Simone De Beauvoir

Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrande de Beauvoir was born in Paris in 1908, in the Montparnasse district, where she continued to live throughout most of her life. De Beauvoir was raised by a devoutly Catholic mother from Verdun and an agnostic father, a lawyer who enjoyed participating in amateur theatrical productions. The contrast between the beliefs of the beautiful, timid, provincial Francoise de Beauvoir and those of the debonair Parisian Georges de Beauvoir led the young Simone to assess situations independently, unbiased by the solid parental front presented by the more traditional families of many of her classmates. As family finances dwindled during World War I, de Beauvoir observed the uninspiring household chores that fell upon her mother and decided that she herself would never become either a homemaker or a mother. She had found such pleasure in teaching her younger sister Helene everything she herself was learning at school that she decided to pursue a teaching career when she grew up. 

De Beauvoir and her best friend Zaza "Mabille" (de Beauvoir often assigned fictional names to friends and family members described in her autobiographical writings) sometimes discussed the relative merits of bringing nine children into the world, as Zaza's mother had done, and of creating books, which to Simone was an infinitely more worthwhile enterprise. As the girls matured, de Beauvoir observed the degree to which Zaza's mother used her daughter's affection and commitment to Christian obedience to manipulate Zaza's choice of career and mate. When Zaza, tormented by her parents' refusal to grant her permission to marry Maurice Merleau-Ponty, died at twenty-one, de Beauvoir felt that her friend had been assassinated by bourgeois morality. Many of de Beauvoir's early fictional writings attempted to deal on paper with the emotions stirred by her recollection of the "Mabille" family and of Zaza's death. Only many years later did she learn that Merleau-Ponty, who became a well-known philosopher and writer and remained a close friend of de Beauvoir's and Sartre's, was unacceptable to the "Mabilles" because he was an illegitimate child. 

Despite her warm memories of going to early morning mass as a little girl with her mother and of drinking hot chocolate on their return, de Beauvoir gradually pulled away from the traditional values with which Francoise de Beauvoir hoped to imbue her. She and her sister began to rebel, for example, against the restrictions of the Cours Adeline Desir, the private Catholic school they were attending. Weighing the pleasures of this world against the sacrifices entailed in a belief in an afterlife, the fifteen-year-old de Beauvoir opted to concentrate on her life here on earth. Her loss of faith erected a serious barrier to communication with her mother.  De Beauvoir was convinced during several years of her adolescence that she was in love with her cousin Jacques Champigneulles ("Jacques Laiguillon" in her memoirs), who introduced her to books by such French authors as Andre Gide, Alain-Fournier, Henry de Montherlant, Jean Cocteau, Paul Claudel, and Paul Valery; these books scandalized de Beauvoir's mother, who had carefully pinned together pages of volumes in their home library that she did not want her daughters to read. Jacques Champigneulles, however, seemed unwilling to make a commitment either to de Beauvoir or to anything else, and the de Beauvoir sisters were totally disillusioned when this bright bohemian opted to marry the wealthy and generously dowried sister of one of his friends.  Because family finances did not allow Georges de Beauvoir to provide dowries, his daughters became unlikely marriage prospects for young middle-class men. Both Simone and Helene were delighted to have this excuse for continuing their studies and pursuing careers.

Even as a young girl, Simone had a passion for capturing her life on paper. In the first volume of her autobiography, Memoires d'une jeune fille rangee ( Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter), she looked back with amusement at her determination, recorded in her adolescent diary, to "tell all"; yet her memoirs, her fiction, her essays, her interviews, and her prefaces do indeed record events, attitudes, customs, and ideas that help define approximately seven decades of the twentieth century.  After passing the baccalaureate exams in mathematics and philosophy, she studied mathematics at the Institut Catholique and literature/languages at the Institut Sainte-Marie, then philosophy at the University of Paris (Sorbonne). In 1929, while at the Sorbonne, de Beauvoir gave a presentation on Leibniz. There she met many other young intellectuals, including Maurice Merleau-Ponty, René Maheu and Jean-Paul Sartre. While at the Sorbonne, Maheu gave de Beauvoir her lifelong nickname, Castor, the French word for "beaver", given to her because of the animal's strong work ethic. Maheu (called "Andre Herbaud" in the memoirs) also introduced her to Jean-Paul Sartre. In 1929, at the age of 21, de Beauvoir became the youngest person ever to obtain the agrégation in philosophy, and the 9th woman to obtain this degree. On the final examination she received second place; Sartre, age 24, was first (he'd failed his first exam). The jury for the agrégation argued over whether to give Sartre or de Beauvoir first place in the competition. In the end they awarded it to Sartre.

In Sartre, de Beauvoir found the partner of whom she had dreamed as an adolescent. As she remarked in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, "Sartre corresponded exactly to the ideal I had set for myself when I was fifteen: he was a soul mate in whom I found, heated to the point of incandescence, all of my passions. With him, I could always share everything." And so she did, for 51 years, from the time they became acquainted at the Sorbonne in 1929 until his death on April 15, 1980. Together Sartre and de Beauvoir analyzed their relationship, deciding that they enjoyed an indestructible essential love but that they must leave themselves open to "contingent loves" as well, to expand their range of experience. From various accounts I’ve read (one of them NY Times), this open relationship was Sartre’s idea. Although marriage would have enabled them to receive a double teaching assignment instead of being sent off to opposite ends of the country, they were intent upon escaping the obligations that such a "bourgeois" institution would entail. That neither had a particular desire for children was an added reason to avoid marriage. A daring and unconventional arrangement during the early 1930s, their relationship raised consternation in conservative members of de Beauvoir's family. Except for a brief period during World War II, de Beauvoir and Sartre never lived together but spent their days writing in their separate quarters and then came together during the evenings to discuss their ideas and to read and criticize one another's manuscripts. As both became well-known figures in the literary world, they found it increasingly difficult to maintain their privacy; as La Force des choses (The Force of Circumstance) records, they had to alter their routine and avoid certain cafes during the years after the war in order to protect themselves from the prying eyes of the public. Sartre's autobiography, Les Mots (The Words), published in 1963, dealt only with the early years of his life.

De Beauvoir's autobiographical writings provide a much more complete and intimate account of the adult Sartre. In several volumes of reminiscences, de Beauvoir described their mutual reluctance to leave their youth behind and become part of the adult world, their struggles to set aside adequate time for writing, the acceptance of their works for publication, their travels, their friendships, their gradually increasing commitment to political involvement; her final autobiographical volume, Le Ceremonie des adieux: Suivi de entretiens avec Jean-Paul Sartre ( Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre), recreates her anguish in witnessing the physical and mental decline of a lifelong companion who had been one of the most brilliant philosophers of the twentieth century. 

For de Beauvoir, writing was not only a way of preserving life on paper but also a form of catharsis, a means of working out her own problems through fiction. Her early short stories, written between 1935 and 1937 and originally rejected by two publishers, were brought out by Gallimard in 1979. The tales in Quand prime le spirituel ( When Things of the Spirit Come First: Five Early Tales) captured de Beauvoir's infatuation with Jacques (her cousin), the tragedy of Zaza's death, the young philosophy teacher's ambivalence about the impact her ideas and her life-style might have on her impressionable lycee students in Marseille and Rouen, and her sense of excitement as she saw the world opening up before her. De Beauvoir identified strongly with her central character Marguerite who, in the final paragraphs of the book, perceives the world as a shiny new penny ready for her to pick up and do with as she wishes. 

Experimenting with nontraditional relationships, Sartre and de Beauvoir had formed a trio with de Beauvoir's lycee student Olga Kosakiewicz in 1933. The anguish experienced by de Beauvoir as a result of this intimate three-way sharing of lives led to the writing of her first published work, L'Invitee ( She Came to Stay). In this novel, the author relived the hothouse atmosphere generated by the trio, and she chose to destroy the judgmental young intruder, the fictional Xaviere, on paper, but to dedicate her novel to Olga. The real life situation resolved itself less dramatically after Olga became interested in Jacques-Laurent Bost, a former student of Sartre's, and broke away from the trio; the four principals remained lifelong friends, however. In her 1986 study, Simone de Beauvior, Judith Okely suggests that She Came to Stay reflects not only the de Beauvoir-Sartre-Olga trio but also the young Simone's rivalry with her mother for her father's affections.  With World War II de Beauvoir's attention shifted from the concerns and crises of her personal life to a broader spectrum of philosophical, moral, and political issues. In the short essay "Pyrrhus et Cineas," written during a three-week period in 1943, she launched an inquiry into the value of human activity, examining questions of freedom, communication, and the role of the other in the light of the existentialist ideas presented in Sartre's L'Etre et le neant: Essai d'ontologie phenomenologique(Being and Nothingness: Essay on Phenomenological Ontology).

In his 1975 monograph, Simone de Beauvoir, Robert Cottrell discusses Pyrrhus et Cineas as "a popularization of existentialist thought."  De Beauvoir's second novel, Le Sang des autres ( The Blood of Others), focused on the dilemma of dealing with the consequences of one's acts. The liberal Jean Blomart, shaken by the accidental death of a young friend he inspired to participate in a political demonstration, struggles throughout much of the narrative to avoid doing anything that may inadvertently harm another human being, his "search for a saintly purity," as Carol Ascher labels it in Simone de Beauvoir: A Life of Freedom. The female protagonist, Helene Bertrand, intent on protecting her own happiness in a world turned upside down by war and the German Occupation, is shaken out of her inertia by the cries of a Jewish mother whose small daughter is being wrenched away from her by the Gestapo. Helene seeks an active and ultimately fatal involvement in terrorist Resistance activities orchestrated by Jean Blomart, who has decided finally that violence is perhaps the only rational response to Hitler's insanity. Infused with the euphoria of Resistance camaraderie, the novel highlights a question that is also central to Sartre's play Les Mains sales (Dirty Hands)--the relationship between intellectuals and violence. 

Moral and ethical issues continued to dominate de Beauvoir's works in the 1940s. Caught up in the success of Sartre's play Les Mouches (The Flies) during the Occupation, she decided that she too would like to write for the theatre. Les Bouches inutiles ( Who Shall Die? ), based on a historical incident which took place in the fourteenth century, reprises the main theme of The Blood of Others, examining the consequences of a young man's determination to remain pure and blameless by not taking part in the decisions of the town council. The play also protests the assumption that able-bodied young men are the only truly useful citizens in a besieged community. De Beauvoir frankly related in her memoirs dramatist Jean Genet's criticism of her theatrical sense, confessing that he sat beside her shaking his head disapprovingly throughout the entire opening night performance. She never again attempted to write for the theatre, although Terry Keefe in Simone de Beauvoir: A Study of Her Writings, notes the dramatic potential of her plot and the "spare and sharp" quality of the dialogue in Act I.  One of the most difficult aspects of the war years for de Beauvoir and her friends was the often senseless deaths of their contemporaries. In Simone de Beauvoir: Encounters with Death, Elaine Marks focuses on the preoccupation with death permeating the writer's works and on what Marks labels her evasions of confrontation with death. For de Beauvoir, death was an outrage, a scandal, and in 1943, she began to write a third novel, Tous les hommes sont mortel ( All Men Are Mortal), for which she created a hero who has become immortal and who therefore meanders from his thirteenth-century birthplace in Italy on through to the twentieth century. Because Raymond Fosca's alternating attempts to seize political power and to establish peace on earth all result in disappointment and frustration, the reader concludes that immortality would be a curse rather than a blessing, that life's value is derived from sharing experiences with one's contemporaries and from a willingness to take the risks implicit in human mortality. According to Force of Circumstance, this novel was de Beauvoir's attempt to deal with her own feelings and anxieties about death. Konrad Bieber, in his 1979 study Simone de Beauvoir, senses the presence of "the philosopher behind the novelist" throughout the book yet also notes "long moments of drama, of genuine poignancy, that bring to the fore all that is human."  As de Beauvoir's works and Sartre's became better known, the label "existentialist" was regularly attached to them. At first de Beauvoir resisted the use of the term, but she and Sartre gradually adopted it and began to try to explain existentialist philosophy to the public.

In Pour une morale de l'ambiguite ( The Ethics of Ambiguity), published in 1947, de Beauvoir defined existentialism as a philosophy of ambiguity, one which emphasized the tension between living in the present and acting with an eye to one's mortality; she also attempted to answer critics who had accused existentialists of wallowing in absurdity and despair. In the four essays published the following year as L'Existentialisme et la sagesse des nations("Existentialism and the Wisdom of the Ages"), de Beauvoir argued for the importance of a philosophical approach to modern life. Here she defended existentialism against accusations of frivolity and gratuitousness and explained that existentialists considered man neither naturally good nor naturally bad: "He is nothing at first; it is up to him to make himself good or bad depending upon whether he assumes his freedom or denies it." Emphasizing the fact that man can be "the sole and sovereign master of his destiny," de Beauvoir insisted that existentialist philosophy was essentially optimistic; in Simone de Beauvoir and the Limits of Commitment, however, Anne Whitmarsh sees the author's existentialism as "a stern ethical system." 

With the end of the war came the opportunity to travel again. De Beauvoir spent four months in the United States in 1947, lecturing on college campuses throughout the country about the moral problems facing writers in postwar Europe. She recorded her impressions through journal entries dating from January 25 to May 19, 1947, in L'Amerique au jour le jour (America Day by Day), which was dedicated to black author Richard Wright and his wife Ellen. Her perceptive eye took in a great variety of detail but saw everything through a lens whose focus was influenced by certain preconceived notions. Keefe finds the value of the book in the record it presents of de Beauvoir's "excitement and disappointment at a historical moment when many Europeans knew little about America and were eager to expose themselves to its impact, for better or worse." Consistently critical of capitalist traditions and values, America Day by Day can be paired with de Beauvoir's account of her 1955 trip to China, La Longue Marche: Essai sur la Chine (The Long March), in which she euphorically accepts everything in communist China. While praising de Beauvoir's ability to evoke settings and glimpses of life in China, Keefe sees The Long March as "first and foremost a long, extremely serious attempt to explain the situation of China in 1955-56 and justify the direction in which the new regime [was] guiding the country." 

Ready after the war to begin her purely autobiographical works, de Beauvoir realized that she first needed to understand the extent to which being born female had influenced the pattern of her life. She therefore spent hours at the Biblotheque Nationale (National Library) in Paris seeking documentation for each section of the book that was to become the battle cry of feminism in the latter half of the twentieth century. When Le Deuxieme Sexe ( The Second Sex) appeared in 1949, reactions ranged from the horrified gasps of conservative readers to the impassioned gratitude of millions of women who had never before encountered such a frank discussion of their condition. The opening statement of the section on childhood, "One is not born a woman, one becomes one," has become familiar throughout the world, and the book advises women to pursue meaningful careers and to avoid the status of "relative beings" implied, in its author's view, by marriage and motherhood. The Second Sex is her encyclopedic and shocking account of woman's condition as "other" in a world where the norm, with all its overarching and defining power, was male. The book analyses how women have been made over in a world of male descriptions, the contortions performed in order to draw something from the secondary role, the mutilation, the pain.

Before turning to her memoirs, de Beauvoir wrote the novel that won her the prestigious Goncourt Prize. Les Mandarins ( The Mandarins) presents the euphoria of Liberation Day in Paris and the subsequent disillusionment of French intellectuals who had been temporarily convinced that the future was theirs to fashion as they saw fit, but who found themselves gradually dividing into factions as the glow of Resistance companionship and of victory over the Nazis dimmed. De Beauvoir always denied that The Mandarins was a roman a clef, with Robert Dubreuilh, Henri Perron, and Anne Dubreuilh representing Sartre, Albert Camus, and herself; nonetheless, echoes of the developing rift between Sartre and Camus, of the discussions of staff members of Les Temps modernes (the leftist review founded by Sartre, de Beauvoir, and their associates), and of the concern of French intellectuals over the revelation of the existence of Soviet work camps are clearly audible throughout the novel. And, as we know, Lewis Brogan is a fictionalized portrait of Nelson Algren, to whom the novel is dedicated. Whether or not the work is a roman a clef, it is generally regarded, in Carol Ascher's words, as de Beauvoir's "richest, most complex, and most beautifully wrought novel." 

The first volume of de Beauvoir's autobiography appeared in 1958. In Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, the author chronicled the warmth and affection of the early years of her life, her growing rebellion against bourgeois tradition, and her sense of emancipation when she moved from the family apartment on the rue de Rennes to a rented room at her grandmother's. She highlighted her close association with her sister ("I felt sorry for only children,"), her relationship with Zaza, and her infatuation with Jacques. Jean-Paul Sartre appears only in the concluding pages of this volume. In Simone de Beauvoir on Woman, Jean Leighton characterizes the portrait of Zaza in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter as the epitome of “traditional feminine qualities. Next to Simone de Beauvoir she is the most vivid person in the book."  De Beauvoir dedicated the second volume of her autobiography, La Force de l'age (The Prime of Life), to Sartre. The first half of the narrative tells the story of their lives from 1929 to 1939, recounting the exhilarating sense of freedom they experienced as they pooled their money to travel throughout France and to London, Italy, Germany, and Greece. Here the memoir looks back on the experiment of the trio, on the illness which put de Beauvoir in a clinic for several weeks, on her insistence upon living in the present and trying to ignore the menacing news filtering through from Hilter's Germany. The second half of the book begins in 1939, as the German occupation of France was about to begin, and ends with Liberation Day in Paris in August 1944. These pages provide one of the most vivid accounts of life in France during World War II, as the reader witnesses the lines of people waiting for gas masks, the sirens and descents into metro stations during air raids, and the struggle to find enough food to survive.

These were the years when leftist intellectuals remained in close contact with one another, when Albert Camus, actress Maria Casares, writers Michel Leiris and Raymond Queneau, theatrical director Charles Dullin, and artist Pablo Picasso joined de Beauvoir, Sartre, Olga, and Bost in "fiestas" that provided occasional nights of relaxation amidst the bombings and the anticipation of the Allied landing. The emotions of Liberation Day were unforgettable for de Beauvoir, who asserted: "No matter what happened afterward, nothing would take those moments away from me; nothing has taken them away; they shine in my past with a brilliance that has never been tarnished." 

What did become tarnished, however, were de Beauvoir's hopes of participating in the creation of a brave new world, preferably one in which socialism would solve the problems of society. The third volume of her autobiography, Force of Circumstance, begins with the Liberation and covers the period from 1944 to early 1963. Despite the success of her many books that were published during those years and her extensive travels and increasing political involvement, Force of Circumstance was written with a heavy heart because of the anguish associated with the Algerian war. These were also the years during which de Beauvoir began to reflect upon aging and death, began to realize that there were certain activities in which she was engaging for perhaps the last time. The final sentence in the memoir's epilogue has been widely discussed: "I can still see . . . the promises with which I filled my heart when I contemplated that gold mine at my feet, a whole life ahead of me. They have been fulfilled. However, looking back in amazement at that gullible adolescent I once was, I am stupefied to realize to what extent I have been cheated." She felt cheated because the goals she had set for herself did not lead to the sense of fulfillment that she had anticipated; she also felt cheated because all human activity, no matter how successful, leads uncompromisingly to the same impasse, the death of the individual.

For Konrad Bieber, Force of Circumstance is "a remarkable monument to the crucial years of the cold war. . . . A whole era, with its ups and downs, its hopes and disillusionments, is seen through the temperament of a highly gifted writer." 

Nineteen sixty-three was a time of personal crisis for de Beauvoir both because of her vision of the state of the modern world and because of the death of her mother. Deeply affected by watching her mother valiantly struggle against cancer, de Beauvoir shared with her readers the anxiety of knowing more about her mother's condition than she could reveal to her, the dilemma of how far to authorize heroic medical measures, the pain of helplessly watching a life ebb away. In Une Mort tres douce ( A Very Easy Death), a 3 chapter volume dedicated to her sister, de Beauvoir recaptured the warmth of her childhood relationship with her mother and reactivated her admiration for this woman who had always "lived against herself" yet could still appreciate a ray of sunlight or the song of the birds in the tree outside her hospital window. Looking back at her interaction with her mother, de Beauvoir realized the full impact of Francoise de Beauvoir's unhappy childhood, of the unfortunate social restraints that kept her mother from finding a satisfying outlet for the energy and vitality which she had passed on to her daughters but which she had never been able to use appropriately herself. Sartre considered A Very Easy Death de Beauvoir's best work. 

Tout compte fait ( All Said and Done), dedicated to Sylvie Le Bon whom de Beauvoir later adopted, covers the decade following the publication of Force of Circumstance. Here de Beauvoir abandons the chronological treatment of events employed in the earlier volumes of memoirs; instead she devotes one section to speculation about what might have happened if she had been born into a different family, she had not met Sartre at the Sorbonne, or had married her cousin Jacques, for example; other sections explore her dreams and provide accounts of her trips to places such as Japan, the U.S.S.R., Israel, and Egypt. After expressing a sense of satisfaction about her ability to communicate the tone of her life to her readers, she leaves it to them to draw whatever conclusions they wish from this particular volume of her autobiography. 

Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre, a companion piece to A Very Easy Death, records de Beauvoir's efforts to cope with the anguish of watching age and illness take their toll on her companion of fifty years. It is dedicated to "those who have loved Sartre, who love him and who will love him." De Beauvoir's subsequent publication of Sartre's Lettres au Castor et a quelques autres further attempts to share the quality of their relationship with her readers. "Castor" was a nickname invented by her Sorbonne classmate Rene Maheu, who noted the similarity between the name de Beauvoir and the English word "beaver" (castor in French) and who considered it an appropriate appellation for the hard-working de Beauvoir.

The two volumes of Sartre's letters cover a period from 1926 to 1963 and include quite detailed references to his involvements with other women. Some feminist criticism has seen Adieux, with its rather graphic account of Sartre's mental and physical decline, as de Beauvoir's revenge on her partner for the pain inflicted upon her by his numerous "contingent" affairs. In an essay appearing in Philosophy and Literature, Hazel Barnes disagrees, considering these passages "both factual reporting and a tribute" and noting "the profound respect which Sartre and de Beauvoir had for each other, something deeper than the obvious affection, companionship and commonality of values, more bedrock than love." 

De Beauvoir's own correspondence to Sartre was published in 1990 in the volume,Letters to Sartre, providing readers with what Jerome Charyn in the Los Angeles Times Book Review termed "an incredible gift." De Beauvoir herself had claimed these letters were lost, but they were found stashed away in a cupboard in her apartment after her death. The letters are explicit in their detail of de Beauvoir's relationship with Sartre as well as with several women who were also Sartre's lovers.

Their graphic portrayal of de Beauvoir's unconventional personal life led some critics to question her reputation as a dedicated feminist. "This is nonsense," stated Elaine Showalter in the London Review of Books. "De Beauvoir's feminist credentials come from her writing, and from her years of staunch, courageous and generous support of abortion legislation, battered women's shelters, women's publishing, and the cause of women's liberation around the world. . . . To have had a less-than-perfect personal life weighs no more against her intellectual achievements than it would against those of a man." 

During the mid-1960s de Beauvoir had also returned to fiction with a novel, Les Belles Images. Dedicated to Claude Lanzmann, one of the younger staff writers forLes Temps modernes and a "contingent love" of de Beauvoir's from 1952 to 1958,Les Belles Images describes a milieu quite alien to de Beauvoir, that of the mid-century technocrats. The novel centers on a bright, attractive career woman, comfortably married and the mother of two daughters, who suddenly finds herself caught between two generations as she attempts to help her estranged mother cope with the loss of her wealthy lover and to answer the probing questions of her own ten-year-old daughter about poverty and misery. As she gradually develops sensitivity she has been taught by her mother to restrain, Laurence despairs of ever changing anything in her own life, yet vows in the concluding lines of the novel that she will raise her daughters to express their feelings, to allow themselves to be moved by the plight of undernourished children in Third World countries, of factory workers shackled to uninspiring jobs.

Laurence is an incarnation of the contemporary superwoman who attempts to juggle her commitments to her career, her husband, her children, her aging parents, even her lover, until she eventually falls apart under the strain of such responsibilities.  The three novellas in the 1967 collection La Femme rompue ( The Woman Destroyed) reflect the degree to which de Beauvoir had been listening to the women who wrote and spoke to her about the problems of their more traditional lives.

One of the novellas, Age of Discretion, focuses on a recently retired woman professor, author of several books, for whom life seems to lose all meaning when her son abandons academia for a more lucrative business job and when critics suggest that her latest book merely repeats ideas presented in earlier ones.Monologue takes the reader through a New Year's Eve of neurotic ranting by the twice-divorced Murielle, whose possessiveness has driven her sixteen-year-old daughter to suicide and who wants to force her son and her second husband to live with her once again so that she will regain her social status as a wife and mother. The title story highlights the plight of the middle-aged Monique, who abandoned her medical studies in order to marry and have children and who suddenly discovers that her husband is having an affair with a younger and more independent woman. In each case the protagonist has allowed herself to be relegated to the status of a "relative being" dependent upon others for her sense of identity. According to Mary Evans in Simone de Beauvoir: A Feminist Mandarin, the setting of both Les Belles Images and The Woman Destroyed is "the culture in which people become objects, but the objects least able to manipulate their fate are women."  In the late 1960s de Beauvoir turned her attention to an important study of old age, a companion piece to The Second Sex. She gave her book, published in 1970, the straightforward title La Vieillesse ("Old Age"), but the title was euphemistically translated as The Coming of Age in the United States.

The work focuses upon the generally deplorable existence of most elderly people, and along with a film entitledPromenades au pays de la vieillesse ("Wandering through the Pathways of Old Age"), in which de Beauvoir appeared, this book defines one of the as yet unresolved dilemmas of the late twentieth century. Bieber sees in The Coming of Age an example of de Beauvoir's "boundless empathy" and of her understanding of human frailty; Ascher, in contrast, finds it "shocking for its lack of feeling for the special plight of old women" and asserts that for the author the universal is male, at least among the elderly.  Several critics have taken de Beauvoir to task for her apparently negative presentation of women and their values. Leighton sees the women of de Beauvoir's fiction as "finely etched portraits of various types of femininity [that] personify in a compelling way the pessimistic and anti-feminine bias of The Second Sex. " Ascher's personal letter to de Beauvoir in the middle of her Simone de Beauvoir: A Life of Freedom speaks of "my resistance to accepting your grim view of women's condition." For Evans there is an assumption in de Beauvoir's works that "traditionally male activities (the exercise of rationality, independent action, and so on) are in some sense superior, and are instances almost of a higher form of civilization than concerns such as child care and the maintenance of daily life that have traditionally been the preserve of women." Whitmarsh is critical of the author's confining her political commitment to the ethical and the literary rather than extending her activities to the practical aspects of everyday politics. Okely finds that many of de Beauvoir's generalizations are based on her limited experience in a small Parisian intellectual circle and do not apply as readily to cultures that are neither western, white, nor middle class. 

A substantial number of interviews granted by de Beauvoir gave her the opportunity to clarify many of her ideas and to answer her critics. Speaking with Francis Jeanson in an interview published as Simone de Beauvoir ou l'entreprise de vivre, she elaborated on her childhood, on her relationship with both her parents, on her conviction that being a woman had never hindered her progress toward the goals she had set for herself. At that particular time (the mid-1960s), she defined feminism as a way of living individually and of fighting collectively and strongly opposed any tendency to consider men as the enemy.

Literature, in her opinion, should serve to make people more transparent to one another. She acknowledged a puritanical strain in herself caused by her early upbringing and spoke with Jeanson about what she labeled her "schizophrenia," a determination to throw herself wholeheartedly into any project she undertook and an accompanying unwillingness to deviate from her original plan even when intervening circumstances made it no longer practical.  Betty Friedan's It Changed My Life contains a dialogue with de Beauvoir, to whom Friedan looked for answers to the questions raised by the American feminist groups that were forming in the 1970s. In her introduction to this dialogue, Friedan acknowledges her debt to de Beauvoir: "I had learned my own existentialism from her. It was The Second Sex that introduced me to that approach to reality and political responsibility that . . . led me to whatever original analysis of women's existence I have been able to contribute." When they spoke, however, she and de Beauvoir disagreed completely about the viability of motherhood for women seeking their independence and about the possibility of providing salaries for housewives in order to enhance their self-image. In It Changed My Life, Friedan expressed disappointment over what she saw in de Beauvoir as detachment from the lives of real women, and concluded: "I wish her well. She started me out on a road on which I'll keep moving. . . . There are no gods, no goddesses. . . . We need and can trust no other authority than our own personal truth." 

Who was Simone de Beauvoir for others? The newspaper and magazine articles that appeared after her death provide a variety of answers to that question. For many women, she was the person who led the way, who opened up horizons and suggested possibilities of breaking out of the mold society had previously forged for them. The caption on the front page of Le Nouvel Observateur, taken from an article by philosophy professor Elisabeth Badinter, proclaimed, "Women, you owe her everything!" According to American feminist Kate Millett, quoted in London'sObserver, "She had opened a door for us. All of us . . . women everywhere, their lives touched and illumined ever after."

In the New York Times Gloria Steinem remarked that "More than any other single human being, she's responsible for the current international women's movement," and Betty Friedan labeled her "an authentic heroine in the history of womanhood." Despite her determination never to have children of her own, she became the "symbolic mother" of several generations of women. Josyane Savigneau declared in Le Monde that women in responsible positions today are "the descendants of this woman without children . . . who, obstinately, for more than sixty years . . . affirmed that there was nothing wrong with being born a woman."  Most appraisals of de Beauvoir's writings focused on The Second Sex, called by Philip Wylie in the New York Times "one of the few great books of our era." However, Bertrand Poirot-Delpech, who noted in Le Monde that de Beauvoir was "a much less minor novelist than one might think," described The Mandarins as one of the best sources of documentation on the committed intellectuals of the cold war period. Millett pronounced The Woman Destroyed "a literary masterpiece" and de Beauvoir's books on aging and death great social documents. Michel Contat, writing for Le Monde, saw the 1946 novel All Men Are Mortal as de Beauvoir's most powerful philosophical work, "the most daring, the most scandalous and the most strangely passionate interrogation launched by this great rationalist intellectual against the human condition." 

Still other French newspapers highlighted de Beauvoir's intelligence and underlined the fact that at twenty-one she was the youngest student ever to receive the "agregation" degree in philosophy. Friends emphasized, however, that her keen mind was accompanied by sincere concern for other people. Jean Cathala noted inLe Monde that "her remarkable intelligence was inseparable from her remarkable hearts"; Millett cited her "endless generosity and patience" in giving of herself and her time to others; singer Juliette Greco recalled in Le Monde de Beauvoir's "generosity, human tenderness and . . . ability to listen." Equally praised in the press was de Beauvoir's tireless commitment to causes in which she believed. Contacted by Le Monde for his reaction to the author's death, Jack Lang, former Minister of Culture under Francois Mitterrand, described de Beauvoir as "a generous human being who never hesitated to defend the cause of the oppressed." Claudine Serre recorded in Le Monde Aujourd'hui that to the last days of her life, de Beauvoir remained "a free woman opposed to servitude, and nothing ever appeased her anger. . . . Her commitment . . . did not diminish with age." 

"Women, you owe her everything!" So read the headline announcing Simone de Beauvoir's death in April 1986. It was a phrase repeated over and over at her funeral, where some 5,000 mourners gathered to pay tribute to the writer many consider the greatest French woman of the 20th century, author of The Second Sex, mother of the modern women's movement. 

At Simone de Beauvoir's funeral on April 19, 1986, flowers from all over the world filled the corner of the Montparnasse cemetery where she was laid to rest next to Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980). Banners and cards from the American-based Simone de Beauvoir Society, women's studies groups, women's health centers and centers for battered women, diverse political organizations, and publishing houses attested to the number of lives that the author had touched during her seventy-eight years. Five thousand people, many of them recognizable figures from the political, literary, and film worlds, made their way along the boulevard du Montparnasse past her birthplace, past the cafes where she, Sartre, and their friends had discussed their ideas and written some of their manuscripts, to the cemetery. 

AWARDS

Prix Goncourt, 1954, for Les Mandarins; Jerusalem Prize, 1975; Austrian State Prize, 1978; Sonning Prize for European Culture, 1983; LL.D. from Cambridge University.

CAREER

Philosopher, novelist, autobiographer, nonfiction writer, essayist, editor, lecturer, and political activist. Instructor in philosophy at Lycee Montgrand, Marseilles, France, 1931-33, at Lycee Jeanne d'Arc, Rouen, France, 1933-37, at Lycee Moliere and Lycee Camille-See, both Paris, France, 1938-43. Founder and editor, with Jean-Paul Sartre, of Les Temps modernes, beginning 1945.

WRITINGS

• L'Invitee (novel), Gallimard, 1943, reprinted, 1977, translation by Yvonne Moyse and Roger Senhouse published as She Came to Stay, Secker Warburg, 1949, World Publishing, 1954, reprinted, Flamingo, 1984. 

• Pyrrhus et Cineas (philosophy; also see below), Gallimard, 1944. 

• Les Bouches inutiles (play in two acts; first performed in Paris), Gallimard, 1945, translation published as Who Shall Die?, River Press, 1983. 

• Le Sang des autres (novel), Gallimard, 1946, reprinted, 1982, translation by Moyse and Senhouse published as The Blood of Others, Knopf, 1948, reprinted, Pantheon, 1984. 

• Tous les hommes sont mortel (novel), Gallimard, 1946, reprinted, 1974, translation by Leonard M. Friedman published as All Men Are Mortal, World Publishing, 1955. 

• Pour une morale de l'ambiguite (philosophy; also see below), Gallimard, 1947, reprinted, 1963, translation by Bernard Frechtman published as The Ethics of Ambiguity, Philosophical Library, 1948, reprinted, Citadel, 1975. 

• Pour une morale de l'ambiguite [and] Pyrrhus et Cineas, Schoenhof's Foreign Books, 1948. 

• L'Existentialisme et la sagesse des nations (philosophy; title means "Existentialism and the Wisdom of the Ages"), Nagel, 1948. 

• L'Amerique au jour le jour (diary), P. Morihien, 1948, translation by Patrick Dudley published as America Day by Day, Duckworth, 1952, Grove, 1953, new edition translated by Carol Cosman, foreword by Douglas Brinkley, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1999. 

• Le Deuxieme Sexe, two volumes, Gallimard, 1949, translation by H. M. Parshley published as The Second Sex, Knopf, 1953 , reprinted, Random House, 1974 (Volume 1 published in England as A History of Sex, New English Library, 1961, published as Nature of the Second Sex, 1963). 

• The Marquis de Sade (essay; translation of Faut-il bruler Sade?; also see below; originally published in Les Temps modernes), translation by Annette Michelson Grove, 1953 (published in England as Must We Burn de Sade?, Nevill, 1953, reprinted, New English Library, 1972). 

• Les Mandarins (novel), Gallimard, 1954, reprint published in two volumes, French and European, 1972, translation by Friedman published as The Mandarins, World Publishing, 1956, reprinted, Flamingo, 1984. 

• Privileges (essays; includes Faut-il bruler Sade?), Gallimard, 1955. 

• La Longue Marche: Essai sur la Chine, Gallimard, 1957, translation by Austryn Wainhouse published as The Long March, World Publishing, 1958. 

• Memoires d'une jeune fille rangee (autobiography), Gallimard, 1958, reprinted, 1972 , translation by James Kirkup published as Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, World Publishing, 1959, reprinted, Penguin, 1984. 

• Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome, translated by Frechtman, Reynal, 1960, published with foreword by George Amberg, Arno, 1972. 

• La Force de l'age (autobiography), Gallimard, 1960, reprinted, 1976 , translation by Peter Green published as The Prime of Life, World Publishing, 1962. 

• (With Gisele Halimi) Djamila Boupacha, Gallimard, 1962, translation by Green published under same title, Macmillan, 1962. 

• La Force des choses (autobiography), Gallimard, 1963, reprinted, 1977 , translation by Richard Howard published as Force of Circumstance, Putnam, 1965. 

• Une Mort tres douce (autobiography), Gallimard, 1964, reprinted with English introduction and notes by Ray Davison, Methuen Educational, 1986, translation by Patrick O'Brian published as A Very Easy Death, Putnam, 1966, reprinted, Pantheon, 1985. 

• (Author of introduction) Charles Perrault, Bluebeard and Other Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault, Macmillan, 1964. 

• (Author of preface) Violette Leduc, La Batarde, Gallimard, 1964. 

• Les Belles Images (novel), Gallimard, 1966, translation by O'Brian published under same title, Putnam, 1968, reprinted with introduction and notes by Blandine Stefanson, Heinemann Educational, 1980. 

• (Author of preface) Jean-Francois Steiner, Treblinka, Simon & Schuster, 1967.  • La Femme rompue (three novellas; includes L'Age de discretion), Gallimard, 1967, translation by O'Brian published as The Woman Destroyed (includes Age of Discretion and Monologue), Putnam, 1969, reprinted, Pantheon, 1987. 

• La Vieillesse (nonfiction), Gallimard, 1970, translation by O'Brian published as The Coming of Age, Putnam, 1972 (published in England as Old Age, Weidenfeld Nicolson, 1972). 

• Tout compte fait (autobiography), Gallimard, 1972, translation by O'Brian published as All Said and Done, Putnam, 1974. 

• Quand prime le spirituel (short stories), Gallimard, 1979, translation by O'Brian published as When Things of the Spirit Come First: Five Early Tales, Pantheon, 1982.

• Le Ceremonie des adieux: Suivi de entretiens avec Jean-Paul Sartre (reminiscences), Gallimard, 1981, translation published as Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre, Pantheon, 1984. 

• (Contributor with Jean-Paul Sartre; also editor) Lettres au Castor et a quelques autres, Gallimard, 1983, Volume 1: 1926-1939, Volume 2: 1940-1963. 

• Lettres a Sartre, French and European Publications, 1990, Volume 1: 1930-1939, Volume 2: 1940-1963. 

• Journal de guerre, septembre 1939-janvier 1941, Gallimard, 1990. 

• (Editor) Witness to My Life: The Letters of Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir , translated by Norman MacAfee and Lee Fahnestock, Macmillan, 1992. 

• A Transatlantic Love Affair: Letters to Nelson Algren, compiled and annotated by Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir; translation from the French by Ellen Gordon Reeves, The New Press (New York, NY), 1998.

MEDIA ADAPTATIONS

• The Mandarins was adapted for film by Twentieth Century-Fox in 1969

• The Blood of Others was adapted for film by Home Box Office starring Jodie Foster in 1984.

 

Contemporary Authors Online, Thomson Gale, 2006  Guardian New York Times Wikipedia