Tonini, Sandrine (2010) From existentialist anxiety to existential joy: gendered journeys towards (re)commitment in Les Mandarins and Il rimorso as evidence of Simone de Beauvoir's influence on Alba de Céspedes' writing. PhD thesis. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/2215/ Copyright and moral rights for this thesis are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Glasgow Theses Service http://theses.gla.ac.uk/ [email protected] 1 From Existentialist Anxiety to Existential Joy: Gendered Journeys Towards (Re)commitment in Les Mandarins and Il rimorso as Evidence of Simone de Beauvoir’s Influence on Alba de Céspedes’ Writing Sandrine Tonini Submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of Modern Languages and Cultures French and Italian Sections Faculty of Arts University of Glasgow June 2010 2 Cette thèse est dédiée à ma mère qui éclaire le chemin, et à ma fille qui m’incite à le suivre. 3 Abstract Whilst Simone de Beauvoir has become an icon of feminism, and The Second Sex in particular been recognized as a point of reference for writers and philosophers worldwide, her reputation in Italy was not established immediately, and there she remains a controversial figure. This study focuses on one aspect of her influence in Italy: the relationship between her writing and that of the Italian best-selling author, Alba de Céspedes. It is the first in-depth analysis of the complex pattern of influence evident in the relationship between what the two authors have described as their most important novels, Les Mandarins and Il rimorso. Part I deals with the historical and theoretical backgrounds to this research. It provides a study of the socio-political events that are relevant to the narrative contents, and an overview of different theories of intertextuality. Part II is a detailed comparative analysis of the novels and establishes for the first time the precise nature of the relationship between Les Mandarins and Il rimorso ideologically and philosophically, as well as intertextually. In particular, this work explores a number of superficial resemblances between the novels‘ structures, characterization and thematic content, and it also reveals a more sophisticated relation that is not manifest in the similarities, but rather in the way the texts differ from each other. This thesis brings two significant contributions to literary research: firstly, it will become evident that studies of de Céspedes‘ life and works should include close attention to de Beauvoir; and secondly, it is an addition to a popular area of de Beauvoirian studies, that of the charting of the extent of the French author‘s philosophical and ideological influence and of its legacy worldwide. 4 Table of Contents Abstract 3 Acknowledgement 5 Introduction 6 Part I Chapter One France: From Liberation to the Turn of the 1950s 18 Chapter Two Italy: From the End of the War to Early 1960s 48 Chapter Three Intertextuality 76 Part II Chapter Four Immanence and Transcendence: Delineating the Woman‘s Place and her Function as a Mother 95 Chapter Five Illustrating the Contingency of Freedom: Mirror-Characters and the Past 117 Chapter Six The Criticism of Psychoanalysis and Religion: Rethinking Normality 143 Chapter Seven Existential Joy and the Positive Other: Toward a New Type of Relationship 168 Chapter Eight Intellectual Commitment in Les Mandarins and Il rimorso 196 Conclusion 217 Bibliography 221 5 Acknowledgement I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisor, Dr. Penelope Morris, for all her help and support throughout the years, and for her level-headed presence in times of adversity. 6 Introduction In her study of the Italian novel between 1945 and 1965, Caesar stresses the importance of women‘s writing in this period of time because of its instrumental role in the ‗deprovincialisation of Italian culture‘.1 This female literary production bears the marks, both stylistically and thematically, of their authors‘ ‗long apprenticeship served as readers and translators of the best that European literature could offer from the previous decades‘.2 Caesar also puts emphasis on the significance of Virginia Woolf‘s A Room of One’s Own for female authors of the time, as a symbol of their commitment to writing and the difficulties encountered in a predominantly male literary establishment. While she includes Alba de Céspedes in her list of Italian women writers who may have come into contact with works of major European authors such as Woolf, Gide or Joyce in the literary journal Solaria — namely Anna Banti, Elsa Morante, Natalia Ginzburg, Lalla Romano, Anna Maria Ortese, Maria Bellonci, Gianna Manzini and Fausta Cialente — she also comments that ‗it is noticeable that where other writers turn to Virginia Woolf, de Céspedes is much closer to Simone de Beauvoir‘ and that Il rimorso has affinities with Les Mandarins.3 The resemblance between these works has been the object of further scholarly remarks in fact. For example, Merry sees Il rimorso as the Italian version of Les Mandarins when he asserts that the text has ‗all the hallmarks of the Mandarins and the intellectual novel which Calvino declared was missing from the Italian tradition‘,4 and Nerenberg observes that ‗both novels were written in a like vein‘.5 Yet, these are two works that were published nearly a decade apart. By the time Les Mandarins came out in France in 1954, and Il rimorso in Italy in 1963, both de Beauvoir and de 1 Ann Hallamore Caesar, ‗The novel, 1945-1965‘, in A History of Women’s Writing in Italy, ed. by Letizia Panizza and Sharon Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 205-237 (p. 205). 2 In this study, Caesar informs us that ‗Manzini, Romano, Banti and Ginzburg were all enthusiastic readers of Proust‘, that Maria Bellonci translated Stendhal‘s Chroniques Italiennes, Natalia Ginzburg translated the first volume of Proust‘s À la recherche du temps perdu, that Anna Banti translated Virginia Woolf‘s Jacob’s Room and that Gianna Manzini first read Mrs Dalloway in 1932. See pp. 206-7. 3 Caesar, p. 211. 4 Bruce Merry and Giovanni Cecchetti, eds, Women and Modern Italian Literature. Four Studies Based on the Work of Grazia Deledda, Alba de Céspedes, Natalia Ginzburg and Dacia Maraini (Townsville: James Cook University, 1990), p. 91. 5 Ellen Nerenberg, ‗Resistance and Remorse: Alba de Céspedes‘ Withdrawal from the Public Sphere‘, in Writing Beyond Fascism, ed. by Carole C. Gallucci and Ellen Nerenberg (London: Associated University Presses, 2000), pp. 223-246 (p. 241). 7 Céspedes had already established their international reputations as novelists, and more specifically as observers, thinkers and writers of the female condition — with varying degrees of fame or even notoriety. De Beauvoir became a major intellectual figure at the age of 35 with L’Invitée (1943), a fictionalized account of the relationship between herself, Sartre and Olga Kosakievicz, and a novel which marked the beginning of a prolific writing career. The following year, she published the philosophical essay Pyrrhus et Cinéas in which she examined the significance of situations with reference to individual freedom and the individual‘s relationship with Others, as will be discussed in Part II of this thesis. In 1945, her second novel Le Sang des autres, took the socio-political context of the war and the Resistance to show the way in which our being inevitably impinges on the existence of Others. That same year, her only play Les Bouches inutiles was performed in Paris, and with Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, she launched the politico-literary journal Les Temps Modernes. From this period onward, de Beauvoir‘s presence in the public eye was considerable because of her intellectual contribution to literature and Existentialism and later to the campaigning for women‘s rights, and not least because of her much-publicized, unconventional relationship with Sartre. After her trips to Spain and Portugal, she wrote newspaper articles condemning the Fascist regimes there and, to some extent, these informed her reflection on the Cold War and colonialism in Les Mandarins, which she started writing in 1949. Tous Les hommes sont mortels was published in 1946 and explored the necessity of death. In it, the immortal character Fosca comes to realize that the finite nature of life gives it value and that we must act collaboratively with Others. De Beauvoir produced her second philosophical essay in 1947, Pour Une morale de l’ambiguїté, and that same year she began working on the myths of femininity. In 1948, L’Existentialisme et la sagesse des nations, a collection of moral essays, and L’Amérique au jour le jour, an account of her first two trips to the US, were published. 1949 saw the publication of the two volumes of Le Deuxième sexe, her famous treatise on women, which was met at the time both with virulent criticisms and high praise. De Beauvoir won the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 1954 for Les Mandarins, and she published two political essays and one on the Marquis de 8 Sade (Faut-Il brûler Sade?) under the title Privilèges the following year.6 She recounted her trip to China in La Longue marche (1957), and in 1958 she published the first of the four volumes of her memoirs, Mémoires D’une jeune fille rangée, followed by La Force de l’âge in 1960, La Force des choses in 1963 and Tout Compte fait in 1972.