The first answer to these questions – there are two – is that we have access to new material. Beauvoir’s autobiographies were published in four volumes between 1958 and 1972. Over the course of her life she wrote many other works that included autobiographical material, including two chronicles of her travels to America (1948) and China (1957), and two memoirs of the deaths of her mother (1964) and Sartre (1981). She also published a selection of Sartre’s letters to her (1983).20
During her lifetime some in the circle that grew around Sartre and Beauvoir – known patronymically as ‘the Sartre family’ (la famille Sartre) or more simply, ‘the family’ – thought they could see what Beauvoir was doing with the autobiographical project: putting herself in control of their public image. Many have assumed that she did this out of jealousy because she wanted to be remembered as first in Sartre’s romantic life, as his ‘essential love’.
But in the decades since Beauvoir’s death in 1986 new diaries and letters have been made public that challenge this assumption. After Beauvoir published Sartre’s letters to her in 1983, she lost some friends when the details of their relationships were brought out into the open. And when her war diary and letters to Sartre were published after her death in 1990, many were shocked to learn that not only had she had lesbian relationships, but that the women with whom she had them were former students. Her letters to Sartre also exposed the philosophical character of their friendship, and her influence on his work – but this drew less comment.21
Then came her letters to her American lover Nelson Algren, in 1997, and the public again saw a Beauvoir they had never expected: a tender, sensitive Simone who penned more passionate words for Algren than for Sartre. Less than a decade later, in 2004, her correspondence with Jacques-Laurent Bost was published in French, showing that within the first decade of her pact with Sartre, Beauvoir had another ardent affair with a man who remained close to her until her death. It was another shock, shifting Sartre from the romantic zenith he occupied in the public imagination. Sartre battled to establish Beauvoir’s centrality to his intellectual life, publicly acknowledging her rigorous critical influence on his work. But evaluating Beauvoir’s life seems to require the forcible displacement of Sartre from the centre.
Over the past decade more new publications and documents have been released that show Beauvoir in an even clearer light. Beauvoir’s student diaries – which show the development of Beauvoir’s philosophy before she met Sartre and her early impressions of their relationship – reveal that the life she lived was very different from the life she recounted for the public. Although the diaries were published in 2008 in French, they are not yet available in full in English, so this period of her life is not well known outside scholarly circles. And in 2018 more new material became available to researchers, including letters Beauvoir wrote to the only lover she ever lived with or addressed by the familiar second person, tu: Claude Lanzmann.22 In the same year, a prestigious two-volume Pléiade edition of Beauvoir’s memoirs was released in France, complete with extracts from unpublished diaries and working notes for her manuscripts. In addition to these publications in French, in recent years the Beauvoir series, edited by Margaret Simons and Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, have found, translated and published or republished many of Beauvoir’s early writings, from her philosophical essays on ethics and politics to magazine articles she wrote for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar.
This new material shows that Beauvoir omitted a great deal from her memoirs – but it also shows some of the reasons behind her omissions. In the media-saturated internet age, it is difficult to imagine the extent to which Beauvoir’s publication of autobiography defied contemporary conventions of privacy. Her four volumes (or six, counting the memoirs of her mother’s and Sartre’s deaths) cultivated a sense of intimate familiarity in her readers. But she did not promise to tell all: in fact, she told her readers that she had deliberately left some things obscure.23
The most recent new material – her diaries and unpublished letters to Claude Lanzmann – show that it was not just lovers she left in obscurity, but the early genesis of her philosophy of love and the influence of her philosophy on Sartre. Throughout her life she was plagued by people doubting her ability or originality – some even suggested that Sartre wrote her books. Even the ‘mammoth edifice’ that is The Second Sex was accused of resting on ‘two slender postulates’ that Beauvoir took from Sartre’s Being and Nothingness; she was accused of referring to Sartre’s works ‘as if to a sacred text’.24 In some of her writings she explicitly condemns these belittlements as false. But they afflicted her in life and after death: in addition to the one that called her a popularizer, another obituary dismissively declared her ‘incapable of invention’.25
It may come as a surprise to today’s readers to hear this woman be accused of being unoriginal. But it was (and still is, sadly) an allegation frequently made against women writers – and often internalized by them. Beauvoir did have her own ideas, some of which were very like the ones Sartre became famous for; one year she published under his byline because he was busy and no one even noticed. Sartre acknowledged that it was her idea to make his first novel Nausea a novel rather than an abstract philosophical treatise, and that she was a rigorous critic whose insights improved his manuscripts before publication throughout his long career. In the 1940s and 1950s she wrote and published her own philosophy, criticizing Sartre and eventually changing his mind. In her later autobiography she defended herself against attacks on her own abilities, claiming outright that she had her own philosophy of being and nothingness before she met Sartre (who went on to write the book Being and Nothingness), and that she did not come to the same conclusions that he did. But these claims to her own independence and originality would be widely overlooked, as would her claims that some of the things people called ‘Sartrean’ weren’t really original to Sartre.
This leads me to my second answer to the question of why we should reconsider Beauvoir’s life now. Biography can reveal what a society cares about, what it values – and by encountering the values of another person in another time we can learn more about our own. The Second Sex criticized many ‘myths’ of femininity for being the projections of men’s fears and fantasies about women.26 Many of these myths involve failing to take women as agents – as conscious human beings who make choices and develop projects for their lives, who want to love and be loved as such, and who suffer when they are reduced to objects in the eyes of others. Before she met Sartre, a year before she had an argument with her father about love, the 18-year-old Beauvoir wrote in her diary that: ‘There are several things I hate about love.’27 Her objections were ethical: men were not held up to the same ideals that women were. Beauvoir grew up in a tradition which taught that becoming an ethical self involves learning to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’. But in Beauvoir’s experience this injunction was rarely applied: people always seemed to love themselves too much or too little; no example of love from books or life satisfied her expectations.
It is far from clear whether Beauvoir’s expectations were satisfied by the loves she went on to have. But it is clear that Beauvoir made and remade her decision to live a philosophical life, a reflective life guided by her own intellectual values, a life of freedom. She chose to do this by writing in several literary forms – and to do this in lifelong conversation with Sartre. It matters to reconsider Beauvoir’s life now because Beauvoir and Sartre were united in the popular imagination by a very ambiguous word – ‘love’ – and ‘love’ was a concept that Beauvoir subjected to decades of philosophical scrutiny.
Reconsidering Beauvoir’s life also matters because over time Beauvoir became dissatisfied with the way her life was depicted – with the way the persona ‘Simone de Beauvoir’ departed from the narrative of conventional marriage only to be subsumed by another erotic plot. Even after her death, widespread assumptions about ‘what women want’ and ‘what women can do’ affected the way Beauvoir’s life is remembered. Whether r
omantically or intellectually, she has been cast as Sartre’s prey.
Romantically, the idea that Beauvoir was Sartre’s victim relies heavily on the assumption that where ‘love’ is concerned all women, if they’re really honest with themselves, want lifelong monogamy with men. Over the five decades of the ‘legendary couple’ Sartre very publicly courted numerous ‘contingent’ women. Beauvoir, on the other hand, appeared (because they were omitted from her memoirs) to have few contingent relationships with men, all of which were over by her early fifties. On this basis some concluded that Sartre hoodwinked her into an exploitative relationship in which, despite being unmarried, they played the all-too-familiar parts of feckless womanizer and faithful woman. Sometimes her life is described as a casualty of patriarchal norms which suggest, among other things, that an ageing or intellectual woman was not as romantically desirable as an ageing or intellectual man. And sometimes she is the dupe of her own foolishness. As her former student, Bianca Lamblin, put it: Beauvoir ‘planted the seeds of her own unhappiness’ by refusing marriage and family.28 Louis Menand wrote in the New Yorker that ‘Beauvoir was formidable, but she was not made of ice. Though her affairs, for the most part, were love affairs, it is plain from almost every page she wrote that she would have given them all up if she could have had Sartre for herself alone.’
By contrast, Beauvoir’s student diaries show that within weeks of meeting Jean-Paul Sartre she assigned him only one irreplaceable role: she was delighted to have found Sartre, writing that he ‘is in my heart, in my body and above all (for in my heart and my body many others could be) the incomparable friend of my thought’.29 It was friendship rather than love, she later explained in a letter to Nelson Algren, because Sartre ‘does not care much for sexual life. He is a warm, lively man everywhere, but not in bed. I soon felt it, though I had no experience; and little by little, it seemed useless, and even indecent, to go on being lovers’.30
Was ‘the great love story of the century’ ultimately the story of a friendship?
Intellectually, Beauvoir has also been portrayed as a victim of Sartre, patriarchy, or personal failure. Did Beauvoir internalize misogyny? Did she lack confidence in her own philosophical ability? Throughout her public life Beauvoir was accused of ‘popularizing’ Sartre’s ideas. She has been taken – to borrow Virginia Woolf’s metaphor – as a magnifying mirror, with ‘the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size’.31 Even worse, she has been accused of being satisfied with playing this reflective role.
But it is difficult to know how much Beauvoir’s purported ‘secondary’ status owes to Beauvoir and Sartre themselves and how much to attribute it to widespread cultural sexism. Even today, we know that women are: more often described in relational (personal or familial) terms than professional; more likely to be described with passive verbs than active ones; subject to negative gender distinctions (for example, ‘despite being a woman, Simone thought like a man’) and paraphrased rather than cited in their own voice.
Prominent commentary spanning Beauvoir’s career provides illustration after illustration of her public definition as Sartre’s derivative double, or worse:
The New Yorker, 22 February 1947
‘Sartre’s female intellectual counterpart’; ‘the prettiest Existentialist you ever saw’
William Barrett (philosopher), 1958
‘that woman, his friend, who wrote a book of feminine protest’32
La Petit Larousse, 1974
‘Simone de Beauvoir: woman of letters, Sartre’s disciple’
The Times of London, 1986
‘In both her philosophical and political thinking, she follows his lead’33
La Petit Larousse, 1987
‘Simone de Beauvoir: Sartre’s disciple and companion, and an ardent feminist’
Deirdre Bair, Beauvoir’s first biographer, 1990
Sartre’s ‘companion’, who ‘applies, disseminates, clarifies, supports, and administers’ his ‘philosophical, aesthetic, ethical and political principles’34
The Times Literary Supplement, 2001
‘Sartre’s sex slave?’35
Because many of Beauvoir’s own words have not been available until relatively recently even some of her most insightful commentators have cast her as someone who passively succumbed to Sartre’s spell. Intellectually, Beauvoir has been described as a ‘closet philosopher’, who renounced philosophy (becoming ‘second to Sartre’) because she saw intellectual success to be ‘incompatible with seduction’.36 Romantically, Toril Moi wrote, Beauvoir’s relationship to Sartre was ‘the one sacrosanct area of her life to be protected even against her own critical attention’.37 bell hooks writes that ‘Beauvoir passively accepted Sartre’s appropriation of her ideas without acknowledging the source’.38 But personally Beauvoir was critical of Sartre from the early days of their relationship; and philosophically she did defend her own originality – although it is true that this would become more pronounced later in her life, after she saw just how inflated and one-sided claims of Sartre’s influence on her became.
Alongside concerns that she was an exploited victim, Beauvoir has also been depicted as an exploitative vixen. The posthumous publication of Beauvoir’s letters to Sartre and her diaries from the Second World War revealed that she had sexual relationships with three young women in the late 1930s and early 1940s, all of whom were her own former students. In some cases, Sartre would later have relationships with them too. It is bad enough, the objection goes, that she preyed upon women many years her junior and in dynamics of unequal power; but did Simone de Beauvoir ‘groom’ young women for Sartre? The couple of the pact clearly valued truth-telling – it was a central part of the public mythology of their relationship. So when details of their trios came to light they provoked shock, disgust and character assassination: ‘It turned out that these two advocates of truth-telling constantly told lies to an array of emotionally unstable young girls.’39
But the disdain they provoked was, again, suspiciously asymmetrical: whether because Beauvoir was a woman or because she was the woman who would go on to write The Second Sex, it seemed so much more surprising that she could be guilty of such behaviour. When Beauvoir’s Wartime Diary was published in English in 2009 one disgusted reviewer entitled her review ‘Lying and Nothingness’, expressing shock that Beauvoir had written ‘page after dishonest page’ in her memoirs.40 In the eyes of some readers this Beauvoir cared only for herself, and her novels were vanity writ large. When Beauvoir’s letters to Sartre were published in English in 1991, Richard Heller called her ‘vapid’ and lamented the ‘dispiriting, narcissistic quality of the material’.41
Readers may be tempted to give up on Beauvoir when they encounter the way she described these women. One of her lovers – with whom Beauvoir remained friends until her death – wrote a memoir after the posthumous publication of Beauvoir’s letters to Sartre. Although it was decades after the events the letters depicted, she felt used and betrayed after reading them. Who should be believed – and when? What sense can be made of these accusations against the same woman who later wrote a rigorous ethics demanding that women should be treated with the respect befitting their dignity as free and conscious human beings? After all, it is because of Beauvoir that the word ‘sexism’ was added to the French dictionary.42 She has been admired by feminists like Toril Moi and bell hooks as ‘the emblematic intellectual woman of the twentieth century’, ‘the one female intellectual, thinker-writer who had lived fully the life of the mind as I longed to live it’.43
The answers to these questions matter because Beauvoir’s authority has been invoked by many feminists to sanction their claims – whether or not she would have agreed with them. ‘Simone de Beauvoir’ has become an iconic feminist and post-feminist consumer product: ‘a trademark of [her]self, a person turned into a brand’.44 But brand perception is notoriously fickle. While some feminists celebrated her perceptive analysis of women’s oppression, Beauvoir’s
criticisms of ideals of love, in particular, enraged some of her contemporaries, who retaliated by belittling and insulting her. When she published an excerpt from The Second Sex in May 1949, claiming that women did not want a battle of the sexes but rather (among other things) to feel ‘both desire and respect’ from men in sexual life, the prestigious author François Mauriac asked with derision: Is ‘a serious philosophical and literary review really the place for the subject treated by Mme Simone de Beauvoir’?45 When Pascal asked whether there was a conflict between love and justice, he was doing philosophy. When Kant and Mill discussed the place of love in ethics, they were doing philosophy.46 But when Beauvoir extended discussions of love and justice to intimate relationships between men and women, she was called ‘Madame’ – to draw shameful attention to her unmarried status – and accused of lowering the tone.
In hindsight, it looks like Beauvoir was on the receiving end of an ad feminam offensive: If her critics could reduce her to a failure as a woman, highlighting her deviance from femininity; or a failure as a thinker, because she was unoriginal and owed everything to Sartre; or a failure as a human being, highlighting her deviance from their own moral ideals, then her ideas could be summarily dismissed rather than seriously debated.
As a matter of principle, clearly, both men and women can fall foul of the ad hominem fallacy, an argumentative strategy that diverts attention from the topic at hand by attacking a person’s character or motives instead. But Beauvoir was not just accused of having poor character and unsound motives; she was accused of being against nature, of being a failure as a woman. Recent research in psychology suggests that women who achieve positions called agentic – that is, positions in which they show agency, including competence, confidence, and assertiveness – are often punished by ‘social dominance penalties’. If women break out of gender hierarchies by competing for or achieving high-status, traditionally masculine positions, they are often perceived to be arrogant or aggressive, and penalized by being ‘taken down’ or brought down to size – sometimes entirely unconsciously – in order to maintain gender hierarchy.47
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