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Women, Choices and Simone De Beauvoir

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Women, Choices and Simone De Beauvoir - 187 FOLLOWING ARGUMENTS WHEREVER THEY LEAD: WOMEN, CHOICES AND SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR EUGENIA N. ZIMMERMAN CARLETON UNIVERSITY, OTTAWA I belong to that generation of students who did their first university degree in the mid/late 1950’s and who were profoundly, perhaps permanently marked by the Existentialism which had rolled across the Atlantic about a decade earlier and which came to us bearing the name of Jean-Paul Sartre. In the wake of that tremendous presence, at least as far as I was concerned, anyone else -- Simone de Beauvoir, certainly, but Albert Camus no less -- was automatically a member of the "second sex." Some years later, when I chose to do my doctoral dissertation on the work of Sartre, I came in contact with Beauvoir through the three volumes of her memoirs which, one by one, had gradually appeared. I read Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée once and then it was, indeed, "rangé" for decades until I resurrected it in 1991 for teaching purposes. However, I read La Force de l'âge and La Force des choses to tatters since they provided contact with the oracle for whom "la grande sartreuse" was guardian and priest. If I am now willing to speak as directly to Beauvoir as I speak to Sartre, according them equal status as rhetorical exempla, it is due, to a great extent, to the good offices of Professor Patterson who, by making me aware of the activities of the Simone de Beauvoir Society and of its publications, lightened the burden of my teaching and extended the bounds of my research. What follows is an amalgamation of: 1) material generated for a colloquium on "rhetoric and argumentation" but which could not be fitted into the argumentative structure of that paper in its final form and 2) a series of reflections generated by my reading of the various texts and comments both in the Newsletters and the Studies produced by this Society. If my arguments here are to have any chance at all of bringing about persuasion, then this my audience must first permit what I consider to be a not unreasonable extension of the boundaries of terms. The first extension will allow the inclusion of material deriving from the controversy which followed the appearance of the war diary, the letters, the Bair biography. Thus, the expression "women writers" will encompass not only what we might consider to be primary texts, such as those produced by Simone de Beauvoir or by other women writing fiction, confessional literature, philosophical polemic, etc. but also any secondary texts provoked into existence by these first. The second extension will allow the term "writing" to encompass not only the product of writing but also the source of writing: that choice of the intellectual life as central to existence whenever anyone — man or woman -- asserts: "I will define myself as one who writes." In September 1991, in the context of a colloquium on "Rhetoric and Argumentation" organized by the Carleton University Centre for Rhetorical Studies, I presented a paper entitled "Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and the Question of Ethos" (1991b). This paper had both a general and a special component. The general component -- the theory -- was tied to the rhetorical proof of ethos, the appeal to the character and authority of the speaker. Together with logos, the appeal to reason, and pathos, the appeal to the emotions, it makes up the system of the three artificial proofs, defined by Aristotle, which are the sine quae non of rhetorical argument. The special component -- the instance -- was Deirdre Bair s article, Do as She Said, Not as She Did," which had previously appeared in the Magazine section of the Sunday Times. This article was treated as an exercise in forensic rhetoric. Since Simone de Beauvoir stood accused of breach of contract, it was incumbent on Ms. Bair, the advocate, to provide her client with a reasonable and persuasive defense. nri • i r One part of that defense made use of the strategy of [turning] [s/c] what has been said 188 against oneself upon the one who said it." This is the tu quoque fallacy in Standard View informal logic but in rhetoric, it is one of Aristotle’s 28 valid topics of invention (Rhet. 2,23:1398a in Kennedy, 1991: 194). Thus: "we don't impose this standard-of perfection upon male writers; we don’t discredit their work when wè learn how reprehensible or disappointing their lives may have been. No one has suggested, for example, that we reject the existential philosophy of Sartre because of his notorious womanizing or his self-serving behavior during World War II, but they do seem to believe we should reject de Beauvoir's because she went along with it." (Bair, New York Times, p. 34.) In my earlier rebuttal, I maintained that while Ms. Bair had a general case, she did not necessarily have this particular case, and I provided counter-examples involving men: one involved Sartre himself, the other involved the controversial theorist Paul de Man.^ Here, I have chosen to explore some possible implications of that "general case." In this last decade of the twentieth century, I do not think it is any longer matter for dispute that for most of human history, while men were Dy no means totally exempt from sanctions, women were more severely treated for essentially the same behavior and desires.The traditional double standard in matters of sexual activity provides an obvious example, but I will be (re)examining rather the traditional double standard in matters of intellectual activity. In the past, — caeteris paribus -- if a man chose to concern himself with matters of an intellectual nature, then he joined a well-respected company, but if a woman chose to concern herself with matters of an intellectual nature, then the term "blue-stocking" was rarely far behind. Examples, both historical and fictional, abound. Aurore Dupin became George Sand, Marian Evans became George Eliot, the Brontes presented themselves to the world as Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. If we were French majors, we could be taught by Molière to mock Les Femmes savantes. If we liked the Savoy operas, we could have the pleasure of meeting Gilbert and Sullivan's Princess Ida. So is this what we have in the case of Simone de Beauvoir? Well, we do and we don’t. Suppose we et "what she said" on feminism represent her choices as a "writer" and "what she did" for Jean-Paul Sartre represent her choices as a "woman." Now, since for Deirdre Bair and her disappointed audience, her choices as a writer were correct and her choices as a woman were fallacious, their conclusion is that while Simone de Beauvoir was indeed a "blue¬ stocking," -i.e. committed to the intellectual life - UNFORTUNATELY, she was not "blue¬ stocking" enough. However, Kathleen Riordan Speeth opines in the Simone de Beauvoir Studies: "On paper she trusted her head more than her heart; in the everyday world she trusted femininity over feminism . And we have all paid the price in learning from her books and not from her loyal heart" (1991:60). So here the conclusion is the contrary: while Simone de Beauvoir was indeed a blue¬ stocking, FORTUNATELY, she was not blue-stocking enough. And from these two conflicting valorizations of that same particular instance, the different choices made by the same woman, one set of choices as intellectual and the opposite set of choices as woman, we are being asked, directly or indirectly, to draw a more general inference, either (1) choices as an intellectual should take priority over choices as a woman, or its contrary, (2) choices as a woman should take priority over choices as an intellectual. Now I must ask my audience to permit another extension of the boundaries of terms. Let choices made in terms of intellectual criteria be represented by the term of "logos" and let choices made in terms of emotional criteria be represented by the term of "pathos" If this is accepted, then I now have the central problem of this paper: What should be the role of logos and what should be the role of pathos in the lives of women, when they "say" and when they "do"? In another paper published in the 1991 issue of the Simone de Beauvoir Studies, Donald L. Hatcher expounds three different theories of self he ascribes to three different women writers (1991:183). 2 I will speak only to the theories as summarized and paraphrased. They are as follows: .
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