existentialist philosophers and writers. Working alongside other
famous existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir produced a rich corpus of writings
including works on ethics, feminism, fiction, autobiography, and
politics. A philosopher by training, at age 21 she was the youngest
student ever to pass the agrégation examination in philosophy. Her
philosophical approach is notably diverse as her influences include
not only French philosophy from Descartes to Bergson, but the
phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger, the historical materialism of
Marx and Engels, and the idealism of Kant and Hegel. In addition to
her philosophical pursuits, Beauvoir was also an accomplished literary
figure and her novel, The Mandarins, received the prestigious Prix
Goncourt award in 1954. Her most famous and influential philosophical
work, The Second Sex, heralded a feminist revolution and remains to
this day a central text in the investigation of women's oppression and
liberation.
1. BiographySimone de Beauvoir was born on January 9, 1908 in Paris to
Georges Bertrand de Beauvoir and Françoise (née) Brasseur. Her father,
George, whose family had some aristocratic pretensions, had once
desired to become an actor but studied law and worked as a civil
servant, contenting himself instead with the profession of legal
secretary. Despite his love of the theater and literature, as well as
his atheism, he remained a staunchly conservative man whose
aristocratic proclivities drew him to the extreme right. In December
of 1906 he married Françoise Brasseur whose wealthy bourgeois family
offered a significant dowry that was lost in the wake of World War I.
Slightly awkward and socially inexperienced, Françoise was a deeply
religious woman who was devoted to raising her children in the
Catholic faith. Her religious, bourgeois orientation became a source
of serious conflict between her and her oldest daughter, Simone.
Born in the morning of January 9, 1908, Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie
Bertrand de Beauvoir was a precocious and intellectually curious child
from the beginning. Her sister, Hélène (nicknamed "Poupette") was born
two years later in 1910 and Beauvoir immediately took to intensely
instructing her little sister as a student. In addition to her own
independent initiative, Beauvoir's intellectual zeal was also
nourished by her father who provided her with carefully edited
selections from the great works of literature and who encouraged her
to read and write from an early age. His interest in her intellectual
development carried through until her adolescence when her future
professional carrier, necessitated by the loss of her dowry, came to
symbolize his own failure. Aware that he was unable to provide a dowry
for his daughters, Georges' relationship with his intellectually
astute eldest became conflicted by both pride and disappointment at
her prospects. Beauvoir, on the contrary, always wanted to be a writer
and a teacher, rather than a mother and a wife and pursued her studies
with vigor. Beauvoir began her education in the private Catholic
school for girls, the Institut Adeline Désir where she remained until
the age of 17. It was here that she met Elizabeth Mabille (Zaza), with
whom she shared an intimate and profound friendship until Zaza's
untimely death in 1929. Although the doctor's blamed Zaza's death on
meningitis, Beauvoir believed that her beloved friend had died from a
broken heart in the midst of a struggle with her family over an
arranged marriage. Zaza's friendship and death haunted Beauvoir for
the rest of her life and she often spoke of the intense impact they
had on her life and her critique of the rigidity of bourgeois
attitudes towards women. Beauvoir had been a deeply religious child as
a result of her education and her mother's training, however, at the
age of 14, she had a crisis of faith and decided definitively that
there was no God. She remained an atheist until her death. Her
rejection of religion was followed by her decision to pursue and teach
philosophy. Only once had she considered marriage to her cousin,
Jacques Champigneulle. She never again entertained the possibility of
marriage, instead preferring to live the life of an intellectual.
Beauvoir passed the baccalauréat exams in mathematics and philosophy
in 1925. She then studied mathematics at the Institut Catholique and
literature and languages at the Institut Sainte-Marie, passing exams
in 1926 for Certificates of Higher Studies in French literature and
Latin, before beginning her study of philosophy in 1927. Studying
philosophy at the Sorbonne, Beauvoir passed exams for Certificates in
History of Philosophy, General Philosophy, Greek, and Logic in 1927,
and in 1928, in Ethics, Sociology, and Psychology. She wrote a
graduate diplôme on Leibniz for Léon Brunschvig and completed her
practice teaching at the lycée Janson-de-Sailly with fellow students,
Merleau-Ponty and Claude Lévi-Strauss – with both of whom she remained
in philosophical dialogue. In 1929, she took second place in the
highly competitive philosophy agrégation exam, beating Paul Nizan and
Jean Hyppolite and barely losing to Jean-Paul Sartre who took first
(it was his second attempt at the exam). Unlike Beauvoir, all three
men had attended the best preparatory (khâgne) classes for the
agrégation and were official students at the École Normale Supérieure.
Although she was not an official student, Beauvoir attended lectures
and sat for the agrégation at the École Normale. At 21 years of age,
Beauvoir was the youngest student ever to pass the agrégation in
philosophy and thus became the youngest philosophy teacher in France.
It was during her time at the École Normale that she met Sartre.
Sartre and his closed circle of friends (including René Maheu, who
gave her her life-long nickname "Castor", and Paul Nizan) were
notoriously elitist at the École Normale. Beauvoir had longed to be a
part of this intellectual circle and following her success in the
written exams for the agrégation in 1929, Sartre requested to be
introduced to her. Beauvoir thus joined Sartre and his "comrades" in
study sessions to prepare for the grueling public oral examination
component of the agrégation. For the first time, she found in Sartre
an intellect worthy (and, as she asserted, in some ways superior) to
her own-a characterization that has lead to many ungrounded
assumptions concerning Beauvoir's lack of philosophical originality.
For the rest of their lives, they were to remain "essential" lovers,
while allowing for "contingent" love affairs whenever each desired.
Although never marrying (despite Sartre's proposal in 1931), having
children together, or even living in the same home, Sartre and
Beauvoir remained intellectual and romantic partners until Sartre's
death in 1980. The liberal intimate arrangement between her and Sartre
was extremely progressive for the time and often unfairly tarnished
Beauvoir's reputation as a woman intellectual equal to her male
counterparts. Adding to her unique situation with Sartre, Beauvoir had
intimate liaisons with both women and men. Some of her more famous
relationships included the journalist Jacques Bost, the American
author Nelson Algren, and Claude Lanzmann, the maker of the Holocaust
documentary, Shoah. In 1931, Beauvoir was appointed to teach in a
lycée at Marseilles whereas Sartre's appointment landed him in Le
Havre. In 1932, Beauvoir moved to the Lycée Jeanne d'Arc in Rouen
where she taught advanced literature and philosophy classes. In Rouen
she was officially reprimanded for her overt criticisms of woman's
situation and her pacifism. In 1940, the Nazis occupied Paris and in
1941, Beauvoir was dismissed from her teaching post by the Nazi
government. As a result of the effects of World War II on Europe,
Beauvoir began exploring the problem of the intellectual's social and
political engagement with his or her time. Following a parental
complaint made against her for corrupting one of her female students,
she was dismissed from teaching again in 1943. She was never to return
to teaching. Although she loved the classroom environment, Beauvoir
had always wanted to be an author from her earliest childhood. Her
collection of short stories on women, Quand prime le spirituel (When
Things of the Spirit Come First) was rejected for publication and not
published until many years later (1979). However, her fictionalized
account of the triangular relationship between herself, Sartre and her
student, Olga Kosakievicz, L'Invitée (She Came to Stay), was published
in 1943. This novel, written from 1935 to 1937 (and read by Sartre in
manuscript form as he began writing Being and Nothingness)
successfully gained her public recognition. The Occupation inaugurated
what Beauvoir has called the "moral period" of her literary life. From
1941 to 1943 she wrote her novel, Le Sang des Autres (The Blood of
Others), which was heralded as one of the most important existential
novels of the French Resistance. In 1943 she wrote her first
philosophical essay, an ethical treatise entitled Pyrrhus et Cinéas.
Finally, this period includes the writing of her novel, Tous Les
Hommes sont Mortels (All Men are Mortal), written from 1943-46 and her
only play, Les Bouches Inutiles (Who Shall Die?), written in 1944.
Although only cursorily involved in the Resistance, Beauvoir's
political commitments underwent a progressive development in the
1930's and 1940's. Together with Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Raymond Aron
and other intellectuals, she helped found the politically
non-affiliated, leftist journal, Les Temps Modernes in 1945, for which
she both edited and contributed articles, including in 1945, "Moral
Idealism and Political Realism," "Existentialism and Popular Wisdom,"
and in 1946, "Eye for an Eye." Also in 1946, Beauvoir wrote an article
explaining her method of doing philosophy in literature in "Literature
and Metaphysics." The creation of this journal and her leftist
orientation (which was heavily influenced by her reading of Marx and
the political ideal represented by Russia), colored her uneasy
relationship to Communism. The journal itself and the question of the
intellectual's political commitments would become a major theme of her
novel, The Mandarins (1954). Beauvoir published another ethical
treatise, Pour une Morale de l'Ambiguïté (The Ethics of Ambiguity) in
1947. Although she was never fully satisfied with this work, it
remains one of the best examples of an existentialist ethics. In 1955,
she published, "Must We Burn Sade?" which again approaches the
question of ethics from the perspective of the demands of and
obligations to the other. Following advance extracts which appeared in
Les Temps Modernes in 1948, Beauvoir published her revolutionary,
two-volume investigation into woman's oppression, Le Deuxième Sexe
(The Second Sex) in 1949. Although previous to writing this work she
had never considered herself to be a "feminist," The Second Sex
solidified her as a feminist figure for the remainder of her life. By
far her most controversial work, this book was embraced by feminists
and intellectuals, as well as mercilessly attacked by both the right
and the left. The 70's, famous for being a time of feminist movements,
was embraced by Beauvoir who participated in demonstrations, continued
to write and lecture on the situation of women, and signed petitions
advocating various rights for women. In 1970, Beauvoir helped launch
the French Women's Liberation Movement in signing the Manifesto of the
343 for abortion rights and in 1973, she instituted a feminist section
in Les Temps Modernes. Following the numerous literary successes and
the high profile of her and Sartre's lives, her career was marked by a
fame rarely experienced by philosophers during their lifetimes. This
fame resulted both from her own work as well as from her relationship
to and association with Sartre. For the rest of her life, she lived
under the close scrutiny of the public eye. She was often unfairly
considered to be a mere disciple of Sartrean philosophy (in part, due
to her own proclamations) despite the fact that many of her ideas were
original and went in directions radically different than Sartre's
works. During the 1940's, she and Sartre, who had at one time relished
in the café culture and social life of Paris, found themselves
retreating into the safety of their close circle of friends,
affectionately named the "Family." However, her fame did not stop her
from continuing her life-long passion of traveling to foreign lands
which resulted in two of her works, L'Amérique au Jour le Jour
(America Day by Day) first published in 1948 and La Longue Marche (The
Long March) published in 1957. The former was written following her
lecture tour of the United States in 1947, and the latter following
her visit with Sartre to communist China in 1955. Her later work
included the writing of more works of fiction, philosophical essays
and interviews. It was notably marked not only by her political action
in feminist issues, but also by the publication of her autobiography
in four volumes and her political engagement directly attacking the
French war in Algeria and the tortures of Algerians by French
officers. In 1970, she published an impressive study of the oppression
of aged members of society, La Vieillesse (The Coming of Age). This
work mirrors the same approach she had taken in The Second Sex only
with a different object of investigation. Beauvoir saw the passing of
her lifelong companion in 1980, which is recounted in her 1981 book,
La Cérémonie des Adieux (Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre). Following the
death of Sartre, Beauvoir officially adopted her companion, Sylvie le
Bon, who became her literary executor. Beauvoir died of a pulmonary
edema on April 14, 1986.
2. Ethics
a. Pyrrhus et Cineas
For most of her life, Beauvoir was concerned with the ethical
responsibility that the individual has to him or herself, other
individuals and to oppressed groups. Her early work, Pyrrhus et Cinéas
(1944) approaches the question of ethical responsibility from an
existentialist framework long before Sartre was to attempt the same
endeavor. This essay was well-received as it spoke to a war-torn
France that was struggling to find a way out of the darkness of War
World II. It begins as a conversation between Pyrrhus, the ancient
king of Epirus, and his chief advisor, Cineas, on the question of
action. Each time Pyrrhus makes an assertion as to what land he will
conquer, Cineas asks him what will he do afterwards? Finally, Pyrrhus
exclaims that he will rest following the achievement of all of his
plans, to which Cineas retorts, "Why not rest right away"? The essay
is thus framed as an investigation into the motives of action and the
existential concern with why we should act at all.
This work was written by a young Beauvoir in close dialogue with the
Sartre of Being and Nothingness (1943). The framework of an individual
freedom engaged in an objective world is close to Sartre's conception
of the conflict between being-for-itself (l'être-pour-soi) and
being-in-itself (l'être-en-soi). Differing from Sartre, Beauvoir's
analysis of the free subject immediately implies an ethical
consideration of other free subjects in the world. The external world
can often manifest itself as a crushing, objective reality whereas the
other can reveal to us our fundamental freedom. Lacking a God to
guarantee morality, it is up to the individual existent to create a
bond with others through ethical action. This bond requires a
fundamentally active orientation to the world through projects that
express our own freedom as well as encourage the freedom of our fellow
human beings. Because to be human is essentially to rupture the given
world through our spontaneous transcendence, to be passive is to live,
in Sartrean terminology, in bad faith. Although emphasizing key
Sartrean motifs of transcendence, freedom and the situation in this
early work, Beauvoir takes her enquiry in a different direction. Like
Sartre, she believes that that human subjectivity is essentially a
nothingness which ruptures being through spontaneous projects. This
movement of rupturing the given through the introduction of
spontaneous activity is called transcendence. Beauvoir, like Sartre,
believes that the human being is constantly engaged in projects which
transcend the factical situation (cultural, historical, personal,
etc.) into which the existent is thrown. Yet, even though much of her
nomenclature and ideas obviously emerge within a philosophical
discourse with Sartre, her goal in writing Pyrrhus et Cinéas is
somewhat different than his. Most notably, in Pyrrhus et Cinéas, she
constructs an ethics, which is a project postponed by Sartre in Being
and Nothingness. In addition, rather than seeing the other (who in his
or her gaze turns me into an object) as a threat to my freedom as
Sartre would have it, Beauvoir sees the other as the necessary axis of
my freedom-without whom, in other words, I could not be free. With the
goal of elucidating an existentialist ethics then, Beauvoir is
concerned with questions of oppression that are largely absent in
Sartre's early work. Pyrrhus et Cinéas is a richly philosophical text
which incorporates themes not only from Sartre, but also from Hegel,
Heidegger, Spinoza, Voltaire, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard. However,
Beauvoir is as critical of these philosophers as she is admiring. For
example, she criticizes Hegel for his unethical faith in progress
which sublates the individual in the relentless pursuit of the
Absolute. She criticizes Heidegger for his emphasis on
being-towards-death as undermining the necessity of setting up
projects, which are themselves ends and are not necessarily
projections towards death. Beauvoir emphasizes that one's
transcendence is realized through the human project which sets up its
own end as valuable, rather than relying on external validation or
meaning. The end, therefore, is not something cut off from activity,
standing as a static and absolute value outside of the existent who
chooses it. Rather, the goal of action is established as an end
through the very freedom which posits it as a worthwhile enterprise.
Beauvoir maintains the existentialist belief in absolute freedom of
choice and the consequent responsibility that such freedom entails, by
emphasizing that one's projects must spring from individual
spontaneity and not from an external institution, authority, or
person. As such, she is sharply critical of the Hegelian absolute, the
Christian conception of God and abstract entities such as Humanity,
Country and Science which demand the individual's renunciation of
freedom into a static Cause. All world-views which demand the
sacrifice and repudiation of freedom diminish the reality, thickness,
and existential importance of the individual existent. This is not to
say that we should abandon all projects of unification and scientific
advancement in favor of a disinterested solipsism, only that such
endeavors must necessarily honor the individual existents of which
they are composed. Additionally, instead of being forced into causes
of various kinds, existents must actively and self-consciously choose
to participate in them. Because Beauvoir is so concerned in this essay
with freedom and the necessity to self-consciously choose who one is
at every moment, she takes up relationships of slavery, mastery,
tyranny, and devotion which remain choices despite the inequalities
that often result from these connections with others. Despite the
inequity of power in such relationships, she maintains that we can
never do anything for or against others, i.e., we can never act in the
place of others because each individual can only be responsible for
him or herself. However, we are still morally obligated to keep from
harming others. Echoing a common theme in existentialist philosophy,
even to be silent or to refuse to engage in helping the other, is
still making a choice. Freedom, in other words, cannot be escaped.
Yet, she also develops the idea that in abstaining from encouraging
the freedom of others, we are acting against the ethical call of the
other. Without others, our actions are destined to fall back upon
themselves as useless and absurd. However, with others who are also
free, our actions are taken up and carried beyond themselves into the
future-transcending the limits of the present and of our finite
selves. Our very actions are calls to other freedoms who may choose to
respond to or ignore us. Because we are finite and limited and there
are no absolutes to which our actions can or should conform, we must
carry out our projects in risk and uncertainty. But it is just this
fragility that Beauvoir believes opens us up to a genuine possibility
for ethics.
b. The Ethics of Ambiguity
In many ways, The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) continues themes first
developed in Pyrrhus et Cinéas. Beauvoir continues to believe in the
contingency of existence in that there is no necessity that we exist
and thus there is no predetermined human essence or standard of value.
Of particular importance, Beauvoir expounds upon the idea that human
freedom requires the freedom of others for it to be actualized.
Although Beauvoir was never fully satisfied with The Ethics of
Ambiguity, it remains a testament to her long-standing concern with
freedom, oppression, and responsibility, as well as to the depth of
her philosophical understanding of the history of philosophy and of
her own unique contributions to it.
She begins this work by asserting the tragic condition of the human
situation which experiences its freedom as a spontaneous internal
drive that is crushed by the external weight of the world. Human
existence, she argues, is always an ambiguous admixture of the
internal freedom to transcend the given conditions of the world and
the weight of the world which imposes itself on us in a manner outside
of our control and not of our own choosing. In order for us to live
ethically then, we must assume this ambiguity rather than try to flee
it. In Sartrean terms, she sets up a problem in which each existent
wants to deny their paradoxical essence as nothingness by desiring to
be in the strict, objective sense; a project that is doomed to failure
and bad faith. In many ways, Beauvoir's task is to describe the
existentialist conversion alluded to by Sartre in Being and
Nothingness, but postponed until the much later, incomplete attempt in
his Cahiers Pour une Morale. For Beauvoir, an existentialist
conversion allows us to live authentically at the crossroads of
freedom and facticity. This requires that we engage our freedom in
projects which emerge from a spontaneous choice. In addition, the ends
and goals of our actions must never be set up as absolutes, separate
from we who choose them. In this sense, Beauvoir sets limits to
freedom. To be free is not to have free license to do whatever one
wants. Rather, to be free entails the conscious assumption of this
freedom through projects which are chosen at each moment. The meaning
of actions is thus granted not from some external source of values
(say in God, the church, the state, our family, etc.), but in the
existent's spontaneous act of choosing them. Each individual must
positively assume his or her project (whether it be to write a novel,
graduate from university, preside over a courtroom, etc.) and not try
to escape freedom by escaping into the goal as into a static object.
Thus, we act ethically only insofar as we accept the weight of our
choices and the consequences and responsibilities of our fundamental,
ontological freedom. As Beauvoir tells us, "to will oneself moral and
to will oneself free are one and the same decision." The genuine human
being thus does not recognize any foreign absolute not consciously and
actively chosen by the person him or herself. This idea is perhaps
best seen in Beauvoir's critique of Hegel which runs throughout this
text. Although Hegel is not the only philosopher with whom she is in
dialogue (she addresses Kant, Marx, Descartes, and Sartre, as well) he
represents the philosophical crystallization of the desire for human
beings to escape their freedom by submerging it into an external
absolute. Thus Hegel, for Beauvoir, sets up an "Absolute Subject"
whose realization only comes at the end of history, thereby justifying
the sacrifice of countless individuals in the relentless pursuit of
its own perfection. As such, Hegel's Absolute represents an
abstraction which is taken as the truth of existence which annihilates
instead of preserves the individual human lives which compose it. Only
a philosophy which values the freedom of each individual existent can
alone be ethical. Philosophies such as those of Hegel, Kant, and Marx
which privilege the universal are built upon the necessary diminution
of the particular and as such, cannot be authentically ethical
systems. Beauvoir claims against these philosophers of the absolute,
that existentialism embraces the plurality of concrete, particular
human beings enmeshed in their own unique situations and engaged in
their own projects. However, Beauvoir is also emphatic that even
though existentialist ethics uphold the sanctity of individuals, an
individual is always situated within a community and as such, separate
existents are necessarily bound to each other. She argues that every
enterprise is expressed in a world populated by and thus affecting
other human beings. She defends this position by returning to an idea
touched upon in Pyrrhus et Cinéas and more fully developed in the
Ethics, which is that individual projects fall in upon themselves if
there are not others with whom our projects intersect and who
consequently carry our actions beyond us in space and time. In order
to illustrate the complexity of situated freedom, Beauvoir provides us
with an important element of growth, development and freedom in The
Ethics of Ambiguity. Most philosophers begin their discussions with a
fully-grown, rational human being, as if only the adult concerns
philosophical inquiry. However, Beauvoir incorporates an analysis of
childhood in which she argues that the will, or freedom, is developed
over time. Thus, the child is not considered moral because he or she
does not have a connection to a past or future and action can only be
understood as unfolding over time. In addition, the situation of the
child gives us a glimpse into what Beauvoir calls the attitude of
seriousness in which values are given, not chosen. In fact, it is
because each person was once a child that the serious attitude is the
most prevalent form of bad faith. Describing the various ways in which
existents flee their freedom and responsibility, Beauvoir catalogues a
number of different inauthentic attitudes, which in various forms are
all indicative of a flight from freedom. As the child is neither moral
nor immoral, the first actual category of bad faith consists of the
"sub-man" who, through boredom and laziness, restrains the original
movement of spontaneity in the denial of his or her freedom. This is a
dangerous attitude in which to live because even as the sub-man
rejects freedom, he or she becomes a useful pawn to be recruited by
the "serious man" to enact brutal, immoral and violent action. The
serious man is the most common attitude of flight as he or she
embodies the desire that all existents share to found their freedom in
an objective, external standard. The serious man upholds absolute and
unconditioned values to which he or she subordinates his or her
freedom. The object into which the serious attitude attempts to merge
itself is not important-it can be the Military for the general, Fame
for the actress, Power for the politician-what is important is that
the self is lost into it. But as Beauvoir has already told us, all
action loses meaning if it is not willed from freedom, setting up
freedom as its goal. Thus the serious man is the ultimate example of
bad faith because rather than seeking to embrace freedom, he or she
seeks to lose into an external idol. All existents are tempted to set
up values of seriousness (say, for example, by claiming that one is a
"republican" or a "liberal" as if these monikers were substantial
"things" that defined us in any essential sense) so as to give meaning
to their lives. But the attitude of seriousness gives rise to tyranny
and oppression when the "Cause" is pronounced more important than
those who comprise it. Other attitudes of bad faith include the
"nihilist" which is an attitude resulting from disappointed
seriousness turned back on itself. When the general understands that
the military is a false idol that does not justify his existence, he
may become a nihilist and deny that the world has any meaning at all.
The nihilist desires to be nothing which is not unlike the reality of
human freedom for Beauvoir. However, the nihilist is not an authentic
choice because he or she does not assert nothingness in the sense of
freedom, but in the sense of denial. Although mentioning other
interesting attitudes of bad faith (such as the "demoniacal man" and
the "passionate man") the last attitude of importance is the attitude
of the "adventurer." The adventurer is interesting because it is so
close to an authentically moral attitude. Disdaining the values of
seriousness and nihilism, the adventurer throws him or herself into
life and chooses action for its own sake. But the adventurer cares
only for his or her own freedom and projects, and thus embodies a
selfish and potentially tyrannical attitude. The adventurer
demonstrates a tendency to align him or herself with whoever will
bestow power, pleasure and glory. And often those who bestow such
gifts, do not have the welfare of humanity as their main concern. One
of Beauvoir's greatest achievements in The Ethics of Ambiguity is
found in her analyses of situation and mystification. For the early
Sartre, one's situation (or facticity) is merely that which is to be
transcended in the spontaneous surge of freedom. The situation is
certainly a limit, but it is a limit-to-be-surpassed. Beauvoir,
however, recognizes that some situations are such that they cannot be
simply transcended but serve as strict and almost unsurpassable
inhibitors to action. For example, she tells us that there are
oppressed peoples such as slaves and many women who exist in a
childlike world in which values, customs, gods, and laws are given to
them without being freely chosen. Their situation is defined not by
the possibility of transcendence, but by the enforcement of external
institutions and power structures. Because of the power exerted upon
them, their limitations cannot, in many circumstances, be transcended
because they are not even known. Their situation, in other words,
appears to be the natural order of the world. Thus the slave and the
woman are mystified into believing that their lot is assigned to them
by nature. As Beauvoir explains, because we cannot revolt against
nature, the oppressor convinces the oppressed that their situation is
what it is because they are naturally inferior or slavish. In this
way, the oppressor mystifies the oppressed by keeping them ignorant of
their freedom, thereby preventing them from revolting. Beauvoir
rightly points out that one simply cannot claim that those who are
mystified or oppressed are living in bad faith. We can only judge the
actions of those individuals as emerging from their situation. Only
the authentically moral attitude understands that the freedom of the
self requires the freedom of others. To act alone or without concern
for others is not to be free. As Beauvoir explains, "No project can be
defined except by its interference with other projects." Thus if my
project intersects with others who are enslaved-either literally or
through mystification-I too am not truly free. What is more, if I do
not actively seek to help those who are not free, I am implicated in
their oppression. As this book was written after World War II, it is
not so surprising that Beauvoir would be concerned with questions of
oppression and liberation and the ethical responsibility that each of
us has to each other. Clearly she finds the attitude of seriousness to
be the leading culprit in nationalistic movements such as Nazism which
manipulate people into believing in a Cause as an absolute and
unquestionable command, demanding the sacrifice of countless
individuals. Beauvoir pleads with us to remember that we can never
prefer a Cause to a human being and that the end does not necessarily
justify the means. In this sense, Beauvoir is able to promote an
existential ethics which asserts the reality of individual projects
and sacrifice while maintaining that such projects and sacrifices have
meaning only in a community comprised of individuals with a past,
present, and future.
3. Feminism
a. The Second Sex
Most philosophers agree that Beauvoir's greatest contribution to
philosophy is her revolutionary magnum opus, The Second Sex. Published
in two volumes in 1949 (condensed into one text divided into two
"books" in English), this work immediately found both an eager
audience and harsh critics. The Second Sex was so controversial that
the Vatican put it (along with her novel, The Mandarins) on the Index
of prohibited books. At the time The Second Sex was written, very
little serious philosophy on women from a feminist perspective had
been done. With the exception of a handful of books, systematic
treatments of the oppression of women both historically and in the
modern age were almost unheard of. Striking for the breadth of
research and the profundity of its central insights, The Second Sex
remains to this day one of the foundational texts in philosophy,
feminism, and women's studies.
The main thesis of The Second Sex revolves around the idea that woman
has been held in a relationship of long-standing oppression to man
through her relegation to being man's "Other." In agreement with
Hegelian and Sartrean philosophy, Beauvoir finds that the self needs
otherness in order to define itself as a subject; the category of the
otherness, therefore, is necessary in the constitution of the self as
a self. However, the movement of self-understanding through alterity
is supposed to be reciprocal in that the self is often just as much
objectified by its other as the self objectifies it. What Beauvoir
discovers in her multifaceted investigation into woman's situation, is
that woman is consistently defined as the Other by man who takes on
the role of the Self. As Beauvoir explains in her Introduction, woman
"is the incidental, the inessential, as opposed to the essential. He
is the Subject, he is the Absolute-she is the Other." In addition,
Beauvoir maintains that human existence is an ambiguous interplay
between transcendence and immanence, yet men have been privileged with
expressing transcendence through projects, whereas women have been
forced into the repetitive and uncreative life of immanence. Beauvoir
thus proposes to investigate how this radically unequal relationship
emerged as well as what structures, attitudes and presuppositions
continue to maintain its social power. The work is divided into two
major themes. The first book investigates the "Facts and Myths" about
women from multiple perspectives including the biological-scientific,
psychoanalytic, materialistic, historical, literary and
anthropological. In each of these treatments, Beauvoir is careful to
claim that none of them is sufficient to explain woman's definition as
man's Other or her consequent oppression. However, each of them
contributes to woman's overall situation as the Other sex. For
example, in her discussion of biology and history, she notes the women
experience certain phenomena such as pregnancy, lactation, and
menstruation that are foreign to men's experience and thus contribute
to a marked difference in women's situation. However, these
physiological occurrences in no way directly cause woman to be man's
subordinate because biology and history are not mere "facts" of an
unbiased observer, but are always incorporated into and interpreted
from a situation. In addition, she acknowledges that psychoanalysis
and historical materialism contribute tremendous insights into the
sexual, familial and material life of woman, but fail to account for
the whole picture. In the case of psychoanalysis, it denies the
reality of choice and in the case of historical materialism, it
neglects to take into account the existential importance of the
phenomena it reduces to material conditions. The most philosophically
rich discussion of Book I comes in Beauvoir's analysis of myths. There
she tackles the way in which the preceding analyses (biological,
historical, psychoanalytic, etc.) contribute to the formulation of the
myth of the "Eternal Feminine." This paradigmatic myth, which
incorporates multiple myths of woman under it (such as the myth of the
mother, the virgin, the motherland, nature, etc.) attempts to trap
woman into an impossible ideal by denying the individuality and
situation of all different kinds of women. In fact, the ideal set by
the Eternal Feminine sets up an impossible expectation because the
various manifestations of the myth of femininity appear as
contradictory and doubled. For example, history shows us that for as
many representations of the mother as the respected guardian of life,
there are as many depictions of her as the hated harbinger of death.
The contradiction that man feels at having been born and having to die
gets projected onto the mother who takes the blame for both. Thus
woman as mother is both hated and loved and individual mothers are
hopelessly caught in the contradiction. This doubled and contradictory
operation appears in all feminine myths, thus forcing women to
unfairly take the burden and blame for existence. Book II begins with
Beauvoir's most famous assertion, "One is not born, but rather
becomes, a woman." By this, Beauvoir means to destroy the essentialism
which claims that women are born "feminine" (according to whatever the
culture and time define it to be) but are rather constructed to be
such through social indoctrination. Using a wide array of accounts and
observations, the first section of Book II traces the education of
woman from her childhood, through her adolescence and finally to her
experiences of lesbianism and sexual initiation (if she has any). At
each stage, Beauvoir illustrates how women are forced to relinquish
their claims to transcendence and authentic subjectivity by a
progressively more stringent acceptance of the "passive" and
"alienated" role to man's "active" and "subjective" demands. Woman's
passivity and alienation are then explored in what Beauvoir entitles
her "Situation" and her "Justifications." Beauvoir studies the roles
of wife, mother, and prostitute to show how women, instead of
transcending through work and creativity, are forced into monotonous
existences of having children, tending house and being the sexual
receptacles of the male libido. Because she maintains the
existentialist belief in the absolute ontological freedom of each
existent regardless of sex, Beauvoir never claims that man has
succeeded in destroying woman's freedom or in actually turning her
into an "object" in relation to his subjectivity. She remains a
transcendent freedom despite her objectification, alienation and
oppression. Although we certainly can not claim that woman's role as
the Other is her fault, we also cannot say that she is always entirely
innocent in her subjection. As taken up in the discussion of The
Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir believes that there are many possible
attitudes of bad faith where the existent flees his or her
responsibility into prefabricated values and beliefs. Many women
living in a patriarchal culture are guilty of the same action and thus
are in some ways complicitous in their own subjugation because of the
seeming benefits it can bring as well as the respite from
responsibility it promises. Beauvoir discusses three particular
inauthentic attitudes in which women hide their freedom in: "The
Narcissist," "The Woman in Love," and "The Mystic." In all three of
these attitudes, women deny the original thrust of their freedom by
submerging it into the object; in the case of the first, the object is
herself, the second, her beloved and the third, the absolute or God.
Beauvoir concludes her work by asserting various concrete demands
necessary for woman's emancipation and the reclamation of her
selfhood. First and foremost, she demands that woman be allowed to
transcend through her own free projects with all the danger, risk, and
uncertainty that entails. As such, modern woman "prides herself on
thinking, taking action, working, creating, on the same terms as men;
instead of seeking to disparage them, she declares herself their
equal." In order to ensure woman's equality, Beauvoir advocates such
changes in social structures such as universal childcare, equal
education, contraception, and legal abortion for women-and perhaps
most importantly, woman's economic freedom and independence from man.
In order to achieve this kind of independence, Beauvoir believes that
women will benefit from non-alienating, non-exploitative productive
labor to some degree. In other words, Beauvoir believes that women
will benefit tremendously from work. As far as marriage is concerned,
the nuclear family is damaging to both partners, especially the woman.
Marriage, like any other authentic choice, must be chosen actively and
at all times or else it is a flight from freedom into a static
institution. Beauvoir's emphasis on the fact that women need access to
the same kinds of activities and projects as men places her to some
extent in the tradition of liberal, or second-wave feminism. She
demands that women be treated as equal to men and laws, customs and
education must be altered to encourage this. However, The Second Sex
always maintains its fundamental existentialist belief that each
individual, regardless of sex, class or age, should be encouraged to
define him or herself and to take on the individual responsibility
that comes with freedom. This requires not just focusing on universal
institutions, but on the situated individual existent struggling
within the ambiguity of existence.
4. Literature
a. Novels
In her autobiographies, Beauvoir often makes the claim that although
her passion for philosophy was lifelong, her heart was always set on
becoming an author of great literature. What she succeeded in doing
was writing some of the best existentialist literature of the 20th
century. Much as Camus and Sartre discovered, existentialism's concern
for the individual thrown into an absurd world and forced to act,
lends itself well to the artistic medium of fiction. All of Beauvoir's
novels incorporate existential themes, problems, and questions in her
attempt to describe the human situation in times of personal turmoil,
political upheaval, and social unrest.
Her first novel, L'Invitée (She Came to Stay) was published in 1943.
Opening with a quote from Hegel about the desire of self-consciousness
to seek the death of the other, the book is a complex psychological
study of the battles waged for selfhood. Set during the buildup to
World War II, it charts the complexity of war in individual
relationships. The protagonist, Françoise is forced to undergo the
realization that she is not the center of the world and that her
relationship to her lover, Pierre is not guaranteed but must, like all
relationships, be constantly chosen and won. This work brought her
recognition and lead to the writing of one of her most critically
acclaimed novels, Le Sang des Autres (The Blood of Others) in 1945.
This work begins to take into account the social responsibility that
one's times demand. Set during the German Occupation of France, it
follows the lives of the Patriot leader, Jean Blomart and his agony
over sending his lover to her death. This work was heralded as one of
the leading existential novels of the Resistance and stands as a
testimony to the often tragic contradiction between the responsibility
we have to ourselves, to those we love, and to our people and humanity
as a whole. In 1946, Beauvoir published Tous les Hommes sont Mortels
(All Men are Mortal) which revolves around the question of mortality
and immortality. When an aspiring actress discovers that a mysterious
and morose man is immortal, she becomes obsessed with her own
immortality which she believes will be carried forth by him into
eternity after her death. Although this work was not as well-received
by critics and the public, it is especially provocative with the
phenomena of time and mortality and the desire all human beings share
to achieve immortality in any form we can, and how this leads to a
denial of lived experience in the here and now. Les Mandarins (The
Mandarins), Beauvoir's most famous and critically acclaimed novel was
published in 1954 and soon thereafter won the prestigious French award
for literature, the Prix Goncourt. This work is a profound study of
the responsibilities that the intellectual has to his or her society.
It explores the virtues and pitfalls of philosophy, journalism,
theater, and literature as these media try to speak to their age and
to implement social change. The Mandarins brings in a number of
Beauvoir's own personal concerns as it tarries with the issues of
Communism and Socialism, the fears of American imperialism and the
nuclear bomb, and the relationship of the individual intellectual to
other individuals and to society. It also raises the questions of
personal and political allegiance and how the two often conflict with
tragic results. Finally, Beauvoir's novel, Les Belles Images (1966),
explores the constellation of relationships, hypocrisy and social
mores in Parisian society.
b. Short Stories
Beauvoir wrote two collections of short stories. The first, Quand
Prime le Spirituel (When Things of the Spirit Come First) wasn't
published until 1979 even though it was her first work of fiction
submitted (and rejected) for publication (in 1937). As the 1930's were
less amenable to both women writers and stories on women, it is not so
peculiar that this collection was rejected only to be rediscovered and
esteemed over forty years later. This work offers fascinating insight
into Beauvoir's concerns with women and their unique attitudes and
situations long before the writing of The Second Sex. Divided into
five chapters, each titled by the name of the main female character,
it exposes the hypocrisy of the French upper classes who hide their
self-interests behind a veil of intellectual or religious absolutes.
The stories take up the issues of the crushing demands of religious
piety and individual renunciation, the tendency to aggrandize our
lives to others and the crisis of identity when we are forced to
confront our deceptions, and the difficulty of being a woman submitted
to bourgeois and religious education and expectations. Beauvoir's
second collection of short stories, La Femme Rompue (The Woman
Destroyed), was published in 1967 and was considerably well-received.
This too offers separate studies of three women, each of whom is
living in bad faith in one form or another. As each encounters a
crisis in her familial relationships, she engages in a flight from her
responsibility and freedom. This collection expands upon themes found
in her ethics and feminism of the often denied complicity in one's own
undoing.
c. Theater
Beauvoir only wrote one play, Les Bouches Inutiles (Who Shall Die?)
which was performed in 1945-the same year of the founding of Les Temps
Modernes. Clearly enmeshed in the issues of World War II Europe, the
dilemma of this play focuses on who is worth sacrificing for the
benefit of the collective. This piece was influenced by the history of
14th century Italian towns that, when under siege and facing mass
starvation, threw out the old, sick, weak, women and children to fend
for themselves so that there might be enough for the strong men to
hold out a little longer. The play is set in just such circumstances
which were hauntingly resonant to Nazi occupied France. True to
Beauvoir's ethical commitments which assert the freedom and sanctity
of the individual only within the freedom and respect of his or her
community, the town decides to rise up together and either defeat the
enemy or to die together. Although the play contains a number of
important and well-developed existential, ethical and feminist themes,
it was not as successful as her other literary expressions. Although
she never again wrote for the theater, many of the characters of her
novels (for example in She Came to Stay, All Men are Mortal, and The
Mandarins) are playwrights and actors, showing her confidence in the
theatrical arts to convey crucial existential and socio-political
dilemmas.
5. Cultural Studies
a. Travel Observations
Beauvoir was always passionate about traveling and embarked upon many
adventures both alone and with Sartre and others. Two trips had a
tremendous impact upon her and were the impetus for two major books.
The first, L'Amérique au Jour le Jour (America Day by Day) was
published in 1948, the year after her lecture tour of the United
States in 1947. During this visit, she spent time with Richard and
Ellen Wright, met Nelson Algren, and visited numerous American cities
such as New York, Chicago, Hollywood, Las Vegas, New Orleans and San
Antonio. During her stay, she was commissioned by the New York Times
to write an article entitled, "An Existentialist Looks at Americans,"
appearing on May 25, 1947. It offers a penetrating critique of the
United States as a country so full of promise but also one that is a
slave to novelty, material culture, and a pathological fixation on the
present at the expense of the past. Such themes are repeated in
greater detail in America Day by Day, which also tackles the issue of
America's strained race relations, imperialism, anti-intellectualism,
and class tensions.
The second major work to come out of Beauvoir's travels resulted from
her two-month trip to China with Sartre in 1955. Published in 1957, La
Longue Marche (The Long March) is a generally positive account of the
vast Communist country. Although disturbed by the censorship and
careful choreographing of their visit by the Communists, she found
China to be working towards a betterment in the life of its people.
The themes of labor and the plight of the worker are common throughout
this work, as is the situation of women and the family. Despite the
breadth of its investigation and the desire on Beauvoir's behalf to
study a completely foreign culture, it was both a critical and a
personal embarrassment. She later admitted that it was done more to
make money than to offer a serious cultural analysis of China and its
people. Regardless of these somewhat justified criticisms, it stands
as interesting exploration of the tension between capitalism and
Communism, the self and its other, and what it means to be free in
different cultural contexts.
b. The Coming of Age
In 1967, Beauvoir began a monumental study of the same genre and
caliber as The Second Sex. La Vieillesse (The Coming of Age, 1970) met
with instant critical success. The Second Sex had been received with
considerable hostility from many groups who did not want to be
confronted with an unpleasant critique of their sexist and oppressive
attitudes towards women; The Coming of Age however, was generally
welcomed although it too critiques society's prejudices towards
another oppressed group: the elderly. This masterful work takes the
fear of age as a cultural phenomenon and seeks to give voice to a
silenced and detested class of human beings. Lashing out against the
injustices suffered by the old, Beauvoir successfully complicates a
problem all too oversimplified. For example, she notes that, depending
on one's work or class, old age can come earlier or later. Those who
are materially more advantaged can afford good medicine, food and
exercise, and thus live much longer and age less quickly, than a miner
who is old at 50. In addition, she notices the philosophically complex
connection between age and poverty and age and dehumanization.
As she had done in with The Second Sex, Beauvoir approaches the
subject matter of The Coming of Age from a variety of perspectives
including the biological, anthropological, historical, and
sociological. In addition, she explores the question of age from the
perspective of the living, elderly human being in relation to his or
her body, time and the external world. Just as with The Second Sex,
this later work is divided into two books, the first which deals with
"Old Age as Seen from Without" and the second with,
"Being-in-the-World." Beauvoir explains the motivation for this
division in her Introduction where she writes, "Every human situation
can be viewed from without-seen from the point of view of an
outsider-or from within, in so far as the subject assumes and at the
same time transcends it." Continuing to uphold her belief in the
fundamental ambiguity of existence which always sits atop the
contradiction of immanence and transcendence, objectivity and
subjectivity, Beauvoir treats the subject of age both as an object of
cultural-historical knowledge and as the first-hand, lived experience
of aged individuals. What she concludes from her investigation into
the experience, fear and stigma of old age is that even though the
process of aging and the decline into death is an inescapable,
existential phenomenon for those human beings who live long enough to
experience it, there is no necessity to our loathing the aged members
of society. There is a certain acceptance of the fear of age felt by
most people because it ironically stands as more of the opposite to
life than does death. However, this does not demand that the aged
merely resign themselves to waiting for death or for younger members
of society to treat them as the invisible class. Rather, Beauvoir
argues in true existentialist fashion that old age must still be a
time of creative and meaningful projects and relationships with
others. This means that above all else, old age must not be a time of
boredom, but a time of continuous political and social action. This
requires a change of orientation among the aged themselves and within
society as a whole which must transform its idea that a person is only
valuable insofar as they are profitable. Instead, both individuals and
society must recognize that a person's value lies in his or her
humanity which is unaffected by age.
c. Autobiographical Works
In her autobiography, Beauvoir tells us that in wanting to write about
herself she had to first explain what it meant to be a woman and that
this realization was the genesis of The Second Sex. However, Beauvoir
also successfully embarked upon the recounting of her life in four
volumes of detailed and philosophically rich autobiography. In
addition to painting a vibrant picture of her own life, Beauvoir also
gives us access into other influential figures of the 20th century
ranging from Camus, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, to Richard Wright, Jean
Cocteau, Jean Genet, Antonin Artaud and Fidel Castro among many
others. Even though her autobiography covers both non-philosophical
and philosophical ground, it is important not to downplay the role
that autobiography has in Beauvoir's theoretical development. Indeed,
many other existentialists, such as Nietzsche, Sartre, and
Kierkegaard, embrace the autobiographical as a key component to the
philosophical. Beauvoir always maintained the importance of the
individual's situation and experience in the face of contingency and
the ambiguity of existence. Through the recounting of her life, we are
given a unique and personal picture of Beauvoir's struggles as a
philosopher, social reformer, writer and woman during a time of great
cultural and artistic achievement and political upheaval.
The first volume of her autobiography, Mémoirs d'une Jeune Fille
Rangée (Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, 1958), traces Beauvoir's
childhood, her relationship with her parents, her profound friendship
with Zaza and her schooling up through her years at the Sorbonne. In
this volume, Beauvoir shows the development of her intellectual and
independent personality and the influences which lead to her decisions
to become a philosopher and a writer. It also presents a picture of a
woman who was critical of her class and its expectations of women from
an early age. The second volume of her autobiography, La Force de
l'Âge (The Prime of Life, 1960) is often considered to be the richest
of all the volumes. Like Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, it was
commercially and critically well received. Taking up the years from
1929-1944, Beauvoir portrays her transition from student to adult and
the discovery of personal responsibility in war and peace. In many
points, she explores the motivations for many of her works, such as
The Second Sex and The Mandarins. The third installment of her
autobiography, La Force des Choses (The Force of Circumstance, 1963;
published in two separate volumes) takes up the time frame following
the conclusion of World War II in1944 to the year 1962. In these
volumes, Beauvoir becomes increasingly more aware of the political
responsibility of the intellectual to his or her country and times. In
the volume between 1944-1952 (After the War) Beauvoir describes the
intellectual blossoming of post-war Paris, rich with anecdotes on
writers, filmmakers and artists. The volume focusing on the decade
between 1952-1962 (Hard Times), shows a much more subdued and somewhat
cynical Beauvoir who is coming to terms with fame, age and the
political atrocities waged by France in its war with Algeria (taken up
in her work with Gisèle Halimi and the case of Djamila Boupacha).
Because of its brutal honesty on the themes of aging, death and war,
this volume of her autobiography was less well-received than the
previous two. The final installment in the chronicling of her life
charts the years from 1962-1972. Tout Compte Fait, (All Said and Done,
1972) shows an older and wiser philosopher and feminist who looks back
over her life, her relationships, and her accomplishments and
recognizes that it was all for the best. Here Beauvoir shows her
commitments to feminism and social change in a clarity only hinted at
in earlier volumes and she continues to struggle with the virtues and
pitfalls of capitalism and Communism. Additionally, she returns to
past works such as The Second Sex, to reevaluate her motivations and
her conclusions about literature, philosophy, and the act of
remembering. She again returns to the themes of death and dying and
their existential significance as she begins to experience the passing
of those she loves. Although not exactly considered to be
"autobiography," it is worth mentioning two more facets of Beauvoir's
self-revelatory literature. The first consists of her works on the
lives and deaths of loved ones. In this area, we find her sensitive
and personal recounting of her mother's death in Une Mort très Douce
(A Very Easy Death, 1964). This book is often considered to be one of
Beauvoir's best in its day-by-day portrayal of the ambiguity of love
and the experience of loss. In 1981, following the death of Sartre the
previous year, she published La Cérémonie des Adieux (Adieux: A
Farewell to Sartre) which recounts the progression of an aged and
infirm Sartre to his death. This work was somewhat controversial as
many readers missed its qualities as a tribute to the late, great
philosopher and instead considered it to be an inappropriate exposé on
his illness. The second facet of Beauvoir's life that can be
considered autobiographical are the publication by Beauvoir of
Sartre's letters to her in Lettres au Castor et à Quelques Autres
(Letters to Castor and Others, 1983) and of her own correspondence
with Sartre in Letters to Sartre published after her death in 1990.
Finally, A Transatlantic Love Affair, compiled by Sylvie le Bon de
Beauvoir in 1997 and published in 1998, presents Beauvoir's letters
(originally written in English) to Nelson Algren. Each of these works
provides us with another perspective into the life of one of the most
powerful philosophers of the 20th century and one of the most
influential female intellectuals on the history of Western thinking.
6. References and Further Reading
a. Selected Works by Beauvoir (in French and English)
Beauvoir, Simone de. Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre. Translated by
Patrick O'Brian. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986. English translation of
La cérémonie des adieux (Paris: Gallimard, 1981).
Beauvoir, Simone de. All Men are Mortal. Translated by Leonard M.
Friedman. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1992. English translation of
Tous les Hommes sont Mortels (Paris: Gallimard, 1946).
Beauvoir, Simone de. All Said and Done. Translated by Patrick O'Brian.
New York: Paragon House, 1993. English translation of Tout compte fait
(Paris: Gallimard, 1972).
Beauvoir, Simone de. America Day by Day. Translated by Carol Cosman.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. English translation of
L'Amérique au jour le jour (Paris: Gallimard, 1954).
Beauvoir, Simone de. Sons & Co. Ltd., 1968. English translation of Les
belles images (Paris: Gallimard, 1966).
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Blood of Others. Translated by Roger Senhouse
and Yvonne Moyse. New York: Pantheon Books, 1948. English translation
of Le sang des autres (Paris: Gallimard, 1945).
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Coming of Age. Translated by Patrick O'Brian.
New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996. English translation of La
vieillesse (Paris: Gallimard, 1970).
Beauvoir, Simone de. "In Defense of Djamila Boupacha." Le Monde, 3
June, 1960. Appendix B in Djamila Boupacha: The Story of the Torture
of a Young Algerian Girl which Shocked Liberal French Opinion;
Introduction to Djamila Boupacha. Edited by Simone de Beauvoir and
Gisèle Halimi. Translated by Peter Green. New York: The Macmillan
Company, 1962. English translations of Djamila Boupacha (Paris:
Gallimard, 1962).
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Ethics of Ambiguity. Translated by Bernard
Frechtman. New York: Citadel Press, 1996. English translation of Pour
une morale de l'ambiguïté (Paris: Gallimard, 1947). Beauvoir, Simone
de Beauvoir, Simone de. Force of Circumstance, Vol. I: After the War,
1944-1952; Vol. 2: Hard Times, 1952-1962. Translated by Richard
Howard. New York: Paragon House, 1992. English translation of La force
des choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1963).
Beauvoir, Simone de. Letters to Sartre. Translated and Edited by
Quintin Hoare. London: Vintage, 1992. English translation of Lettres à
Sartre (Paris: Gallimard, 1990).
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Long March. Translated by Austryn Wainhouse.
New York: The World Publishing, 1958. English translation of La longue
marche (Paris: Gallimard, 1957).
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Mandarins. Translated by Leonard M. Friedman.
New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1991. English translation of Les
mandarins (Paris: Gallimard, 1954).
Beauvoir, Simone de. Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. Translated by
James Kirkup. Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1963. English translation of
Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée (Paris: Gallimard, 1958).
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Prime of Life. Translated by Peter Green. New
York: Lancer Books, 1966. English translation of La force de l'âge
(Paris: Gallimard, 1960).
Beauvoir, Simone de. Pyrrhus et Cinéas. Paris: Gallimard, 1944.
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Translated by H. M. Parshley. New
York: Vintage Books, 1989. English translation of Le deuxième sexe
(Paris: Gallimard, 1949).
Beauvoir, Simone de. Must We Burn Sade? Translated by Annette
Michelson, The Marquis de Sade. New York: Grove Press, 1966. English
translation of Faut-il brûler Sade? (Paris: Gallimard, 1955).
Beauvoir, Simone de. She Came to Stay. Translated by Roger Senhouse
and Yvonne Moyse. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.,1954. English
translation of L'Invitée (Paris: Gallimard, 1943).
Beauvoir, Simone de. A Transatlantic Love Affair: Letters to Nelson
Algren. Compiled and annotated by Sylvie le Bon de Beauvoir. New York:
The New Press, 1998.
Beauvoir, Simone de. A Very Easy Death. Translated by Patrick O'Brian.
New York: Pantheon Books, 1965. English translation of Une mort très
douce (Paris: Gallimard, 1964).
Beauvoir, Simone de. When Things of the Spirit Come First. Translated
by Patrick O'Brian. New York: Pantheon Books, 1982. English
translation of Quand prime le spirituel (Paris: Gallimard, 1979).
Beauvoir, Simone de. Who Shall Die? Translated by Claude Francis and
Fernande Gontier. Florissant: River Press, 1983. English translation
of Les bouches inutiles (Paris: Gallimard, 1945).
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Woman Destroyed. Translated by Patrick
O'Brian. New York: Pantheon Books, 1969. English translation of La
femme rompue (Paris: Gallimard, 1967).
b. Selected Books on Beauvoir in English
Arp, Kristana. The Bonds of Freedom. Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 2001.
Bair, Deirdre. Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography. New York: Summit Books, 1990.
Bauer, Nancy. Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy and Feminism. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2001.
Bergoffen, Debra. The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Gendered
Phenomenologies, Erotic Generosities. Albany: SUNY Press, 1997.
Fallaize, Elizabeth. The Novels of Simone de Beauvoir. London: Routledge, 1988.
Fullbrook, Kate and Edward. Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre:
The Remaking of a Twentieth-Century Legend. New York: Basic Books:
1994.
Le Doeuff, Michèle. Hipparchia's Choice: An Essay Concerning Women,
Philosophy, Etc. Translated by Trista Selous. Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers, 1991.
Lundgren-Gothlin, Eva. Sex and Existence: Simone de Beauvoir's 'The
Second Sex.' Translated by Linda Schenck. Hanover: Wesleyan University
Press, 1996.
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