Though published in 1979, Beauvoir's collection of short stories Quand prime le spirituel (When Things of the Spirit Come First) was written between 1935 and 1937. Her first fictional work, When Things of the Spirit Come First was rejected for publication upon completion and set aside until late in her career. Each of the five stories in the collection bears the name of a woman: "Marcelle," "Chantal," "Lisa," "Anne," and "Marguerite." Largely autobiographical, they reveal Beauvoir's aversion toward established religion and bourgeois society. In "Chantai," for example, a provincial school teacher who professes emancipated views attempts to discourage a pregnant student from having an abortion. The young woman featured in "Anne" is an obedient daughter in a wealthy family who, tempted to follow her instincts, suffers from a mental breakdown and sudden death. Beauvoir's second collection, La femme rompue (The Woman Destroyed), is the author's last published work of fiction. Like Beauvoir's stories, each of the three novellas in this collection presents the narrative of a single woman. However, this collection characterizes middle-aged women whose dependencies on men have crippled their abilities to create positive identities and construct autonomous lives. Beauvoir incorporated in both collections existential concepts regarding personal freedom, or individual guidance by choice alone; responsibility, or accepting the consequences of one's choices; bad faith, or denying one's freedom by shifting responsibility to an outside source; and the role of the other, or the relation of the inessential being to an essential being.
La Femme Rompue Simone De Beauvoir Pdf Download
The very opposite appears to be the case with the third and most substantial story in the book, La Femme rompue itself Beauvoir has related how the publication of this tale in Elle occasioned numerous letters from 'femmes rompues, demi rompues, ou en instance de rupture', all of whom strongly identified with its central character, Monique. Interestingly enough, however, the author goes on to claim that the reactions of her correspondents 'reposaient sur un énorme contresens' and that they, like most of the critics, seriously misunderstood the story.10 While it has a banal plot about 'une femme attachante mais d'une affectivité envahissante' whose husband long ago stopped loving her and is gradually breaking away from her in order to make a new life with a lively woman lawyer of whom he has become enamoured, Beauvoir did not intend our sympathy with Monique to be by any means unqualified:
Moreover, all three instances graphically draw our attention to, or remind us of, certain rather neglected characteristics of self-deception, notably its fragility (mostly, we are able to detect it only when the victim is forced by circumstances to face the truth), its elusiveness (often there is great difficulty in distinguishing it from misjudgement or error), and its complex moral implications. 'Self-deception' is frequently used as a term of moral disapproval, and yet our recognition that the 'aveuglement' of certain women is often, though in varying degrees, self-inflicted cannot automatically be taken to imply that we wish above all to censure them; nor indeed that their plight is any the less real or heart-rending for that. Beauvoir is seeking, after all, to 'donner à voir leur nuit',16 and she does so all the more memorably and convincingly as a result of identifying the self-imposed element in their dilemma. At the same time, to acknowledge the existence of self-deception in such cases (at least, where it is non-pathological) is presumably to suggest that the women concerned have it in some sense within their power to alleviate their own suffering, so that a particular kind of judgement on them seems to be involved. These are all intrinsically important matters, which potentially bear upon our attitudes towards others in general as well as towards some 'femmes rompues'. They also raise complex and difficult questions, however, which admit of no easy resolution at either the practical or the theoretical level. It is to Beauvoir's credit that she sees the work of fiction as being at least as appropriate a genre in which to broach and explore them as the philosophical essay:
Though each story is kept formally closed in on itself, the adoption of the title of the last and longest of the three stories as the title of the volume produces a particular pattern of expectations about the cycle. There is a two-way process in which the reader feels that the first two stories are a preparation for the last, and that, in reverse, the reading of the last story may reveal something affecting the decoding of the stories as a whole. Another rather striking aspect of the title is the way in which it draws attention to the sex of the narrator-protagonists; the fact that the stories are about women, and about women in difficulties, is underlined from the outset. Finally a third, less immediately apparent aspect, is that the title permits the direct expression of an authorial view; a glimpse all the more interesting since the use of monologue within the stories themselves does not offer any scope to overt comments by an author or narrator. Unlike When Things of the Spirit Come First, the title of The Woman Destroyed (La Femme rompue) offers no indication of the source of the characters' problems; instead, it offers a categorisation, a use of a conventional statement with a rather dismissive definite article, which fixes the characters inescapably into place and carries at least a hint of an ironic distancing between the author and her three femmes rompues.13
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