She Came to Stay (1943)
L'Invitée: debut novel about a trio relationship, exploring the threat posed by another consciousness
Philosophy
Simone de Beauvoir
1908–1986 · French
Existentialism; feminism
Simone de Beauvoir was a French existentialist philosopher, novelist and memoirist whose The Second Sex (1949) became a founding text of modern feminism. Applying existentialist ideas to women's situation, she argued that woman has been constructed as man's "Other" and that femininity is made, not given. Her novels, including the Goncourt-winning The Mandarins, and her memoirs made her a central figure of postwar French intellectual life alongside Jean-Paul Sartre.
How to spot them
- ▸"One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman"
- ▸The Second Sex (Le Deuxième Sexe); woman as "the Other"; transcendence and immanence
- ▸The Ethics of Ambiguity; The Mandarins (Prix Goncourt 1954)
- ▸Lifelong partner of Sartre, nicknamed "Castor" (Beaver); Les Temps modernes; Manifesto of the 343
Key works
The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947)
Pour une morale de l'ambiguïté: an existentialist ethics in which my freedom requires willing the freedom of others
The Second Sex (1949)
Le Deuxième Sexe: vast study of how women have been made the Other; placed on the Vatican's Index of Forbidden Books
The Mandarins (1954)
Les Mandarins: novel of postwar Parisian left-wing intellectuals; won the Prix Goncourt
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958)
Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée: first volume of her autobiography, on her bourgeois Catholic upbringing
Key ideas
- "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman": femininity is a social and historical construction, not a biological destiny
- Man has defined himself as the Subject and the Absolute and woman as the Other, relative to and defined by him
- Transcendence (free, creative projection into the future) has been reserved for men, while women have been confined to immanence (repetition and maintenance)
- Human existence is ambiguous, both free subject and material object; ethics means accepting this and willing one's own freedom along with others'
- Women are sometimes complicit in their subordination because of the comforts and evasions of accepting the role of Other, an application of bad faith
Quick-fire facts
- •Born in Paris into a bourgeois Catholic family, and lost her faith as a teenager
- •Passed the agrégation in philosophy in 1929, aged 21, placing second to Sartre, then one of the youngest ever to pass
- •Met Sartre in 1929 and formed an open, lifelong partnership with him; they never married or lived together
- •Sartre and friends nicknamed her "Castor", French for beaver
- •Won the Prix Goncourt in 1954 for The Mandarins, partly based on her affair with the American writer Nelson Algren
- •Wrote the Manifesto of the 343 (1971), in which French women declared they had had abortions
- •Also wrote The Coming of Age (La Vieillesse, 1970) and A Very Easy Death, about her mother's dying
- •Is buried beside Sartre in Montparnasse Cemetery, Paris
Drill it — 10 cards
1 / 10new card
Sources
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Simone de Beauvoir
- Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Simone de Beauvoir