[In the following review, Civello praises the insights and organization of Simone de Beauvoir.]

Toril Moi's Sexual/Textual Politics has become required reading in the area of feminist theory. Her latest work, Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman, equals the excellence of the first, but for different reasons. The former brilliantly surveys French and Anglo-American theory, comparing both while sacrificing the heterogeneity of neither. The latter concentrates on one French theorist, Simone de Beauvoir, calling her “the greatest feminist theorist of our century.”

In the introduction to Simone de Beauvoir, Moi defines her terms, reveals her assumptions, and describes her methodology. “Intellectual woman” means one who “refuses to accept the dichotomy between mind and body, sense and seduction.” Along with a mini-essay in the afterword, the concept of the intellectual woman in love not only frames the book but also provides the context for argumentation—effective organization since Moi assumes no distinction between life and text, literature and philosophy. My quarrels with the book are small, but I am relieved that Moi drops the label “personal genealogy” early on; her explanation of it unnecessarily complicates what is an otherwise model introduction.

The very structure of Simone de Beauvoir is feminist and will remind those who have read Sexual/Textual Politics of the discussion of écriture féminine therein. The body of the text corresponds to “three textual moments” in Beauvoir's work, established by Moi as inseparable from Beauvoir's life. Part one explicates a 1929 conversation between Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre; in this section, Moi investigates the differences in their education. Part two focuses on Beauvoir's postwar relationship with Sartre; Moi examines the social conflicts for intellectual women at that time in France. Part three looks at Beauvoir's frame of mind at middle age and asks why this accomplished woman was so depressed and how this sadness affected her writing.

Throughout the book, Moi stresses Beauvoir's feeling of being Sartre's subordinate, but nowhere more than in the first chapter, tellingly entitled “Second Only to Sartre.” In this chapter, part of the larger section devoted to the differences in the educational experiences of the couple (his led to the professoriate, hers to teaching in the lycée), Moi writes convincingly of society's ambivalence toward the thinking woman. Whereas intellectuality is generally considered an asset for a man, it is often a liability for a woman, as Moi says, “under patriarchy.”

Continuing to trace the educational path for women in pre-war France, chapter two could stand alone as a short treatise on the reform of that system. With it, Moi fills in gaps left by the recent (excellent) biography of Simone de Beauvoir by Deirdre Bair. This information, none of it new but pulled together here probably for the first time, illuminates Beauvoir's self-assessment that she was less intellectual than Sartre. According to Moi, that conclusion “is the overdetermined outcome of a great number of social factors.”

Chapter three delves into the reception of Beauvoir's work and, more to the point, the tone of that reception. Although popular with mass audiences from the beginning, her work has usually received “strikingly hostile” criticism from scholars. Moi exposes this sexism, stating that many critics have preferred discrediting her personally to debating her substantively.

The purpose of chapter four is to discover why Beauvoir, who apologized for L'Invitée, believed that “to write the body is bad writing.” In this and the next chapter, Moi closely reads the 1943 novel of jealousy and murder; it is on the one hand “melodramatic,” but on the other “a victory over repression” for Beauvoir in the face of Sartre's actual infidelity. Moi uses the psychoanalytic model, as well as the tenets of existentialism, to interpret the main characters, Françoise, Pierre, and (the third side of the triangle) Xavière. Moi's reading of Sartre's Being and Nothingness against Beauvoir's L'Invitée advances her thesis in the fifth chapter. Whereas the philosophical work labels a woman's response to a seductive man “bad faith,” the work of fiction gives life to that abstraction. Moi considers both books studies in “the question of women's freedom in sexual relations,” Beauvoir's being the “more subtle” analysis.

Both chapters six and seven deal with The Second Sex (1949). Using a comparative mode, Moi first reads The Second Sex in conjunction with The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) and Being and Nothingness, and then on its own merits. She bases her distinction between Beauvoir's two works on the fact that the earlier, an embarrassment to its author, attempts to construct an ethics based on existentialism. The Second Sex, however, represents Beauvoir's original political theory. While Moi is quick to point out the “phallic metaphors” in the work, she is just as ready to praise: The Second Sex locates the conflicts in women's lives on three levels—the ontological, the social, and the level of the body—that converge in a sexual “arena where the general conflicts of women's lives are most acutely felt.”

Moi describes Beauvoir's chef d'oeuvre as a “narrative of liberation” that posits work as a “double bind” for women, who often find it essential and enslaving at the same time. Noting the harsh criticism of Beauvoir by feminists, Moi makes perhaps the most pointed statement in the book. It is without doubt directed at French feminists, who usually neglect to mention Beauvoir and The Second Sex altogether. She states that “without a political vision to sustain it, feminist theory will hit a dead end,” and she demonstrates the unmistakable contribution of Simone de Beauvoir to that vision.

The strengths of Toril Moi's book far outweigh its weaknesses. I might take issue with her stating that the Bair biography “is aimed as much at a popular as at a scholarly market,” then placing it on the “popular” instead of the “scholarly” list of studies of Beauvoir in an endnote following chapter three. But to quibble over notes would not do justice to this long-awaited monument to Beauvoir. Writing in the exuberant voice that we have come to expect from her, Toril Moi enlists even the headings to energize her text. In spite of subtitles such as “Politics and the Intellectual Woman,” “Educating Simone,” “The Importance of Being Interesting,” and “My Monster/My Mother/My Man/Myself,” Moi avoids being merely cute. Instead, she subverts familiar cultural icons in order to demonstrate Beauvoir's heretofore underestimated subversion of the patriarchal culture itself. And graduate students, take note. Throughout the study, Moi tosses out suggestions for future research, such as reading all of Beauvoir's fiction in light of Peter Brooks' theory of melodrama.

I have one last tribute: Toril Moi has made the best feminist sense out of Simone de Beauvoir's romantic life. So much irrelevant silliness has surrounded this particular topic recently that Moi's comment is particularly refreshing: “To admire … is not to worship.”