During her lifetime readers rejected Beauvoir’s ideas because of the way she lived her life: because she loved too many men, the wrong man, the right man in the wrong way (they didn’t know about the women yet). They accused her of giving too little of herself or too much of herself, of being too feminist or not feminist enough. Beauvoir admitted that the way she treated others was not always above reproach. She clearly expressed regret at the suffering her relationship with Sartre caused les tiers – the contingent ‘thirds’.
When Schwarzer asked Beauvoir about her claim that her relationship with Sartre was the greatest success of her life, she asked whether they had succeeded in having a relationship based on equality. Beauvoir said that the problem of equality never arose between them, because there was ‘nothing of the oppressor’ in Sartre.15 It is curious here that she says, ‘If [she] had loved someone other than Sartre’, she would not have let herself be oppressed. Some have interpreted this comment to attribute her escape from domination to her professional autonomy; feminists have wondered if she is guilty of bad faith, if Sartre was ‘the one sacrosanct area of her life to be protected even against her own critical attention’.16
There is no doubt, now, that she was critical of him – although many may not find her critical enough.
In the mid-1980s an American philosopher told the Beauvoir scholar Margaret Simons that she was angry at Beauvoir because she wrote ‘we, we, we’ in her autobiography. Where was she? ‘She had completely disappeared.’ But she hadn’t disappeared. She used her voice. She said ‘we’ with it, and she said ‘I’, too – because she believed that ‘one can be close to a man and be a feminist.’17 One could, in fact, be close to several – men and women. She thought that the most important thing about her was her thoughts, and that Sartre was their incomparable friend. Beauvoir’s reviewers called her derivative and imaginationless from without; even lovers told her her books were boring or too full of philosophy;18 but Sartre was, for much of her life, her ‘main source of encouragement’,19 an interlocutor in a matchless meeting of minds.
We will never know what it was like to be Beauvoir from within: the life lived cannot be resurrected from the life recounted. But from without, we must not forget the agency with which she struggled to become herself. In some cases, she chose to write overlooked instances of the word ‘I’. In Force of Circumstance, she claims that she had a philosophy of being and nothingness before she met Sartre, the man who would become famous for writing Being and Nothingness. There was a ‘basic confrontation of being and nothingness that I sketched at the age of twenty in my private diary, pursued through all my books and never resolved’.20 And she also said that after She Came to Stay, something changed: ‘I always had “something to say”.’21
In All Said and Done (1972) there is a passage in which Beauvoir says explicitly that she preferred sharing life with someone who mattered ‘a great deal to her – usually with Sartre, sometimes with Sylvie’. She says outright that she would not distinguish between ‘I’ and ‘we’ because ‘in fact, apart from a few short periods, I always had someone with me’.22 In later life she described solitude as a ‘form of death’, and herself as coming back to life as she felt ‘the warmth of human contact’.23
Beauvoir loved philosophy, but she wanted it to express ‘palpable reality’, to tear ‘aside the cleverly woven web of our conventional self’.24 In many cases, she chose literature as the best means of doing this because her characters could be brought to life in their contact with each other. Nietzsche thought that ‘it is impossible to teach love’,25 but Beauvoir thought that she could show it. In her novels she gave concrete examples in which women and men suffered from a lack of reciprocity. And in The Second Sex she made explicitly philosophical claims: that to be ethical love must be reciprocal – lover and beloved must both be recognized as conscious and free, committed to each other’s projects in life, and, in cases where their love was sexual, seen as sexual subjects – not objects.
When Rousseau scrutinized the history of ‘civilization’ for political purposes in his work Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, he did so in order to better outline the inequalities that existed between men. When Nietzsche turned to the past to illuminate the morality of the present in On the Genealogy of Morality he thought a ‘revaluation of values’ was needed in the wake of the ‘death of God’. Beauvoir thought that a philosophical revaluation of woman was necessary, and that concrete freedom for women wouldn’t be achieved without a revaluation of what ‘civilization’ called love.
When a philosopher like Plato uses a literary form, it is philosophy. When he speaks of love, it is philosophy – even when it comes from a context where pederasty is a cultural norm and discusses something as absurd as the story that all humans were once quadrupeds, that we have been divided from our other half, and now long to be reunited with our missing pair.26
Simone de Beauvoir’s life became a symbol of success for generations of women who were no longer content to ‘dream through men’s dreams’.27 She was ‘the feminist voice of the twentieth century’28 – a philosopher whose thinking demonstrably altered the course of legislation and many lives. And yet, on the centenary of her birth in 2008, Le Nouvel Observateur decided to honour her – a woman whose work included campaigning to make explicit images of women illegal – by publishing a photograph of her naked.
From within Beauvoir saw herself as a becoming that never stopped. She didn’t believe that any single point in her life showed ‘the’ Simone de Beauvoir because ‘there is no instant in a life where all moments are reconciled’.29 All action carries the possibility of failure – and some failures only reveal themselves as failures after the fact. Time passes; dreams change; and the self is always beyond reach. The individual moments in Beauvoir’s becoming were dramatically diverse. But if there’s one thing to learn from the life of Simone de Beauvoir, it’s this: No one becomes herself alone.
Notes
Introductionn
1DPS 266, 28 May 1927.
2See Toril Moi, Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman, 2nd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 26.
3Claude Jannoud, ‘L’Œuvre: Une vulgarisation plus qu’une création’, Le Monde, 15 April 1986.
4Moi, Simone de Beauvoir, p. 27.
5Beauvoir, ‘Existentialism and Popular Wisdom’, PW 218.
6Sandrine Sanos, Simone de Beauvoir: Creating a Feminist Existence in the World, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017, p. 118.
7SS 3.
8DPS 57, 7 August 1926.
9FC 288.
10Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, New York: Dover, 2001, p. 178.
11Ovid, Tristia III.iv.25, cited in Descartes (Descartes, Letter to Mersenne), April 1634, Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, volume I, Paris: Cerf, 1897, pp. 285–6.
12PL 22.
13Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre: A Life, London: Heinemann, 1987, p. 86.
14http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20171211-were-sartre-and-de-beauvoir-the-worlds-first-modern-couple
15Quoted by Madeleine Gobeil in an interview with Simone de Beauvoir, ‘The Art of Fiction No. 35’, Paris Review 34 (Spring–Summer 1965).
16Hazel Rowley, Tête-à-tête: The Lives and Loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, London: Vintage, 2007, p. ix.
17MDD 344.
18Beauvoir, cited in Simone de Beauvoir, Margaret A. Simons and Jane Marie Todd, ‘Two Interviews with Simone de Beauvoir’, Hypatia 3(3) (1989): 13.
19Alice Schwarzer, Simone de Beauvoir Today: Conversations 1972–1982, London: Hogarth Press, 1984, p. 13.
20All publication dates given in this paragraph refer to the first French editions.
21As Margaret Simons has noted, the English translation of Beauvoir’s letters to Sartre did little to help this: it deleted a third of the material available in French. From November and December 1939 alone, thirty-eight references to Beauvoir�
�s work on the novel She Came to Stay were cut. (See Margaret Simons, ‘Introduction’, PW 5.)
22The letters are available for consultation at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University.
23PL 8.
24Robert D. Cottrell, Simone de Beauvoir, New York: Frederick Ungar, 1975, p. 95.
25‘Elle est incapable d’inventer, de s’oublier.’ P. de Boisdeffre, ‘LA REVUE LITTERAIRE: Deux morts exemplaires, un même refus: Jean Genet et Simone de Beauvoir’, Revue des deux mondes (1986): 414–28.
26SS 166.
27DPS 77, 21 August 1926.
28Bianca Lamblin, A Disgraceful Affair, trans. Julie Plovnick, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996 [Fr. 1993], p. 161.
29CJ, 758, 2, 3, 4 September 1929, ‘l’ami incomparable de ma pensée’ (italics added).
30SdB to Nelson Algren (NA), 8 August 1948, TALA 208.
31Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, in A Room of One’s Own/Three Guineas, London: Penguin Classics, 2000, p. 32.
32William Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy, New York: Doubleday, 1958, see pp. 231–2.
33‘Simone De Beauvoir’, The Times [London, England] 15 April 1986: 18. The Times Digital Archive. Online 24 March 2018.
34Deirdre Bair, Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography, London: Jonathan Cape, 1990, p. 514.
35https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/private/sartres-sex-slave/
36Moi, Simone de Beauvoir, pp. 44–5.
37Moi, Simone de Beauvoir, p. 39.
38bell hooks, ‘True Philosophers: Beauvoir and bell’, in Shannon M. Mussett and William S. Wilkerson (eds), Beauvoir and Western Thought from Plato to Butler, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2012, p. 232.
39Rowley, Tête-à-tête, p. 13.
40Elizabeth Bachner, ‘Lying and Nothingness: Struggling with Simone de Beauvoir’s Wartime Diary, 1939–41’, Bookslut, November 2008.
41Richard Heller, ‘The Self-centred Love of Madame Yak-yak’, The Mail on Sunday, 1 December 1991, 35.
42To the 1978 edition of le Petit Robert. See Preface to ‘Everyday Sexism’, Notes, FW 241.
43bell hooks, ‘Beauvoir and bell’, p. 231.
44Sarah Churchwell, The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe, New York: Picador, 2005, p. 33.
45François Mauriac, ‘Demande d’enquête’, Le Figaro (1949), 30 May. See Ingrid Galster, Le Deuxième Sexe de Simone de Beauvoir, Paris: Presse universitaire Paris-Sorbonne, 2004, p. 21. Beauvoir discusses the reaction to this chapter’s publication in FC 197.
46E.g., in Mill’s discussion of impartiality and the command to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’ in chapter 2 of Utilitarianism, or Kant’s discussion of the same command in section I of the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals.
47Laurie A. Rudman, Corinne A. Moss-Racusin, Julie E. Phelan and Sanne Nauts, ‘Status Incongruity and Backlash Effects: Defending the Gender Hierarchy Motivates Prejudice against Female Leaders’, Journal of Experimental and Social Psychology 48 (2012): 165–79.
48For the psychology, see Z. Kunda and R. Sanitioso, ‘Motivated Changes in the Self-concept’, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 25 (1989): 272–85; R. Sanitioso, Z. Kunda and G. T. Fong, ‘Motivated Recruitment of Autobiographical Memories’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 59 (1990): 229–41; R. Sanitioso and R. Wlordarski, ‘In Search of Information that Confirms a Desired Self-perception: Motivated Processing of Social Feedback and Choice of Social Interactions’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 30 (2004): 412–22.
49Voltaire, ‘Première Lettre sur Oedipe’ in Oeuvres (1785) vol. 1.
50Carolyn Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life, London: The Women’s Press, 1988, p. 30.
51For example, psychoanalytic or Marxist biographies seek to achieve understanding of human beings through significant childhood experiences or economic and other social structures. See James Conant, ‘Philosophy and Biography’, lecture given at a symposium on ‘Philosophy and Biography’, 18 May 1999.
52BO 39.
53EA 20.
54SS 88.
55PC 120.
56Bair, p. 13.
57SdB to S, 24 April 1947, LS 451.
58‘A story I used to tell myself’, UM 159.
59DPS 297, 29 July 1927.
60Schwarzer, Simone de Beauvoir Today, p. 86; DPS 296, 29 July 1927.
61Virginia Woolf, ‘Not One of Us’, October 1927, CE IV, p. 20, cited in Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf, London: Vintage, 1997, p. 773 n. 42.
Chapter 1
1The original spelling on her birth certificate was ‘Simonne’.
2Although the family address was on the 103 boulevard du Montparnasse, according to Hélène de Beauvoir the apartment was on the Raspail side of the building. See HdB to Deirdre Bair, cited in Bair, p. 620 n. 18.
3Bair wrote that the Bertrand de Beauvoirs could trace their history to the twelfth century, to a co-founder of the University of Paris and disciple of Saint Anselm, and that they considered themselves minor nobility. In my interview with Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir she denied this, corroborating the version Hélène de Beauvoir gives in Souvenirs (HdB p. 14). For Beauvoir’s childhood we rely on MDD, VED, Bair, Hélène de Beauvoir’s memoir, Souvenirs, Paris: Séguier, 1987, and Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir’s ‘Chronologie’ in MPI.
4MDD 37.
5See Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, ‘Chronologie’, MPI lv; for Bair’s account (reliant on interviews with SdB and HdB) of the parents’ meeting, see Bair, pp. 27–30.
6Simone de Beauvoir, cited in Bair, p. 620 n. 19.
7MDD 37.
8MDD 42.
9HdB, Souvenirs, p. 13.
10MDD 75, 24, 25.
11HdB, Souvenirs, p. 16.
12MDD 23.
13MDD 36, 51.
14HdB, Souvenirs, p. 44.
15HdB, Souvenirs, p. 58.
16MDD 43.
17SLBdB, ‘Chronologie’, 1915, MPI lvii. In Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter she did not mention this story, instead writing that the 89-page La famille cornichon was her first (October 1916, at age 8). Other stories from childhood survived but have not been published, including one she dedicated to her sister, Histoire de Jeannot Lapin (written in 1917–18, fifty-four pages in Beauvoir’s handwriting); ‘contes et histories variées’ (1918–19, nineteen pages); En vacances. Correspodance de deux petites amies (June 1919, twenty-three pages).
18MDD 61.
19In MDD she was referred to as Elisabeth Mabille to protect her identity.
20Hélène de Beauvoir, cited in Bair, p. 133.
21MDD 114.
22DPS 67, 16 August 1926.
23VED 33.
24MDD 38.
25MDD 41, 82.
26MDD 41.
27Quoted in Bair, p. 47.
Chapter 2
1MDD 72.
2MDD 106.
3MDD 16.
4MDD 71.
5Bair, p. 51.
6Hélène de Beauvoir, cited in Bair, p. 58.
7MDD 97.
8MDD 131.
9VED 35.
10Thion de la Chaume, cited in HdB, Souvenirs, p. 27.
11MDD 66.
12MDD 29.
13MDD 30.
14MDD 55.
15Entretiens avec Simone de Beauvoir [1965], in Francis Jeanson, Simone de Beauvoir ou l’entreprise de vivre, Paris: Seuil, 1966, cited in Deguy and Le Bon de Beauvoir, Simone de Beauvoir: Ecrire la liberté, Paris: Gallimard, 2008, p. 99.
16MDD 121.
17MDD 36.
18SLBdB, ‘Chronologie’, MPI lix. Françoise de Beauvoir gave Simone a copy in July 1919.
191965 Paris Review interview. https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4444/simone-de-beauvoir-the-art-of-fiction-no-35-simone-de-beauvoir
20MDD 85.
21MDD 109.
22When Beauvoir read the sequel in which Laurie married Amy she threw the book across the room; when Jo March married an old professor and ‘corked up her inkstand’ in order to start a school, Beauvoi
r wrote that ‘his intrusion’ upset her (MDD 104–5) [she refers to it in SS too].
23DPS 63, 12 August 1926.
24MDD 140.
25See VED 36–7.
26MDD 166.
27MDD 131.
28BO 10–11.
29HdB, Souvenirs, p. 29.
30Bair, p. 55.
31VED 35.
32MDD 57.
33SS 320.
34MDD 92.
35See Bair, pp. 79–80.
36SS 378.
37HdB, Souvenirs, p. 36.
38MDD 176.
39MDD 121.
40See, e.g., CJ 744, 3 August 1929.
41See MDD 152.
42Félicien Challaye to Amélie Gayraud, in Amélie Gayraud, Les Jeunes filles d’aujourd hui, Paris: G. Oudin, 1914, pp. 281–3.
43Bair, p. 90.
44MDD 157.
45MDD 158.
46See MDD 101–2, 107.
47MDD 160.
48MDD 160.
49Claude Bernard, Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, 85, cited in Margaret Simons and Hélène N. Peters, ‘Introduction’ to ‘Analysis of Bernard’s Introduction’, Beauvoir, PW 18.
50Bernard, Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, 37, 38, 39, 73, cited in Margaret Simons and Hélène N. Peters, ‘Introduction’ to ‘Analysis of Bernard’s Introduction’, Beauvoir, PW 18.
51In French, ‘On ne naît pas libre, il le devient’. These words are cited in Beauvoir’s textbook: Charles Lahr, S.J., Manuel de philosophie résumé du cours de philosophie, Paris: Beauchesne, 1920, p. 366. The same phrase (‘one isn’t born, but rather becomes, free’) is often attributed to the poet Rimbaud, and taken to pithily summarize Spinoza’s philosophy of freedom. See, e.g., Alain Billecoq, ‘Spinoza et l’idée de tolérance’, Philosophique 1(1998): Spinoza, pp. 122–42.
52See Alfred Fouillée, La Liberté et le déterminisme, 3rd edn, Paris: Alcan, 1890. Beauvoir wrote in her Mémoires that Fouillée’s Les Idées-forces was assigned reading in her philosophy class, but it is unclear which book she is referring to: Fouillée published three essays on ‘idées-forces’ between 1890–1907: L’Évolutionisme des idées-forces (1890), La psychologie des idées-forces (1893) and La Morale des idées-forces (1907). See MDD 157; MPI 146.
Becoming Beauvoir Page 40
