Becoming Beauvoir

by Kate Kirkpatrick

  This question is only intensified by knowing what her memoirs left unsaid. In her 20 September lecture she said that feminism was ‘far from being outdated’, and not only worthwhile to women: It is ‘a cause that is common to men and women, and men will only come to live in a more just, better-organized world, a more decent world, when women have a more just and more decent status. The acquisition of equality between the sexes is the business of both’.91 Beauvoir expressed hope that The Second Sex would become outdated because, once women achieved equality, its analyses of women’s alienation would be redundant. She thought that women’s exploitation could be abolished without abolishing sexual difference. But she was concerned by what she saw as an antifeminist ‘regression’ in her and other cultures. In France women were claiming that their true vocation was to be a wife and mother: a homemaker.

  Part of Beauvoir’s concern was that women who were ‘confined’ to private life lived precariously, in economic dependence on someone who could stop loving them at any time, leaving women without means and without the meaning around which they built their life. But Beauvoir did not hide the fact that she thought this kind of life ‘inferior’ to ‘real participation in social life’, to ‘helping to build the world in which we live’.92 She thought that women were ‘victims’ of the regression to being housewives: partly because women suffered from comparing themselves with other women, and also because working women were still expected to be housewives when they got home. The result was guilt and exhaustion about their decisions: ‘If a woman has put in an eight-hour day at work and works five or six hours more at home, at the end of the week she finds herself in an absolutely terrifying state of exhaustion. It is not yet at all customary for the man to really help the woman.’93

  What Beauvoir found valuable in countries where she had seen a greater number of women in the workforce was their ‘self-rapport’, their relation to themselves; she thought this self-understanding was derived from participation in public life. She had always been interested in what it meant to become a self, and in The Second Sex she had identified a common challenge facing women: the possibility of being ‘split subjects’, torn between the selves they want to be as lovers and mothers and the selves they want to become in the wider world. Beauvoir’s second lecture in Japan returned to ‘the divided character of women’s condition’. Since working women also want a happy life, love, and a home, many opt to sacrifice their ambition: ‘she finds it prudent to be self-effacing on the professional plane’.94

  Three years later, in 1969, when The Second Sex was published in Japan, it appeared on the bestseller list. On the way back from Tokyo, Beauvoir and Sartre stopped in Moscow. It was Sartre’s eleventh visit to the USSR, but he now realized he had lost his reason to return: it was over with Lena Zonina.

  In November 1966 Beauvoir’s return to fiction, Les Belles Images, was published – in English this title could be rendered ‘Pretty Pictures’ or ‘Beautiful Images’. A review in La Cité described it as a ‘short novel about contemporary morals entirely impregnated with existentialist morality’, again reinforcing the narrative that Beauvoir belonged in the same intellectual category with Sartre and taking no note of the ways Beauvoir’s depictions of women questioned society’s treatment of them. The review dismissively said it was unsuccessful satire; a list of ‘all of the clichés read in weeklies presented in a sort of collage’.95 But the sales told a different story: 120,000 copies sold fast.96

  Beauvoir later described its protagonist Laurence as ‘disgusted with life to the point of anorexia’.97 She is a successful advertising agent, wife, and mother of two daughters. She enjoys extramarital sex at work before coming home to put the kids to bed and spend the evening with her successful architect husband. She drinks, but she doesn’t eat.

  Laurence’s equilibrium (if it can be so-called) is disrupted by her child’s questions – Why do people exist? Why are some unhappy? What do you do for the unhappy ones? – provoking her to reflect on what she values. She is in the business of marketing beautiful images, writing sleek slogans; she has honed the skills required to present a very pretty picture of herself. But maintaining the appearance of the beautiful life – with its beautiful cars, beautiful home, beautiful clothes, beautiful food, beautiful vacations – leaves her dissatisfied with the status quo. Laurence was 10 years old in 1945; she can remember the Holocaust. And she starts to wonder why there is so little sadness over Algeria; to notice that images of civil rights protesters in America are forgotten as soon as they fade from the TV screens.

  The book criticizes capitalism and consumerism, explicitly asking whether money makes one happy.98 Implicitly, it can be taken to respond to shifts in feminism and women’s situations, and the equation of money with independence. It also satirized Michel Foucault, who was becoming known as a leading thinker in France. In a 1966 interview, Beauvoir claimed that Foucault’s works, and the journal Tel Quel, provided ‘bourgeois culture’ with ‘alibis’. Whereas the message of Les Belles Images was that progress ‘must be at once material, intellectual and moral, or it will simply not be progress at all’, in Beauvoir’s view Foucault’s thinking lacked commitment to social change.99

  Beauvoir’s novel concludes with Laurence reflecting on her children: ‘To raise a child is not to make a beautiful image.’ Beauvoir had said in The Second Sex that raising a child is an ethical undertaking, the formation of a human freedom – and that, too often, for women and children, it was a schooling in indifference. In the novel’s final scene Laurence looked in the mirror and thought that for her, the chips were down. Her children would have their own chance. But what chance?100

  The next February Beauvoir, Sartre and Lanzmann travelled to the Middle East, to Egypt and Israel. Les Temps Modernes was running a special issue on the Arab–Israeli conflict. In Egypt they were welcomed by Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, the director of the newspaper Al-Ahram and friend of Egypt’s second president Gamal Abdel Nasser. Al-Ahram ran an interview with Beauvoir entitled ‘The Philosopher of The Second Sex in Cairo’.101 From Egypt they visited Palestinian camps at Gaza on 10 March, and on the 11 March Beauvoir gave a talk on ‘Socialism and Feminism’ at the University of Cairo.

  Figure 11 Claude Lanzmann, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre at Giza.

  Because of the Arab–Israeli conflict there were no airlines flying direct from Egypt to Israel, so they had to travel via Athens.102 When they got to Israel they visited Jaffa and Tel Aviv, and some kibbutzim. They stayed for two weeks, and Beauvoir again gave lectures, this time on ‘The Role of the Writer in the Contemporary World’ at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Beauvoir was fascinated by women’s status in this society, and wanted to understand how young people felt about the competing claims of the Israelis and Palestinians. That June, the Six-Day War remapped territories and divided political opinion in the world and ‘the family’. Beauvoir supported Israel; Sartre supported Palestine. Once Beauvoir’s support of Israel was public, her works were banned in Iraq – two days before the Six-Day War. Closer to home, Lanzmann felt betrayed by Sartre. He had read Sartre’s book on anti-Semitism in the 1940s and found it hugely inspiring; was its author now an anti-Semite?

  The previous month Sartre and Beauvoir had taken part in the Russell Tribunal. The British philosopher Bertrand Russell – then 94 years old – led a group intended to raise public awareness and condemnation of the atrocities Americans were committing in Vietnam (Russell’s age made his chairmanship honorary; he stayed in England). In May the group met in Stockholm for ten days of discussion; in November they reconvened in Copenhagen.103 They heard eyewitness reports, which made for exhausting days. Many members of ‘the family’ were there – Lanzmann, Bost (reporting for Le Nouvel Observateur), Sylvie Le Bon and Arlette Elkaïm.

  After Les Belles Images Beauvoir began to work on a collection of three novellas, which appeared in 1967 as The Woman Destroyed. For a long time she and Hélène had wanted to produce something written by Beauvoir and illustrat
ed by Hélène, and this was the perfect thing: Hélène made some engravings for the title story and to publicize it Beauvoir arranged to have the book serialized in Elle.104 It flopped so badly some people asked Hélène why she’d agreed to produce illustrations for her sister’s worst book.

  Beauvoir’s earlier fiction included both male and female protagonists, but each novella in The Woman Destroyed is written only from the point of view of a single woman’s consciousness – in each case, an ageing woman’s consciousness – and treats the themes of isolation and failure. Beauvoir wrote that in this work she attempted ‘to depict the critical moments of three female existences: the encounter with old age, the exasperation of solitude, and the brutal end of a love affair’.105

  ‘The Age of Discretion’ describes the heartbreak of a writer, wife and mother of an adult son. She is keenly conscious of growing old, experiencing her own body with a mixture of disgust and resignation.106 She has just published a book and is worried that she will never live up to the heights of her previous works, that she no longer has anything worth saying. Her son has made a choice that she vehemently disapproves of, so she threatens never to speak to him again if he will not acquiesce to her wishes. Her husband defies her by continuing to speak to their son, forcing a thick wedge of alienation deeper into an already wounded marriage: she was grieving the loss of its physical intimacy. The novella includes a reconciliation of kinds: together its protagonist and her husband face up to their diminishing future, learning to live ‘a short-term life’.107

  The second story’s prose is unlike anything else Beauvoir wrote – it is the stream of a consciousness hovering on the edge of madness. This protagonist’s child has been taken away from her, she is isolated and outcast, an ugly mirror to the reality that people can be ‘despicable’ when you’re down.108

  The title story, ‘The Woman Destroyed’ is written in diary form; it is the devastating chronicle of a woman’s descent into depression. Monique’s marriage is in decay and she desperately wants to revitalize it. Her happily fulfilled ‘vocation’ was to be a wife and mother. But her children have recently reached adulthood and she now wants to live ‘for herself a little’.109 Devotion and self-giving – Beauvoir’s student diary themes – were fulfilling for her and experienced as a free choice. But then her husband Maurice embarks on an affair. And without his fidelity the edifice that they built together crumbles, burying her under paralysing anxiety and self-doubt.

  Monique’s story raises the familiar themes of judgement and suffering – the judgement that women face when they ‘do nothing’ but stay home with children, and the suffering that they undergo when they commit to a joint project with a partner who accepts this self-giving and then renounces it for a younger giver. Monique challenges her husband but he gaslights her for making a ‘scene’, trying to make her feel guilty for producing an uncomfortable situation that pales in comparison with her own suffering. He succeeds in turning the moral spotlight so it blinds her conscience instead of burning his. Several times she thinks she has hit rock bottom, only to sink deeper into unhappiness.

  When The Woman Destroyed was published, it provoked harsh criticism, even by the standards of reactions to Beauvoir’s other books. The literary critic Henri Clouard wrote that Beauvoir had never before ‘put her talent so much to the use of demoralizing propaganda’. Was this nuisance of a woman now suggesting that all women who build their lives around men will fail? Once again, Clouard said, Beauvoir was ‘administering’ a ‘lesson’ to the public.110 What about Maurice’s character, the man’s point of view? It wasn’t well enough developed. Really, he protested, one expected more ‘clarity of mind’, ‘more freedom’, in her art. ‘Truly, she is out of date’; ‘Madame de Beauvoir is continuing her campaign for the emancipation of women as if our contemporaries still needed it’.111

  Beauvoir herself would not so hastily have argued from a particular case (or rather, in this case, three particular short stories) to a universal conclusion. She had taken care to make Monique’s situation ambiguous: her authorial intention was to make the book a detective story, a post-mortem investigation of a marriage in which the reader is invited to ascertain who or what is the culprit. But Jacqueline Piatier wrote in Le Monde that ‘There are lessons everywhere, no matter what she says.’112 In All Said and Done, Beauvoir lamented the way the book was read; as ever, she was accused of writing autobiography, of including the voices of Simone and Jean-Paul as if they spoke for all humanity. She was asked whether Sartre had left her.113 Ironically, others objected that this book wasn’t ‘real Simone de Beauvoir’ because the fiction wasn’t based in the world they thought she inhabited. Where was Sartre? Why was this all about wives and mothers?

  In All Said and Done Beauvoir wrote that she did not understand why the book provoked so much hatred. Condescension did not surprise her: she had serialized it in Elle, so Figaro littéraire claimed it was a novel for shop girls. But the reactions she experienced were venomous, personal, gendered and ageist:

  Ever since I caught a glimpse of Simone de Beauvoir in the rue de Rennes I have been very sorry I wrote that article: she was creeping along, looking faded and haggard. One should pity the aged. That is why Gallimard goes on publishing her, by the way.

  Oh yes, Madame, It is sad to grow old!114

  Beauvoir knew she was ageing, and she was honest enough to admit that she did not like it. But she saw no reason to hide from it. Instead, she confronted it head-on, as a subject lacking philosophical analysis and in need of political action. She had already been thinking about her book on old age for a few years; later she would call it The Second Sex’s counterpart. But when she started her research in earnest and started looking for books on old age she was surprised by how few she could find. In the catalogue room of the Bibliothèque Nationale she discovered essays by Emerson and Faguet, then slowly compiled a bibliography. She read gerontological periodicals from France; ordered enormous American volumes in English from Chicago.115 Her former colleague, Claude Lévi-Strauss, gave her access to the comparative anthropology material at the Collège de France, so she could study monographs that discussed the status of the elderly in several societies.

  Day by day she worked away at her research. As the events of May 1968 unfolded – with student protests and general strikes so massive that France’s economy ground to a halt – Sartre and Beauvoir gave a brief statement supporting the students’ cause in Le Monde. The political upheaval of this year led Sartre to reconsider his position on what role intellectuals should play in society; he was increasingly interested in Maoism.

  The committee for Les Temps Modernes now met fortnightly at Beauvoir’s apartment. At 10.30 a.m. on Wednesdays they arrived and set to work. Sylvie Le Bon was a new member of the crew, and Bost and Lanzmann were also involved (Lanzmann hadn’t yet started work on his epic Holocaust documentary, Shoah). But Sartre came less and less often. Les Temps Modernes had been ground-breaking in the 1940s. But now it had acquired the dust of an established institution.

  Sartre wanted to be part of something revolutionary, and he had become friendly with some Maoists, including a young man named Pierre Victor. Victor asked Sartre if he would assume the editorship of the French Maoist newspaper, La Cause du peuple, since if he were the editor it might not encounter so much government censure. In April 1970, Sartre was named editor in chief. That June he and Beauvoir handed out issues on the streets of Montparnasse and were arrested for it. They were just as quickly released, but the arrest gave Sartre a platform from which to call out double standards and demand true freedom of the press.

  Beauvoir did not share Sartre’s latest political enthusiasm. In fact, politically their battles had been diverging dramatically over recent years. While Sartre’s Maoism marginalized him from the intellectual mainstream, Beauvoir’s feminism gave her a leading role in the international women’s movement. In 1969 alone the paperback edition of The Second Sex had sold 750,000 copies.116 By 1970 it had gained the status of a ‘cla
ssic’ in North America; The Canadian activist Shulamith Firestone dedicated her 1970 book The Dialectic of Sex to Beauvoir, and in an interesting reversal of the 1949 ‘scandal’ (after the publication of The Second Sex in France), Firestone and many other feminists expressed appreciation for Beauvoir’s life as well as her work: the dedication in The Dialectic of Sex read: ‘To Simone de Beauvoir, who kept her integrity’. In 1971 Elizabeth Janeway’s Man’s World, Woman’s Place made connections between Beauvoir’s theory of woman as ‘Other’ and the behaviours of subordinate groups. Even in France, in 1971 a prominent cultural magazine included it with Kafka’s The Trial and the first (male) Kinsey Report as one of the most significant books of the time.117

  Over the previous year, the women’s liberation movement in France had been gaining political momentum. In the spring of 1970 there were women’s demonstrations at the University of Vincennes. But it was in Paris, deserted during the August holidays, that the MLF (the Mouvement de Libération des Femmes) was born. A wreath of flowers was placed below the Arc de Triomphe to honour the memory of the wife of the Unknown Soldier. Their banners read: ‘One man in two is a woman’; ‘More unknown than the Unknown Soldier is his wife’.

  In October, a special edition of Partisans was published under the title ‘Women’s liberation, year one’.118 Shortly thereafter, Beauvoir met with the activists who initiated it – although in print neither Beauvoir nor they acknowledged having made the first move.119 Anne Zelinsky, Christine Delphy and others wanted to mount a serious campaign to lift the restrictions on abortion. Contraception had been legalized in France in 1967, but abortion was still illegal. The weekly paper Le Nouvel Observateur agreed to publish a manifesto – but on the condition that some celebrated names endorsed it. Simone de Beauvoir had such a name, and she agreed to lend it to this cause. They needed space to meet, too, so she offered her apartment.