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Introduction Cambridge University Press 0521661307 - Simone de Beauvoir Gender and Testimony Ursula Tidd Excerpt More information Introduction Simone de Beauvoir has been described as `the emblematic intel- lectual woman of the twentieth century'.1 The range of her contri- bution to twentieth-century cultural capital is certainly impressive: Goncourt prize winner and author of seven ®ctional works; a key theorist within French existentialism; author of Le DeuxieÁme Sexe (1949),2 which is arguably the most pioneering feminist text of the century; a signi®cant ®gure in twentieth-century French auto- biography; an important travel writer and contributor to the French epistolary tradition; a thinker and political activist, who addressed contentious issues such as the brutality of the French army during the Algerian War, attitudes to ageing and women's right to contra- ception and abortion within a patriarchal society. Such an extensive contribution to twentieth-century culture has been the focus of a vast amount of critical and popular attention. In particular, since Beauvoir's death in 1986, the publication of the Lettres aÁ Sartre and Journal de guerre in 1990and recently, of her letters to Nelson Algren, critical interest in her oeuvre has assumed a renewed impetus.3 These events have encouraged re-evaluations of her work, particularly in Britain and the United States. This has mainly taken the form of a re-assessment of Beauvoir's status as a philosopher, involving a recognition of her contribution to existential phenomenology and an increased awareness of the ethical concerns in her writing ± a development itself resulting perhaps from a `®n de sieÁcle' and millennium anxiety to evaluate the signi®cance of intellectual and philosophical traditions, an increased awareness of women's contribution to the production of philosophy and a related criticism of the assumptions of white, Western, patriarchal intel- lectual traditions and systems of thought. Since 1990, in addition to two biographies of Beauvoir ± Deirdre Bair's Simone de Beauvoir, A Biography (1990)4 and Margaret Crosland's 1 © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 0521661307 - Simone de Beauvoir Gender and Testimony Ursula Tidd Excerpt More information 2 Gender and testimony Simone de Beauvoir, The Woman and Her Work (1992)5 ± there have been signi®cant new critical readings of her work. Perhaps the most important of these, in terms of its originality, intellectual calibre and range, is Toril Moi's Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman (1994). Some other recent contributions which have sought to illuminate individual areas of Beauvoir's work include Eva Lundgren-Gothlin's Sex and Existence, which offers new philosophical, historical and feminist insights into Le DeuxieÁme Sexe, by placing it in the context of Hegelian philosophy, phenomenology and Marxist theory.6 Further contemporary re-assessments of Le DeuxieÁme Sexe are provided in a collection of interdisciplinary essays edited by Ruth Evans ± Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1998).7 Kate and Edward Fullbrook's controversial Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, The Remaking of a Twentieth-Century Legend (1993),8 argues that Beauvoir was responsible for the philosophical framework of Sartre's L'Etre et le neÂant.InPhilosophy as Passion, The Thinking of Simone de Beauvoir, from a Foucauldian critical perspective, Karen Vintges delineates a Beauvoirian ethics drawing on a wide range of her writing.9 In 1998, the Fullbrooks' second book, Simone de Beauvoir, A Critical Introduction, offered a philosophical reading of some of the ®ctional texts and philosophical essays.10 Joseph Mahon's Existentialism, Feminism and Simone de Beauvoir provides a re-reading of her philosophical essays of the 1940s, in defence of Beauvoirian existentialist feminism.11 Finally, ten years after her in¯uential study of Beauvoir's ®ction, Elizabeth Fallaize's recent edited collection of key critical readings of Le DeuxieÁme Sexe, the autobiography and the ®ction, published between 1961 to the mid-1990s, demonstrates the diversity of critical interest in Beauvoir's writing.12 In the United States, there has been a relatively consistent interest in Beauvoir's work in recent decades. She had been interested in American literature since her student days, and, from 1947, devel- oped a strong connection with the United States when she ®rst visited the country.13 The American engagement with Beauvoir's work gained impetus in the late 1960s, when key ®gures of the US Women's Liberation Movement such as Shulamith Firestone and Kate Millett became interested in the materialist analysis of women's oppression in Le DeuxieÁme Sexe. Since the early 1970s, The Society for Women in Philosophy has acted as a forum for discussion of Beauvoir's philosophy.14 In 1983, the Simone de Beauvoir Society of America was founded.15 In 1986, an edition of Yale FrenchStudies © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 0521661307 - Simone de Beauvoir Gender and Testimony Ursula Tidd Excerpt More information Introduction 3 devoted to Beauvoir was published,16 with North American contri- butors such as Elaine Marks, Yolanda Patterson and Margaret A. Simons, who have all written books on Beauvoir. The social constructionist account of gender in Le DeuxieÁme Sexe was also a starting point for Judith Butler, in her ground-breaking Gender Trouble, Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990).17 The Simone de Beauvoir Circle, which seeks to explore Beauvoir's philosophical work, was also formed in North America. Moreover, articles on Beauvoirian philosophy have regularly appeared in the feminist philosophy journal, Hypatia, based in the United States.18 Recently, Margaret Simons has edited a collection of philosophical essays, Feminist Interpretations of Simone de Beauvoir (1995) and written a book on Beauvoir and existentialism.19 DebraB.Bergoffen'sThe Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir, Gendered Phenomenologies, Erotic Generosities (1997) explores the original contribution of Beauvoirian ethics to the phenomenological tradition.20 In France, there appears to be less critical interest in the range of Beauvoir's work. This relative `pheÂnomeÁne de rejet' may be ex- plained by several factors: ®rst, the prevailing masculinism of French intellectual life and of the construction of the French philosophical tradition, noted by Toril Moi.21 Second, the predominance of psychoanalytically inspired feminism in France which, with its concern for psycho-sexual difference, is incompatible with Beau- voir's materialist and anti-essentialist approach to gendered identity in Le DeuxieÁme Sexe.22 The third factor is her lifelong partnership with Jean-Paul Sartre which has, until recently, obscured her independent contribution to twentieth-century French culture. Since 1990, following the publication of the Lettres aÁ Sartre and the Journal de guerre, controversial and popular ®rst-hand accounts of episodes in Beauvoir's and Sartre's lives were published in France. Gilbert Joseph's sensationalist Une si douce Occupation . .: Simone de Beauvoir et Jean-Paul Sartre 1940±1944 (1991) attempted to demolish any notion that they had played an active role in the French Resistance.23 In 1993, in response to the account of her relationship with Sartre and Beauvoir in the letters and war diary, Bianca Lamblin's MeÂmoires d'une jeune ®lle deÂrangeÂe waspublished,which related her version of events.24 The following year, Jean-Pierre Saccani's journalistic account, Nelson et Simone (1994), described Beauvoir's relationship with the American novelist, Nelson Algren.25 To coincide with the ten-year anniversary of Beauvoir's death, © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 0521661307 - Simone de Beauvoir Gender and Testimony Ursula Tidd Excerpt More information 4 Gender and testimony another ®rst-hand `teÂmoignage' was published: Simone de Beauvoir, Le Mouvement des Femmes: MeÂmoires d'une jeune ®lle rebelle (1996), by a member of Beauvoir's feminist circle, Claudine Monteil.26 Since 1990, there has been limited critical interest in Beauvoir in France. In addition to occasional articles on her work in academic journals, in Les Temps modernes, and in the French press, an edition of Roman 20±50 was devoted to Beauvoir in 1992, comprising a previously unpublished fragment of La Femme rompue,`MalentenduaÁ Moscou', and several articles on L'InviteÂe and Les Mandarins.27 In 1994, continuing her work begun in L'Etudeetlerouet(1989) on the Sartre-Beauvoir philosophical collaboration,28 MicheÁle Le Doeuff contributed an article to the Magazine litteÂraire for its special issue on existentialism.29 In 1995, Mona Ozouf offered an appraisal of Beauvoir's life and writing project in Les Mots des femmes.30 Fortu- nately for Beauvoir's status as an intellectual and writer in France, Toril Moi's 1994 study has been translated and published with a preface by Pierre Bourdieu. The present study engages with two areas in Beauvoir studies: her philosophy of selfhood and her auto/biographical writings. It seeks to examine critically Beauvoir's auto/biographical project in the context of her notion of selfhood, as represented in her philosophy of the 1940s. In the early days of Beauvoir criticism (the ®rst study of her writing was published in 1958),31 two critics noted the theme of her relationship to existence, as it is evident in her project of self- representation in her autobiographical writing. In 1958, the psycho-
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