SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

 Published 1958
 Chronicles her youth
 From her birth in 1908 to 1929 (21 years)
 Deals in depth with her childhood, school and university days
 Her relationship with her family and friends
 Her youthful thoughts and experiences of love
 The foundations of ideas that drove her adult life
 Inner conflict growing up as in independent thinker in a Bourgeois family

FORM AND STYLE

 Traditional autobiography
 Starts with her birth, moves forward in a linear fashion
 (Only exception is when she describes Jacques’ future)
 Has many characters
 There is an index to keep track
 At times style is rather like a journal entry, at times highly evocative- when she talks about
nature
 Very dense

LIFE AND LIFE STORY

 A life is such a strange object, at one moment translucent, at another utterly opaque, an
object I make with my own hands, an object imposed on me, an object for which the world
provides the raw material and then steals it from me again, pulverized by events, scattered,
broken, scored yet retaining its unity; how heavy it is and how inconsistent: this contradiction
breeds many misunderstandings
 Her third memoir – Force of Circumstance
 Even as a little girl she thought of her life as a lovely story in the making
 One afternoon I was playing croquet with Poupette, Jeanne and Madeleine. We were
wearing beige pinafores with red scallops and embroidered with cherries. The clumps of
laurel were shining in the sun, and the earth smelt good. Suddenly I was struck motionless: I
was living through the first chapter of a novel in which I was the heroine; she was still almost
a child, but we, too, were growing up. I decided that my sister and my cousins, who were
prettier, more graceful, and altogether nicer than myself would be more popular than I; they
would find husbands, but not I. I should feel no bitterness about it; people would be right to
prefer them to me; but something would happen which would exalt me beyond all personal
preferences; I didn’t know under what form, or by whom I should be recognized for what I
was. I imagined that already there was someone watching the croquet lawn and the four
little girls in their beige pinafores: the gaze rested on me and a voice murmured: ‘She is not
as other girls. (Pg 90)
 Even in her adult life, after her meeting with Sartre, she entertained the notion of her life as
a story
 “I still wanted my life to be ‘a lovely story that became true as I told it to myself,’ and touched
it up improvingly here and there in the telling”
 This was tempered at last by the German occupation
 “at last prepared to admit that my life was not a story of my own telling, but a compromise
between myself and the world at large”
 Whether as “lovely” and embellished, or as radically free, or as a compromise with
circumstance, then, it seems that Beauvoir consistently entertained a sense of her own life
as a living story.

1
 Life as lifestory stance - Very appropriate (only slightly exaggerated) considering her
existential commitment
 Life with a particular narrative shape
 Any life sheen in a story like shape means – it is understood and represented as a narrative
form
 It is to be considered not synchronically in terms of Being
 But diachronically in terms of Becoming
 The best way to understand the nature of Becoming is by narrating it
 Such a concept is in tune with anti-essentialism
 Very much parallel to her famous – “One is not born a woman, but rather becomes one”
 A life becomes a life story by narration
 .
 She presents incidents as stages in personal intellectual development
 She gives incidents as examples to demonstrate the stages of intellectual development
 She recounts intellectual commitments and their passing as phases in development- in
maturarion
 World events are presented in harmony with personal ones with causal relationships
 The individual is affected by them, is responsive to them
 Result- Beauvoir’s individual life-story is punctuated by the rhythms of history
 For example, The advent of war is symbolically as well as causally connected with the
beginning of historical consciousness in her
 With all the naivete of a child who believes in the absolute vertical, I thought that there
was an absolute truth governing the world . . . In the peace which had been granted us,
justice and reason worked like a yeast. I built my happiness on firm ground and beneath
immutable constellations. What a misapprehension this was! It was not a fragment of
eternity I had lived through but a transitory period, the pre-war years.
 Plain chronological telling – allows the passage of years to tell its own tale
 Minimizes the role of the writer as interpreter –
 The writer supposedly telescopes and reorganizes her glimpses of self to give an overall
self- portrait
 But a chronological telling minimizes this activity
 It emphasizes the temporal nfluence on transformation – the passage from then to now
 Why then did Beauvoir choose this?
 Beauvoir talks about this in Force of Circumstance
 .
 why have I subjected myself to chronological order instead of choosing some other
construction? I have pondered this matter, and I have hesitated. But what counts above
all in my life is that time goes by; I grow older, the world changes, my relation with it
varies; to show the transformations, the ripenings, the irreversible deteriorations of
others and of myself -- nothing is more important to me than that. And that obliges me to
follow obediently the thread the years have unwound.

MEMOIRS
 Young Simone has a girlish sense of great things to come
 This generates a momentum in the narrative
 It is enhanced by her authorial shaping of her story
 .
 Simone is constructed as a figure struggling with a deep felt sense of rebellion against
the arbitrary constraints of bourgeois propriety
 For instance, once when she was staying at La Grilliere, she stayed out on the country
side a little longer than usual

2
  Supper was almost over when she returned
 As a punishmnent her mother forbids her from going beyond the bounds of the estate
the next day
 I spent the day sitting on the lawns or pacing up and down the avenues with a book in
my hand and rage in my heart. Over there, outside, the waters of the lake were ruffling
and smoothing, without me, without anyone to see: it was unbearable. “If it were raining;
if there were some reason for this silly prohibition,” I told myself, “then I could resign
myself to it.” Here, once more, boiling up inside me, was the rebelliousness that had
expressed itself in furious convulsions during my early childhood.
 .
 This kind of rage is made more bearable by her alliance with Zaza
 The intimacy with Zaza can be considered as having its own special narrative in the
Memoir
 They common confrontation against the irrationalities of bourgeois upbringing is a uniting
factor
 Even more important than that is the importance given to Zaza’s death
 The female-female intimacy is a precursor to the male –female intimacy between
Beauvoir and Sartre
 Ursula Tidd points out that both these relationships (Beauvoir-Zaza and Beauvoir-
Sartre) are founded on an opposition of bourgeois values
 Beauvoir creates her selfhood in her autobiography through two different relationships
 Reciprocity (with Zaza and Sartre) and Conflict (with bourgeois values)
 .
 Zaza dies in the end
 This has a symbolic weightage
 She suffocates under the weight of bourgeois conventions
Symbolically, what Zaza succumbs to in death is the suffocating
weight of bourgeois convention. She dies, from it is unclear quite
what, at a time of unsustainable anguish on her part over her conventionally
inappropriate love match with Jean Pradelle (Maurice
Merleau-Ponty). As a qualification, it should be said that Beauvoir’s
presentation of Zaza’s demise as connected to bourgeois restrictions
is not black and white. Although the symbolic connection is undoubtedly
there,7 it is not created at the expense of fairness to the
people concerned. It should not be overlooked that Beauvoir is careful
to cast the mothers of both Zaza and Pradelle in a flexible and
humane light. It is just that these qualities come too late:
Madame Mabille put her [Zaza] to bed and called the doctor; she had a long
talk with Pradelle: she didn’t want to be the cause of her daughter’s unhappiness,
and she was not opposed to their marriage. Madame Pradelle wasn’t
against it either; she too didn’t want to cause anyone unhappiness. It would
all be arranged. But Zaza had a temperature of 104◦ and was delirious. [MD
359]
This due fairness dispensed, Memoirs closes with the death of Zaza
and with Beauvoir’s testimony to her experience of what these days
we might identify, glibly perhaps, as a kind of “survivor guilt”:
The doctors called it meningitis, encephalitis; no one was quite sure. Had
it been a contagious disease, or an accident? Or had Zaza succumbed to
 exhaustion and anxiety? She has often appeared to me at night, her face all

3
CHARACTERS
 Plenty of characters mentioned
 Georges de Beauvoir – father
 Francoise de Beauvoir – mother
 Helene ‘Poupette’ de Beauvoir – Sister
 The Laiguillons
 The Mabilles
 Teachers –
 Friends-
 But she concentrates only on three
 First – Herself
 Two – Jacques Laiguillon, Her first love and first cousin – her potential future
 Three- Elizabeth “Zaza” Mabille – her alter ego
 These two provide a kind of coherence to the narrative line
 The question of Simone’s and Jacques’ relationship and possibility of marriage
 The development of Zaza’s character

Jacques
 Her first cousin
 Doesn’t marry her
 Memoir ends when she is 21 an he is 23
 But a brief look at his life and death (at age 46)

Zaza
 A alter ego?
 The book supposedly focuses on Simone’s role and failure (?) as a dutiful daughter
 But the title is perhaps more apt for Zaza
 Simone is duty bound only in the sense of obedience
 Intellectually she is independent
 Zaza’s life is a tragedy of dutiful dauhter’s who cannot achieve this

SARTRE
 Appears towards the very end of the book
 Friend of Andre Herbaud
 They were a group of three at the Ecole Normale Superiure
 Andre Herbaud, Jean Paul Sartre and Paul Nizan
 Herbaud was friends with Beauvoir first (He gave her the name Beaver)
 Introduced to Sartre only much later
 They had a lot of conversations together
 But for some reason he refused to acknowledge their friendship before his other two friends
 This used to hurt Beauvoir first
 But Once Sartre asked to be introduced
 Since Herbaud was not around, they send Poupette
 They were finally introduced
 Page 334
 But after Herbaud left after failing, Sartre and Beauvoir got very close

 Sartre corresponded exactly to the dream companion I had longed for since I was fifteen:
he was the double in whom I found all my burning aspiration raised to the pitch of
incandescence. I should always be able to share everything with him.

4
THE DUTIFUL DAUGHTER
 Born on 9th January 1908 in Montparnasse, a Paris district (was her home for all but 5 years of her
life)
 An avid observer of human life
 Loved looking out the winfdow
 Her extended family belonged to the wealthy bourgeoisie
 Moral and Social codes prevailed
 Girls expected to grow up and marry within their social class
 Remain chaste until married
 Pass from obeying parents to obeying husbands without straying out of approved families
 .
 Decline of her family fortunes
 Maternal Grandfather – wealthy and speculation loving banker- bankrupt and arrested
 Her mother felt the dishonor acutely
 And her mother’s dowry was never paid
 She broke with her previous circles
 Mother had had an unhappy childhood
 Her own mother had no interest in them
 Her father preferred her sister
 A rather lonely childhood
 Consequently she bestowed a lot of her attention on Simone after she was born
 .
 Father Georges de Beauvoir
 The younger son of a family of Parisian Civil Servants
 Elegant, witty, charming
 He loved the theatre
 Participated in amateur performances
 Convinced of his aristocratic status
 Half way between the old aristocracy and the new bourgeoisie he belonged to neither
 Felt he was much removed from the bourgeois vulgarity of work or the pursuit of success
 Didn’t help them much
 Socially displaced
 Simone was later profoundly affected by this
 .
 Her early years – very happy
 A precocious child
 Learned to read at the age of 3
 Composed her first literary works at the age of 7
 The Misfortunes of Marguerite
 La Famille Cornichon
 Petted, papmpered, living in a circle of maternal warmth and physical delight, fed books and attention
 She developed a sense of her own specialness
 Stubborn, too full of energy, the young Simone was prone to violent tantrums
 .
 Sister- Helene – nicknamed Poupette
 2 and a half years younger
 Became a devoted playmate
 Simone knew she was the parental favourite
 She had a bigger room, she had come first
 Simone taught Poupette to read and write

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 They played elaborate imaginative games
 She took the lead always
 She enjoyed being Poupette’s teacher
 Gave her a sense of authority
 “When I started to change ignorance into knowledge, when I started to impress truths upon a virgin
mind, I felt I was at last creating something real… I was breaking away from the passivity of
childhood and entering the great human circle in which everyone is useful to everyone else”
 .
 Interestingly, in their make-believe games, Simone worked out the scenario
 But Poupette took up the dominant role
 Simone preferred being the heroic saint, martyred by the tyrannical Poupette
 .
 Catholicism coloured her childhood
 With its saints and martyrs
 With its hierarchy of sins
 Her mother was a zealous believer
 The girls attended mass with her
 Performed morning and evening devotions
 The intimacy with her pious mother led her to briefly desire to become a nun
 The young Simone may even have confused her all-seeing mother with God zirself
 An acute sense of maternal responsibility
 In 1913 when Simone was enrolled at a catholic institution for young ladies – Course Adeline Desir,
her mother mostly went with her- knitted during class hours
 Learnt Latin and English to monitor her progress
 .
 Attending school was also different from her otgher extended family
 Most young girls had governesses at home
 Was not affordable for them
 Simone loved school and considered herself lucky
 Learning was a never ending adventure
 When her mother took her to a library for the first time, she experienced one of the greatest joys of
her childhood
 .
 On matters of education father and mother agreed
 On questions of faith, they did not
 Radically opposed
 Georges de Beauvoir was a non-believer
 Often aired his skepticism on religious matters
 Yet Simone never heard her parents argue on that
 She was deeply imbued by the idea of God
 Calmly accepted what later became an intolerable contradiction
 I grew accustomed to the idea that my intellectual life- embodied by my father- and my spiritual life –
expressed by my mother- were two radically heterogenous fields of experience which had nothing in
common. Sanctity and intelligence belonged to two quite different spheres; and human things –
culture, politics, business, manners and customs – had nothing to do with religion
 .
 In matters of religion, his father may have been a free thinker
 But in politics – extreme right wing
 Opposed to universal suffrage
 Opposed to the Republic
 Especially during WW I period

6
 Constant diatribes against socialism and internationalism,
 Against supposed foreigners who were bringing down French civilization from within
 .
 The war itself was not as hard for them as for others
 A first flush of patriotic enthusiasm
 Simone made flags and banner
 Georges signed up for the army
 Was sent back after 3 months after a hear t attack
 Spent a lot of time shaping his children’s literary tastes
 Every evening he would read out from his favourite French classics Corneille, Racine, Moliere,
Victor Hugo, Edmund Rostand
 Gave Simone do difficult dictations
 Sang for them, acted, did imitations
 Simone’s admiration for him increased
 .
 But the family’s finances declined
 Nothing could be wasted- not a string, not a crust of bread
 She was imbued with a sense of economy
 Started cramming her notebooks with tiny script
 The teachers complained
 But the principle of economy stayed with her throughout her life
 I remained convinced that one must make use of everything, and of one’s self, to the utmost
 .
 1919- Beauvoirs forced to move to a fisth floor flat in the Rue de Rennes
 No lifet, no running water
 Ank and dirty
 The sisters shared a room
 Only the father’s study had a wood fire
 Simone often worked at her father’s desk
 No maid
 The drudgery turned Francois from a beautiful woman to a perpetually worried one
 Neglected the children’s appearance
 Mostly hand me downs, threadbare from overuse
 Hair matted
 Beauvoir records her shame at her ill fitted dresses, and how that accentuated her clumsiness
 .
 Simone was made to feel that she was ine in a million
 Entitled to consider her taste for reading and scholastic successes as tokens of personal superiority
 A cluster a values she gained in her childhood was to stay with her throughout her life
o A sense of Puritanism
o A disdain for the material surfaces of life
o A belief that salvation lay in the intellect
 .
 Their continuing poverty had its ill effects
 Georges de Beauvoir underwent another speculative fiasco dreamt up by his irresponsible father in
law
 Through the intervention of a relative he secured workas an advertising salesman for a newspaper
 His youthful aspirations to an aristocratic life vanished
 Bitterness set in
 His behavior changed
 The charming, gallant man disappeared

7
 Instead he began to outdo the poor by imitating what he thought of as their vulgar manners
 In public he started talking in a booming voice and hurling abuses in a different accent
 At home he started deriding everyone
 In her teens, he would spent entire nights out, frequenting brothels, coming home in the morning
reeking of drinking, making up stories of card games
 .
 Francoise continued to be a dutiful wife
 But her temper deteriorated
 Just as her daughter started needing more solitude and freedom, Madame de Beauvoir started needing
them increasingly to compensate for the deprivations in her life
 She grew overbearing and possessive, determined to have her daughters in her power
 .
 Simone had learnt to keep certain things from her mother at the early age of eight – a curious
sensation between my legs
 Anything to do with the fruit of thy womb was forbidden territory
 It was not proper to talk of bodily things
 I learnt that the body as a whole was vulgar and offensive
 Books too delved into these improper matters
 Madame de Beauvoir carefully monitored her children’s reading
 She would pin together inappropriate pages
 .
 For many years Simone did not consider transgressing these limits
 But her mother’s prudery did not lessen
 So, forbidden territory became charged with fascination
 The sisters sought answeres from their cousin in the country – Madeleine
 She could read whatever she wanted
 But her explanations only confused them
 Poupette was less inhibited than Simone
 On their return she asks their mother about it
 She casually remarked that babies came out of the anus quite painlessly
 I never again discussed these problems with her, and she never said another word to us about them
 Started being disillusioned with adults
 .
 Full swing in adolescence
 She became increasingly irritated with her own obedience
 Met her mothers demands with reticence
 Was resentful that she had to be controlled by a woman whose opinions she had begun to consider as
ridiculous
 She was also jealous of her mother’s hold on her father’s affections
 .
 All this made more extreme by the fact that her father was increasingly disappointed in her
 Critical of her adolescent unattractiveness
 Preferred her sister who was prettier
 She began her inner rebellion
 Started keeping secrets
 Would read forbidden books
 Had a less hazy notion of sexual relations
 Started questioning the place of religion in the wor;d
 It set an even greater distance between hr and her mother
 .

8
 The bourgeois values she was brought up in permitted convent morality to co-exist with her father’s
nationalism
 Neither my mother nor my teachers doubted for a moment that the Pope was elected by the Holy
Spirit; yet my father thought his Holiness should not interfere in world affairs and my mother agreed
with him
 National values came before Catholic Virtues
 Caesar always got the better of God
 .
 Simone’s breach of faith came at Meyrignac in the Limousin- her paternal grandfather’s country
estate
 She spent her summers there
 There she learnt a love for nature that was never to leave her
 There was no poverty
 No parental supervision
 Spent many joyful moments in solitary communion with sky and tree and fields which were for her an
emanation of a divine presence
 But something changed
 The 14 year old began pondering why religion should be the privilege of women, when obviously
men were their superiors
 Leaning out the window, she was suddenly conscious of an absence in heaven and in her heart
 She had been committed deliberate disobediences all day
 If she believed in God, she wouldn’t have been able to do so so easily
 She loved the world more than God
 She had refined God so much that ze became oblivion
 She made a clean break
 .
 Her characteristic intellectual rigour can be seen in this
 She doesn’t tolerate murkiness in herself or in others
 Young Simone was devasteated by this emptiness in heaven
 She was even more terrified by the contemplation that she was condemned to death
 Despair
 An annihilating fear that would haunt her all her life- that she kept at bay by her optimistic engaging
in activities
 .
 Did not tell her mother of her lapse in faith\
 Out of respect kept up her life of obedience
 Everything was as before, the concept of duty, righteousness,s sexual taboos
 Her worldly ambitions increased
 Had long ago decided to devote herself to intellectual work and reject the maternal model
 At 15, she knew she wanted to be an author
 Her father rated writers higher than philosophers, scholars or professors
 Simone was also convinced of their supremacy
 Literature would grant her the immortality that she lost with her loss of faith.
 .
 Simone has a man’s brain. She thinks like a man
 Her father used to be proud
 But paradoxically not after her academic brilliance persisted
 After Cours Desir she moved on to the academically sounder Institut Saint-Marie
 She passed a lot of nationwide competitive examinations – Philosophy, Mathematics, Literature
 Her father began to bemoan the fact that he had raised a bluestocking
 Her success was a testimony to his failure

9
 The daughters of his friends, his brothers, and his siters would be ladies, but not me.
 In those days people of my parents’ class thought it unseemly for a young lady to go in for higher
education – to train for a profession was a fsign of defeat… He was of the opinion that to shine in
those exalted spheres [of high society] a woman should not only be beautiful and elegant but should
also be well read and a good conversationalist; so he was pleased by my early scholastic successes…
But though my father liked intelligent and witty women, he had no time for bluestockings. When he
announced, ‘My dears, you’ll never marry. You’ll have to work for your living’, there was a
bitterness in his voice
 .
 He thought very low of teachers
 He mourned the fact that Simone had decided on that profession
 It would make her an intellectual, place her in the ranks of those who applauded the Rights of Man,
pacifism, internationalism and socialism
 .
 Simone was confused by her father’s dissatisfaction
 She thought she was fulfilling his wishes
 Yet she was ill at ease
 Gradual resentment
 Growing resentment
 Later she rejects her father’s views outright, and whole heartedly rebel against her family.
 .
 She always identified with the male
 Vowed never to mary
 Her family’s restricted circumstances ensured that no appropriate man would would present himself
 So by choice as well as contingency, she was destined for a career

 ZAZA
 This was not so for her closest friend – Elizabeth Mabille- Zaza
 Actually Elizabeth Le Coin
 Met at Cours Desir at age 10
 Daughter of a wealthy catholic family
 Much involved in public activity
 Far more sophisticated than the bookish Simone
 Fearless in her criticisms of everything and everyone
 Simone’s first friend and first love
 The Object of her childish longings
 Zaza was unaware of Simone’s idolatry until they were both at the university
 Helene de Beauvoir’s description – A high strung woman, like a sleek and elegant racehorse ready to
bolt out of control
 .
 After Cours Desir, they attended the Institut Sainte-Marie together
 There Simone became infatuated with Robert Garric – the founder of a movement of social welfare
groups
 To bring students together with workers to progress friendship beyond class divisions
 She was extremely moved by Garrc’s polemics
 Vowed her life to the service of humanity
 The same way she had vowed herself to the service of God before
 Every moment of her life used scrupulously
 She abstained from frivolous reading matter
 Resented even the time she took to brush her teeth, clean her nails, or engage in the polite
conversation that her family demanded of her

10
 At meals she studied Greek
 Or preparing for papers in literature taught by Garric
 Or in philosophy, mathematics, classics
 Became a monster of insensitivity
 Voiced vigorous disgust at her father’s conservativeliterary tastes or his traditional ideas about
women and marriage
 She made time for Garric’s groups
 They were total disappointments
 Friendships between classes were not to be forged by rhetoric or inspired illusions
 .
 Zaza had reservations about Garric from the very beginning
 She did not have Simone’s fanatic deal with respect to Garric
 There were plenty of differences between them
 Zaza actively took part in the expansice social life of her family
 Often performed all the hosehold chores that were demanded of her
 This prevented her from engaging fully in the university life
 It barred her quite often from seeing Simone too
 Her mother was domineering and manipulative
 She disliked Simone
 And often snubbed Madame de Beauvoir
 But Zaza was extremely attached to her
 And this prevented rebellion against maternal expectations.
 .
 Her university year was merely a respite before her parents arranged a marriage foro her
 Simone reproached her for her growing defeatism before the power of her parents
 Beauvoir herself was optimistic and determined
 This made her impatient with Zaza’s apathy and mounting despair
 This inability to empathize became a constant theme in her writings later on
 .
 About three years after their shared university year, Zaza succumbed to meningitis and died
 Beauvoir believed she was the victim of a conflict between her loyalty to her mother and her love for
the philosopher Jean Pradelle (Maurice Merleau-Ponty)
 Simone had introduced them
 Zaza’s family disapproved of him
 This was incomprehensible to both Zaza and to Simone
 He came from a good Catholic family
 Pradelle himself refused to press his case for Zazas hand
 .
 [After the publication of the Memoirs, Beauvoir came to know what had happened
 Zaza’s younger sisters wrote to explain what had happened
 Her family had learnt through a private investigator that Ponty was illegitimate
 The son of an adulterouos liaison
 So this marriage was unthinkable for the LeCoins
 Adultery was a mortal sin for the Catholic LeCoins
 Ponty knew that if he pressd for the marriage, the story of his mother’s adultery would do the rounds
and destroy his sister’s marriage proposals
 So he told Monsieur LeCoin that he would withdraw the suit
 Zaza was distressed by Ponty’s sudden coolness and became distraught
 Her mother explained it to her
 Unable to cope with the destruction of her love, she slipped into madness
 Succumbed to fever

11
 Too late, their parents were willing to withdraw the prohibition
 But she died
 ]
 .
 For Simone, Zaza’s death took on symbolic overtones
 It was a clear case of victimization by an oppressive bourgeois family and their morality
 Zaza’s fate couldeasily have been hers
 She always felt her friend had paid for her freedom with her death
 All of her early attempts at fiction were haunted by Zaza’s death and the suffocating values of her
class
 Perhaps this bond of female friendship may have played itseld over and ou as akind of mourning in
the flurry of amorous relationships with women that Simonde undertook through the 1930s
 .
 JACQUES
 One other love in her life was her cousin Jacques Champigneulle
 She nursed an infatuation for him
 She knew him since childhood
 He had an artistic bent
 Vowed to turn his family’s stained glass firm into a convern which produced objects of artistic beauty
 He introduced Simone to contemporary French Literature that her father vigorously condemned
 He spent his nights in the bars and clubs frequented by artistic avant garde
 These were prohibited to Simone
 She romanticized his image
 Saw in him what she wanted to become
 With parental encouragement she nursd hopes of matrimony in this relationship
 He was the only person she could talk her problems with during her difficult adolescent years
 His blasé, sulky face, his evasive eyes, the books he had lent me, his half-confidences- everything
convinced me that he lived with his face turned towards an uncertain future.. I saw in Jacques the
perfect incarnation of disquiet
 .
 Jacques never proposed
 Never even kissed her
 Thos lack of sexual approach did not bother her at all
 She still lived within the aura of familial prudery
 In her university years, her range of friendships grew
 Her attitude to Jacques oscillated
 She experienced near indifference or mild contempt at his constant negativity when he was around
 At the same time, she experienced wild longing, jealousy, and marital day dreams when he was away.
 .
 The day dreams ended when she suddenly learnt he was to marry the daughter of a wealthy family
who could provide substantial dowry
 As Jacques’ father before him had done to Simone’s mother, he abandoned Simone
 The hero of her youth became a mere calculating bourgeoisie
 .
 In Jacques, Simone had found a male version of herself
 The boy she might have been if her mother had married his father
 Falling in love with him, she was following the same steps her mother had taken before her
 Perhaps she hoped to succeed where her mother had failed
 .
 The mercenary considerations of the Champigneulles- father and son, ruled the destinies of Francoise
and Simone

12
 Perhaps Simone decided not to marry not just because of Sartre’s or her desire for freedom
 Perhaps she had had enough of the instution of marriage.
 After Jacquesm Simone never concretely dreamt of marriage
 .
 Jacques later life






13
 .

 NIGHTS OUT
 She tried to experience the hazardous and useless existence Jacques and other novelists were praising
 Jacques once introduced her to the adventure of cafes and bars
 Simone would find pretexts to escape from her mother’s vigilant eyes to have a night out in the town
 Sometimes her sistetr would join her- She too had grown into a rebel
 She would sit on her bar stool in the fashionable Jockey Club and, with all the fervor which had
formerly made her kneel before the Holy Sacrament, she would inhale tobacco fumes and drink
 She would behave outlandishly
 Excjange loud insults and slaps with a supposedly unknown Poupette- they enjoyed it
 Pretend to be a prostitute or a model

14
 But with her dingy clothes, sensible shoes, face free ofmakeup, she suspected in retrospect that she
never managed to deceive anyone
 She danced with strangers, learning to enjoytheir caresses
 .
 Perhaps she was trying to imitate her father
 Perhaps she was trying to prove that if she could think like aman, she couls act like a man too
 .
 She was still subject to prudery
 And found sexuality repugnant
 The thought of lust unredeemed by love caused her distress
 Obviously I did not believe that one should languish in perpetual virginity. But I was sure the
wedding night should be a white mass: true love sublimates the physical embrace, and in the arms of
her chosen one the pure young girl is briskly changed into a radiant young woman

 EXISTENTIALISM

GENDER
 Born in 1908
 Family – Conservative catholic bourgeois – except her father
 Teens - “I believed in the absolute equality of human beings”
 But she doesn’t concern herself with the idea of universal suffrage

 I should be in love the day a man came along whose intelligence, culture, and authority
could bring me into subjection.

 I never thought of myself as a man’s female companion; we would be two comrades [but,
she goes on] My education, my culture, and the present state of society all conspired to
convince me that women belong to an inferior caste.
 She goes on to explain that the man she loved would be “the model of all I wished to become;
he would therefore be superior to me”.
 She believed in equality and demanded independence for herself
 When she hears about abortion she is flabbergasted
 That it is illegeal
 What goes on in one’s own body must be one’s own right

 Towards the end she is quite sure

 When Herbauld talks about how women should get married she protests
 She says both the sexes should have equal rules
 She rejects double standards
 It is not excusable for men to lose their purity if it is not so for women
 “that men should be subject to the same laws as women […] I saw no reason why my future
partner in life should permit himself liberties which I wouldn’t allow myself”.
 Yet she sees Sartre as superior to her and hence the partner that she’s always dreamed of

 Her ideas hadn’t developed much more than this by the end of the memoir
 She believed in equality
 She didn’t want to be constrained in the way married women with children were

LITERATURE AND TRUTH

15
 Literature, extremely important to Beauvoir
 Her search for truth too
 Reading “the great passion of my life”
 Her intellectual development is tracked in the Memoir through the books and authors that
she read
 Her earlier reading used to be heavily censored in the family
 As a teenager she was much influenced by The Mill on the Floss and Little Women
 She identified a lot with the character of Jo
 She was disappointed much later when she realized that Laurie doesn’t marry Jo in The
Good Wives
 In her late teens she engages herself with contemporary literature
 Jacques introduces her to modern fiction
 The literature of “disquiet”
 Much to the displeasure of her parents
 Writers like Gide

 Books gave her much of her sex education

 Her mother was a highly religious and prudish woman
 Refused to talk about such matter to her
 So much so that she had a shock when she first menstruated
 Adam Bede episode
 When finally her embarrassed mother tried to talk about such things she was able to quickly
brush the conversation aside
 She could say “I know all about that”

 She knows that literature and reality are not the same things
 Literature takes its revenge on reality by making it the slave of fiction

 At times she argues that literature is the truth, while at other times she feels its connections
with truth are dubious, but this is all part of a portrait of the writer as a young girl. “Real”
truths are not found easily, and she, we see, worked hard for hers.
 I no longer asked myself: what shall I do? There was everything to be done, everything I
had formerly longed to do: to combat error, to find the truth, to tell it and expound it to the
world, perhaps to help to change the world.

QUOTES
…I refused to submit to that intangibl force: words. What I resented was that some casual
phrase beginning ‘You must...’ or ‘You mustn’t…’ couls ruin all my plans and poison all my
happiness. The arbitrary nature of the orders and prohibitions against which I beat unavailing
fists was to my mind proof of their inconsistency; yesterday I peeled a peach : then whty
shouldn’t I peela plum? Why must I stop playing just at that particular moment? I seemed to be
confronted everywhere by force, never by necessity. . (Pg 12)

…To provoke my wrath, someone only had to treat me as a baby. I was limited in my knowledge
and my capabilities, but that did not prevent me from considering myself to be a grown up
person. One day in the place Saint Sulpice, walking along hand in hand with Aunt Marguerite
who hadn’t the remotest idea how to talk to me, I suddenly wondered: ‘How does she see me?’
and felt a sharp sense of superiority: for I knew what I was like inside; she didn’t. Deceived by
outward appearances, she never suspected that inside my immature body nothing was lacking;
and I made up my mind that when I was olderI would never forget that a five year old is a

16
complete individual, a character in his own right. But this was precisely what adults refused to
admit, and whenever they treated me with condescension, I took offence. (Pg 13)

The two major categories into which my universe was divided were Good and Evil. I inhabited
the region of the good, where happiness and virtue reigned in indissoluble unity. I experienced
certain forms of pain, it is true, that seemed to be unmerited. I sometimes bumped my head or
grazed my elbow; an outbreak of eczema disfigured my face. A doctor cauterized my pimples
with silver nitrate and I yelled. But these accidents were quickly forgotten, and they did not
upset my belief that man experiences joy or pain according to his merits. (Pg 14)

A sword of fire separated good from evil… Evil did wrong, just as fire burns, inexcusable and
inevitably; hell was its natural habitat, and endless torment its proper fate; it would have been
sacrilegious to feel pity for its pain. Indeed the red hot iron boots which the seven dwarves made
snow-White’s stepmother wear and the flames burning Lucifer in hell never evoked in my mind
the image of physical suffering. Ogres, witches, demons, stepmothers, and torturers- all these
inhuman creatures symbolized an abstract power and their well-deserved defeat was illustrated
by sufferings that were only abstractions. (Pg 15)

‘there’s Monsieur and Madame fighting again,’ said Louise. That was when my universe began
to totter. It was impossible that papa and mama should be enemies, that Louise should be their
enemy; when the impossible happened, heaven was confused with hell, darkness was conjoined
with light. I began to drown in the chaos which preceded creation. (Pg 16)

A QUICK LOOK AT BEAUVOIR’S PHILOSOPHY

PYRRHUS AND CINEAS (Reference – Joseph Mahon – Existentialism, Feminism and Simone
de Beauvoir)
Candide’s Garden
 All human behavior may be reasonably regarded as absurd
 Because no matter what we achieve, there always remains something else to be achieved
 This derisory nature of our existency is tormenting enough to lead some people to suicide
 Even then, we continue to push forward and human existence retains its momentum
 This constancy/steadfastness in the face of folly and and defeat may be seen as the source of
basic truth about us
 .
 There are 2 ways in which human beings can react to facts of lif
 Facts of life – Death, grief, separation, family life, mixing with other people etc
 One – Like Camus’ Outsider – refuse to acknowledge any meaningful connection between
human beings
 Treat them with indifference
 As far as the outsider was concerned, the relationship between two or more human beings
has no greater consequence than the fact that I’m standing on this piece of ground
 I am here, it is there, and that’s all there to it
 .
 Camus’ outsider is correct to the extent that attachments are not considered as given
 They are to be cultivated/created – That’s the second method
 Meaningful relations are not given, but brought about
 They have to be created
 SO, the alternative way of responding to people – treating them with concern
 They matter in you deciding to make them matter
 Otherwise human relationships became vain pretexts

17
 .
 Voltaire’s novel Candide – The hero says – ‘Each of us must cultivate her own garden’
 But Beauvoir says he doesn’t tell us the extent of the garden one must cultivate
 Some see it as a vast territory waiting to be cultivated
 For some, one flower pot is too much to handle
 She concludes, that Candide’s advice is superfluous
 Your life is always your own responsibility
 Nobody can lead it for you
 It carries your imprint from the moment you begin working on it
 .
The Moment
 Aristippus, Horace and Andre Gide (and many others) propund an ethics of enjoyment
through their works
 They advocate abandoning the world in favour of relaxation and self indulgence
 Beauvoir says this is a false concept of enjoyment
 Relaxation soon induces boredom
 Enjoyment should be dynamic, active and far-reaching
 It relates to things beyond itself
 All enjoyable experience has a wealth of associations
 “Each pleasure is a project. It advances beyond the past towards the future, towards the
world which is a frozen image of the future. To drink cinnamon chocolate, says Gide in his
Incidences, is to imbibe the whole of spain”
 .
 In that sense, to withdraw from the world is to renounce all pleasure and enjoyment as well
 Beauvoir says, the Epicureans and the Stoics understood well the connection between
withdrawal and pleasure
 By renouncing the world, the only possible pleasure remaining would be that of immobility
(pure ataraxia)
 .
 Fundamentally each human being is in transcendence
 Oriented towards things beyond itself
 Heidegger- “Man is a creature of distances. He is always somewhere else”
 Our hopes, longimgs, expectations, plans and ambitions all refer us to a future
 To more or less disitant events
 To events at a distance from where we stand.
 .
 Each human being is in transcendence
 So our happiness can only be found in future projects
 Proof- No sooner have we completed a project, that we set off to complete another
 “Pascal puts it well when he said that what interests the hunter is not the hare, but the
hunt”
 .

The Infinite
 Each human is in transcendence
 But we gain nothing by condsidering this as a transcendence towards the Infinte or the
Universal
 If you aim at the infinite, you lose sight of yourself
 “Man cannot escape his own presence”
 We cant diminish our being indefinitely or expand it to infinity
 We cannot have complete rest

18
 .
God
 It is tempting to turn to God for Guidance
 If God is infinite, and a plenitude of being, there is no distance between his project and his reality.
What he wishes just is; he wishes things as they are. His will is simply the foundation of static being;
one could hardly call it a will. Such a God is not a particular individual: he is the universal, the
immutable and eternal being. And the universal is silence. It doesn't entreat us to do anything: it
doesn't promise anything, it demands no sacrifice, it dispenses no rewards or punishments, it cannot
justify anything, and it cannot be the basis for either hope or despair. It exists, nothing further can
be said about it. The perfection of its being leaves no space for man.13
 .
 She seems to be saying three related but distinct things in this complex passage
 One- There is a conception of God, God just needs to will X, and X will occur
 God’s perfection the leaves no room for human intervention
 If God can simply do it by willing to do it, human agency is a waste of time and effort’
 Two – For God, Willing is Being
 Then the world must be the world that God wanted
 If he wanted a different world, this would be a different world
 Since God wants things as they are, there is no hope for frail human agency
 Three – If God is immutable, universal and eternal, then he is doomed to silence
 Only particular beings punish, proise, will, condemn etc
 If God is doomed to silence, how can humans look to him for guidance
 .
 The upshot o all this –Choose between man and God
 If we turn to god, Either- we don’t have any more meaningful purpose, ir we’re left with eternal
silence
 “If man wants to give meaning to his actions, then he mustn’t turn to this impersonal, indifferent and
completed God
 .
 There is a catholic naturalist tendency to see everything as the grace of god
 But the orthodox Christian does not take this idea
 If everything came from God, human vices like Gluttony also came from God
 In that sense, it must be Good
 Also, if everything comes from God, it is unnecessary o expend human effort on anything.
 .
 There is another way of looking at the relationship between man and God
 Human beings are special creations
 Brought into the world to mould our own being – in accordance with the wishes of the creator
 Human beings are free agents
 Man is called upon to become what God would wish him to be
 It is something that he has not yet become – so there is room for transcendence
 .
 This view has a lot of implications
 God’s will cannot be realized unless human beings choose to realize it
 Gos cannot force us to obey him – he created us as free agents
 .
 We are asked to listen to the voice of God
 But that is anaive aspiration
 How do we know the voice of God>
 We can only know the will of God through a human intermediary
 We are incapable of understanding other modes of communication

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 How do we tell the right message from the wrong one
 The genuine emissary from the bogus one
 .
 The only way of telling a true Messiah from a false one is by what they do
 This is decided on the basis of human welfare
 It depends on human insight and ecperience to discern what God does or does not want
 Any moral code that claims divine backing ends up with this fate
 They have to depend on human standards for validation
 Each society claims to have God on its side; it recreates him in its own image. It is the society that
speaks, not God... Man cannot be illuminated by God; it is by way of man that one attempts to
illuminate God. It is by way of human intermediaries that the voice of God will always make itself
heard, and it is by means of human endeavours that we respond to that appeal. Thus if God existed,
he would be powerless to guide human transcendence. Man always finds himself facing others like
him, and this presence or absence at the base of the sky doesn't concern him at all.
 .
 Humanity
 The Situation


PYRRHUS AND CINEAS AND EXISTENTIALISM

 If we consider existentialism as a kind of philosophy which is preoccupied with the most salient
features of human existence, such as death, love, responsibility, despair etc, the Pyrrhus and Cineas
falls comfortably within the terms of this definition
 Sartre says in his Existentialism and Humanism
 Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism...
what do we mean to say by this, but that man is of a greater dignity than a stone or a table? For we
mean to say that man primarily exists - that man is, before all else, something which projects itself
towards a future and is aware that it is doing so
 .
 Later in the same work he writes
 Man is all the time outside of himself: it is in projecting and losing himself beyond himself that he
makes man to exist; and, on the other hand, it is by pursuing transcendent aims that he himself is able
to exist
 Two years before this came out, we can find in Beauvoir;’s Pyrrhus and Cineas
 Man has to fashion what he will be. He continuously seeks to create himself, and this is what we call
his project. Human beings exist in the manner of projects; these projects are not oriented towards
death, but towards defined objectives. Man hunts, fishes, makes instruments, writes books. These are
not mere diversions, mere escapism, but a movement towards being. Man accomplishes things so as
to be.
 .
 Unlike Sartre, SB is not aggressively atheist
 Sartre proclaims himself as an existential atheist
 There is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it
 Hi is dismissive of Christian Ethics
 He concludes as follows
 Existentialism is nothing else but an attempt to draw the full conclusions from a consistently atheistic
position... Existentialism is not atheist in the sense that it would exhaust itself in demonstrations of
the non-existence of God. It declares, rather, that even if God existed that would make no difference
from its point of view..
 .
 Although Sartre stresses the virtue of consistency, he is not so here

20
 Here he claims that the non-existance of God has implications for our concepts of freedom, human
nature and morality
 At the same time he declares that even if God existed the fact would make no difference to the
existentialist point of view
 Not important for our present discusiion
 .
 We need to consider hoe Beauvoir’s existentialism is different from Sartre’s existentialism
 Sartre approaches it with the question If God doesn’t exist, what are the implications of his non
existence? (Something similar to Nietzche?)
 Beauvoir’s approach is, If God does exist, what are the implications of his existence?
 She replies, if there is a God, then there is no space left for human agency
 We are left marooned without moral guidance
 .
 Conclusions Similar to Sartre
 But she reached them from a different baseline
 .
 Her argument similar to that of Riuex in The Plague by Camus
 Rieux himself does not believe in God
 But he acknowledges that a lot of people do
 He does not have a problem with that
 But he knows they don’t believe in an all-powerful God even if they think they do
 Reason- he argues – if we really believed in an all powerful God, we would leave everything in his
hands – health, welfare`
 Nobody does that.
 .
 De Beauvoir develops her srgument concerneing moral guidelines differently from Sartre
 She says moral guidelines are thought to issue from God, but that thought is wrong
 God by nature is an immutable and eternal being
 He is incapable of issuing moral guidelines
 Even if it is rational to talk about the will of God (It is not. What is it?) it is left to human institutions
to interpret it
 Not everybody reads the same message the same way
 We are to decide among the interpretations, we will decide on the basis of human welfare
 But human welfare is never close ended
 Because human nature itself is to transcend and undertake project after project
 If human welfare is not close ended, then guidelines that have it as a base cannot remain static
 .
 Sartre reaches the same conclusion in a more aggressive fashion
 You cant take away God and expect everything to remain the same
 The picture will drastically change
 .
 In particular our moral values will have to be revised
 With the disappearance of God, there is no supremely wise being to look up to for guidance
 There are no set rules of human conduct
 Because there is nobody qualified enough to set those rules
 Dostoevsky wrote – “If God did not exist everything would be permitted”
 Sartre – “Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for
he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside of himself”
 .
 Doesn’t mean we can do anything we please
 Meanswe are bereft of moral guidance

21
 We have no way of telling right from wrong
 So, we must invent our morality

Death
 Both Sartre and Beauvoir rejects Heidegger’s views on death
 Sartre does so in his short story The Wall
 Heidegger – ‘Man can live towards his own death and thus humanize it’
 Sartre’s story – three prisoners from the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War
 Awaiting execution
 Convincingly portrays the awfulness of death
 The terror that strikes the bravest of hearts
 The manner of death which ‘disenchants’ everything – disenchants- Sarte’s own words
 Pablo the character
 It was worth nothing because it was finished. I wondered how I'd
been able to walk, to laugh with the girls: I wouldn't have moved so
much as my little finger if I had only imagined I would die like this.
My life was in front of me, closed, like a bag and yet everything
inside of it was unfinished. For an instant I tried to judge it. I
wanted to tell myself: this is a beautiful life. But I couldn't pass
judgment on it; it was only a sketch; I had spent my time counterfeiting
eternity. I had understood nothing. I had missed nothing:
there were so many things I could have missed, the taste of manzanilla
or the baths I took in summer in a little creek near Cadiz; but
death had disenchanted everything
 .
 Heidegger
 Doesn’t write of violent or imminent death
 He writes of death as an indefinite certainty
 We are certain of death
 But we have all kinds of strategies to cover it up
 Covering up our certainty of it
 Linguistically we think of it as coming
 But not right away
 It is deferred
 Sometime later
 Using such linguistic evasions we cover up the fact that death is possible at any instant
 We cover up the certainty of death
 With it we coverup the indefiniteness of the’when’
 .
 Death is indefinite
 It can occur at any moment
 This indefiniteness must be inciorporated into the human subject
 So, a human being is not a subject that will die sometime later
 It is a subject that is capable of dying at any time
 So it is a being that is addressed towards death
 A being with death as its utmost possibility

 Sartre identifies the difference between realist and idealist concepts of death
 Realist view- Death is the point of contact with the non human
 The link between the human and the non-human
 Idealist View- Death is the final stage of life

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 Puts the final touch to life
 Like the way the last chord is the meaning of melody
 Sartre says- this was promoted by poets, not philosophers
 Heidegger gave a philosophical account of this humanization of death

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