character, even of a certain type of woman, is penetrating and forceful. Relative lack of detail, however, makes the account of the earlier stages of Marcelle's life much less substantial and convincing than that of her marriage. The latter suffers from compression and has its melodramatic moments, but it contains telling sequences, like the description of Marcelle's wedding night, while a specific problem with the first half is the flimsiness of Beauvoir's explanation of the origins of Marcelle's 'mauvaise foi'. As we have simply to accept that the character chooses this stance early in her childhood, our interest in Marcelle remains limited until we become involved in the more carefully delineated relationship with Denis.

Although the heroine of 'Chantal' is also a victim of self-deception in some measure, this is not quite the main feature of the second story, which relates the first year of a young Sèvres graduate's initial teaching appointment, in the provincial town of Rougemont. Chantal's attitudes are certainly marked by contradictions. She hopes for professional and even social success, yet sees herself as an antiestablishment figure in the school, fraternising with two of her pupils rather than with her colleagues. Furthermore, her love of culture is evidently something of an affectation, for it emerges that she is happy to have finished studying (49) and does not enjoy intellectual conversations (55). In these and other respects Chantai is undoubtedly deluding herself to some unspecified extent. More essential to the story, however, is the general point that, whether self-deceived or simply cynical, she is not what she claims to be. The way in which Chantai refuses to help her favourite pupil Monique, when the latter becomes pregnant, shows both that her views are more conventional than she pretends and that she is much less concerned about the welfare of her pupils than she would have them believe. Above all, she is relieved not to have been implicated in the scandal: 'Ils auraient pu me compromettre' (100).

Beauvoir brings these points out well by relating two and a half of the six sections almost exclusively from the standpoint of another of Chantal's pupil's, Andrée. While part of Chantal's account of events—including the beginning of the story—is cast in a diary-form that is quite appropriate to her new situation, Andrée's viewpoint is introduced much later, in a rather more disorientating manner (for a short time we are not aware that the person she refers to as 'Plattard' is in fact Chantai). This is an effective way of forcing us to see Chantai from the outside and to contrast her view of things with that of someone else. Andrée sees through Monique's boy-friend Serge in a way that Chantai never does, as well as exposing the hopelessly romantic character of the teacher's vision in a number of other respects. In the eyes of the reader, therefore, Chantal's viewpoint is doubly undermined, for she continues to regard Andrée as an unintelligent, unimaginative girl. Because of Beauvoir's juggling with conflicting perspectives, the story rather lacks a strong focal point and the key relationships in it are not explored in sufficient detail or depth to fascinate us. What all of the main characters have in common, however, is that they feel cramped or stifled in the town of Rougemont. The satirical portraits of social life in the provinces and petty squabbling in the local lycée are not enough to pull the story together, but they are vivid in themselves and make Beauvoir's revolt against provincialism one of the most memorable features of the tale.

'Lisa' is a brief but interesting study of the mentality of a highly sheltered post-graduate student, who lives as an assistant teacher in a Catholic institution for rich young girls on the outskirts of Paris. Lisa's commitment to philosophy has gone and her central concern is to excite the interest of the brother of her more independent and free-thinking friend, Marguerite. Beauvoir exposes Lisa's immaturity by tracing her reactions to the trivial incidents of one of her days of freedom in a city that still overwhelms her: 'Les rues de Paris, les passants avaient toujours ce visage ennemi' (117). Lisa is both cruelly disappointed at her failure to win over her 'friends' and stimulated to the point of fantasy by casual encounters in the street, as well as by an appointment with her dentist. She returns meekly to Auteuil, however, and quickly realises how little significance what has happened to her has in the context of her everyday life at the school. Although it is somewhat easier to sympathise with the heroine here than it was in the earlier stories, the institutional background to 'Lisa' is not entirely satisfactory. It is difficult to believe that someone of Lisa's age and education—even one whose studies had been conducted under the watchful eye of Mlle Lambert—would accept such a humiliating position so submissively ('"vous savez que le règlement interdit de passer plus d'une journée par semaine hors de la maison"'; 109). Nevertheless, Beauvoir's portrayal of the vague and unstable romanticism of certain protected young women is convincing, and some of the set-pieces in the story—notably, detailed descriptions of work in the Bibliothèque Nationale and a session in the dentist's chair—are particularly successful.

The key to 'Anne' resides in the fact that no part of the story is narrated from the viewpoint of the heroine. Beauvoir's central purpose is to show how the individuality and freedom of a girl of twenty is ignored by the other main characters, into whose minds we are allowed to penetrate. Anne's mother, Mme Vignon, is only concerned, allegedly in the name of deep religious principles, to ensure that her daughter remains 'moral' and respectable in all ways: 'c'était atroce de torturer cette enfant, mais il fallait penser à son salut, non à son bonheur' (145). Her friend Chantal at least helps her to recognise 'combien il se mêlait de prudence bourgeoise au souci que Mme Vignon prenait de son âme' (166), but she herself, in encouraging Anne to rebel against her mother, is using Anne to solve her own problems: 'elle avait besoin d'une réussite éclatante pour oublier tout à fait Rougemont' (156). Torn between these two forces, Anne attaches great importance to her relationship with Pascal Drouffe. He, however, in spite of his efforts to be honest, is confused and self-deceived. While he idealises Anne and their relationship in certain respects, he does not have genuine love for her and uses the excuse of the situation of his mother and sister (Marcelle) in order to avoid becoming engaged. Perhaps under the pressures involved, Anne breaks down and dies, of encephalitis or a brain tumour. Mme Vignon, Pascal and Chantai all draw some kind of consolation from her death: Pascal interprets it in vague philosophical terms ('la vie s'accomplit par la mort et la mort est source de vie'; 186); Mme Vignon sees it as God's will; and Chantal sees in it a way of making herself into a more mysterious, romantic figure: 'désormais des ombres mystérieuses passeraient parfois sur son visage, ses gestes, ses paroles, auraient de subtiles résonances' (192).

The story is again technically interesting in the way in which it makes us read between the lines. Beauvoir skilfully plays off one viewpoint against another as she did in 'Chantai'—here Chantai is critical of Mme Vignon's view of Anne as well as of Pascal's, while Mme Vignon deplores the influence of both Pascal and Chantai, and Pascal thinks that he understands Anne better than either of the two women. Over and above this, Beauvoir gives a distinctive tone to each of the three main 'narrators' (a short section of Part IV is related from the standpoint of Marcelle), but in each separate case one which encourages the reader to detect forms of 'mauvaise foi' in the words and attitudes on display. Mme Vignon is the first of a line of portraits that Beauvoir was to draw of the repressive mother who transfers her own psychological problems to her daughter; and Chantal's narrative continues to show us the deeply selfish and insecure young woman that we saw in the second story. However, the figure of Pascal (who is an especially important person for many of the women characters in this collection) is not very well delineated, and far too little is made of Anne's death, which scarcely seems to relate to preceding events at all. While the separate parts cohere neatly in relation to the main events, there is a void rather than a fascinating mystery at the heart of the story, since we have no reason for identifying particularly strongly with Anne, who remains relatively unknown to us.

The final story, 'Marguerite', is similar in content to the opening one. It relates, this time in the first person, the childhood and early adulthood of Marguerite Drouffe. Though less sensual than her older sister Marcelle, she too has to struggle against her background in order to understand sexuality; she too soon loses faith in God; and she too works for the movement Contact Social. Moreover, she becomes just as captivated by Denis Charval as her sister was and, after a break, goes on seeing him when he is no longer with Marcelle. Ostensibly in the name of philosophical principles, he introduces her to drink and the night-life of Montparnasse, but although her naïve belief in him represents too violent a swing from the extreme of narrow bourgeois morality to that of empty bohemian rhetoric, Marguerite's commitment to Denis eventually goes far beyond a submission to the charm of the sordid. Her devotion is certainly more genuine and less self-centred than was her sister's rather patronising attitude and—for all its short-sightedness—can be seen as having a certain nobility (237). She is shaken out of it by a similar shock to that sustained by Marcelle, whom he finally decides to go back to. The last part of the story stresses that it was only when she had outgrown her obsession with Denis that she could develop autonomously and begin coming to grips with the real world: 'j'ai voulu montrer seulement comment j'ai été amenée à essayer de regarder les choses en face, sans accepter d'oracles, de valeurs toutes faites; il a fallu tout réinventer moimême' (249).

In spite of some vivid sketches of bizarre characters and shady nightclubs (like 'Marcelle', it comes to life more when Denis enters the scene), and despite Beauvoir's relatively high opinion of it, the story is a rather conventional, undistinguished one. It is rather too tidy and structured to have the open-ended quality of the first tale and although it begins to raise questions of its own—notably, concerning the risks run by a woman who invests all of her faith and hopes on one man ('ma vie était transfigurée, elle avait retrouvé enfin ce sens qu'elle avait perdu le jour où j'avais perdu Dieu'; 228), these are left unexplored. With Marguerite promising to face up to the world more positively than any of Beauvoir's other heroines, the ending allows the collection to close on an apparently constructive note. But this convenient optimism is vague and weak in relation to the pitfalls described in the rest of the story, let alone the rest of the book. Grasset's reader, Henry Müller, made a very astute remark about the stories in this connection: '"Vous vous êtes contentée de décrire un univers en décomposition, et de nous abandonner au seuil d'un monde nouveau sans nous en indiquer très exactement le particulier rayonnement"' (FA,375).

Beauvoir was surprised that her collection should have been taken as a deliberate evocation of certain settings and situations in the period after the First World War, yet this may indeed be its major merit in general. As she suggests, Quand prime le spirituel certainly begins exploring a number of the themes that were to dominate her later fiction—especially that of 'mauvaise foi'—but it cannot be said that the attack on spiritualism provides a single strong focal point for the various stories. At different times she herself has claimed that the satirical and didactic sides of the work are 'trop accusées' (FA,258) and that the satire 'bien que pertinente, restait timide' (QPS,vii). The more important fact is that the target itself remains particularly vague. It was doubtless a very real one for Beauvoir, and comparison with her memoirs shows how extensively she drew on her personal experience in creating her characters ('Anne' is clearly based on Zaza's tragedy, and Beauvoir admits to liking the early part of 'Marguerite' because it is largely her own story). Nevertheless, the crucial process of characterisation is in one way or another inadequate in most cases. This is probably not simply because she was lacking in technique at this point—her handling of narrative, whilst promising a great deal, repeatedly shows a certain lack of control and consistency—but also because she had not yet found a properly substantial and coherent topic. It is also true that the book falls between two stools. At some stage since 1937, at least a few changes seem to have been made to the text (Marcelle was formerly called Renée and 'Lisa' was originally the first, not the third story in the collection; FA,256), but although a broad chronological progression has been preserved and although the interlinking of the tales becomes more prominent in later stages, the book has neither the range and variety of a good collection of separate stories nor the continuity and harmony of a novel.