186 Hypatia

-. 1979. Deux chapitres inedits de “L‘invit6e.” (Two unpublished chapters of She Came to Stay). In Les Ecrits de Simone de Beauvoir, ed. Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier. Paris: Gallimard. -. 1982. When things of the spirit come first. Trans. Patrick O’Brian. New York: Pantheon. -. 1990. She came to stay. Trans. Yvonne Moyse and Roger Senhouse. New York: Norton. Fullbrook, Kate, and Edward Fullbrook. 1994. Simone de Beauvoir andlean-Paul Sartre: The remaking of a twentieth-century legend. New York: Basic Books. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1956. Being and nothingness: An essay on phenomenological ontology. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Philosophical Library. Simons, Margaret A. 1998. Beauvoir and “The second sex”: Feminism, race, and the origins of existentialism. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman &. Littlefield.

Simone de Beauvoir: A Critical Reader. Edited by ELIZABETH FALLAIZE. London and New York: Routledge, 1998.

Kris tana Arp

As this special volume attests, there has been a recent resurgence of inter- est in Simone de Beauvoir. A number of books on her have been published in the last several years. However, Elizabeth Fallaize’s book, Simone de Beau- uoir: A Critical Reader (1998), occupies a special niche. Many of its essays are excerpts from studies done of Beauvoir’s work before this latest renaissance. Some of these studies are not in print in the United States. Some are perhaps unfamiliar to present-day readers or those from different disciplines. In addi- tion, the articles reprinted here are otherwise not easily accessible. Fallaize has performed an important service by gathering them all in one place and by carefully editing, presenting, and, in some cases, translating them. The book is divided into three sections, the first entitled “Readings of The Second Sex.” Aside from Judith Okely’s piece that assesses Beauvoir’s chapter on myths from an anthropological standpoint, the essays mainly address the philosophical aspects of this work. Beauvoir herself of course swore that she was not a philosopher and that Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1953) was the sole philosophical foundation for all her work. Some recent analyses have attempted to turn this picture on its head by arguing that Beauvoir was a central influence on, or even the origin of, the philosophical doctrines put for- ward in Being and Nothingness. None of the writers in this book addresses this issue. But two emphasize Beauvoir’s intellectual independence from Sartre. The Swedish scholar Eva Lundgren-Gothlin argues that Beauvoir turned to G. W. F. Hegel to find a satisfactory theoretical model with which to explain the subjugation of women (Lundgren-Gothlin’s essay is taken from her book Book Reviews 187

Sex and Existence [1996] ). In opposition to other scholars, she argues that the French Hegelian Alexandre Kojsve, not Sartre, influenced Beauvoir’s in- terpretation of Hegel. Following Hegel and Kojsve, Beauvoir envisioned a possible resolution to the struggle for recognition-reciprocal recognition- whereas Sartre’s view of self-other relations in Being and Nothingness rules such reciprocity out. However, Lundgren-Gothlin judges, Beauvoir was not critical enough of the sexist presuppositions of Hegel’s thought, citing the same pro- nouncements Beauvoir makes that subsequent feminists have criticized. Another piece that stresses Beauvoir’s philosophical originality is “Beau- voir: The Weight of Situation,” taken from Sonia Kruks’s book Situation and Human Existence (1990). For some time, Kruks has been doing excellent work placing Beauvoir within the wider phenomenological tradition. In this piece, she argues that, starting with the early essay Pyrrhus et Cine‘as ( 1944) and cul- minating in The Second Sex (1989), Beauvoir elaborated a more nuanced po- sition on the nature and extent of human freedom than Sartre did in Being and Nothingness. According to Beauvoir, human freedom, which Sartre dra- matically proclaims is absolute, can under some conditions, notably condi- tions of severe oppression, “be reduced to no more than a suppressed potenti- ality” (Fallaize 1998,57). In The Second Sex, Beauvoir definitively breaks with the philosophical framework of Being and Nothingness by implying that a wom- an’s situation is a general one, not individually self-constituted, and one that she cannot transcend by an act of free choice. The phenomenology of Mau- rice Merleau-Ponty provides a better foundation for Beauvoir’s conception of subjectivity as socially mediated and embodied than does Sartre’s philosophy, Kruks suggests. Another piece in this section, Judith Butler’s landmark essay “Sex and Gen- der in Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex” (1986), highlights Beauvoir’s philo- sophical originality in a different way. In her introduction, Fallaize points out how this essay served as a foundation for Butler’s own subsequent work on a performative theory of gender. Butler argues that Beauvoir’s claim that one is not born but becomes a woman implies that gender is socially constructed and not natural, as people have insisted for centuries. But to the extent that we become women, gender is not something imposed solely from the outside. We must also construct ourselves as women, which leaves open the possibility that we could construct ourselves as something else. The “emancipatory potential” (Fallaize 1998,35) for women (and men) that this possibility contains should be embraced and acted on, Butler implies. Of course, the heavily voluntaristic reading that Butler gives of Beauvoir’s account of gender formation clashes with Kruks’s reading of Beauvoir’s treatment of oppression. Butler says that Beauvoir “gives Sartrean choice an embodied form” (Fallaize 1998,41), where- as Kruks holds that Beauvoir had jettisoned the Sartrean notion of choice by this point. Like Lundgren-Gothlin, Butler sees Hegel’s masterlslave dialectic as central to Beauvoir’s account of the roots of women’s oppression, but her 188 Hypatia

description of this dialectic is unrecognizable or at least at odds with Lundgren- Gothlin’s description. That tensions between different interpretations should arise in an anthology like this is inevitable, though, and even fruitful for discussion. The remaining essay in this section is an excerpt from Tori1 Moi’s book Simone de Beauuoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman ( 1990). Moi focuses more narrowly on Beauvoir’s role as a theorist of female emancipation. Read- ing Beauvoir in conjunction with Franz Fanon, Moi criticizes Beauvoir for not recognizing “the strategic value of a politics of difference” (Fallaize 1998, 88)’ as well as for offering a confused account of female sexuality, specifically les- bian sexuality. Actually this excerpt from Moi serves as a bridge to the next section of the book, “Readings of the Autobiography,” in that she views Beau- voir’s theoretical shortcomings through the prism of what we now know of Beauvoir’s personal life. It was Beauvoir’s refusal to come to terms, publicly or privately, with her own lesbian experiences that rendered her unable to ad- dress the subject coherently, Moi speculates. Also Beauvoir’s position as an independent woman did not let her see “femininity as a potentially positive force for change” (Fallaize 1998, 87). The three readings included in the next section on the autobiographical writings were written within the time span of 1966 to 1994. That they all adopt a psychoanalytic point of view is not surprising, given how well-entrenched psychoanalysis has become in twentieth century intellectual discourse. The differences in approach among them testify as to how much the psychoana- lytic point of view itself has changed, however. Francis Jeanson’s excerpt from 1966 analyzes Beauvoir’s relation to her father in classical Freudian terms. Written twenty years later, Elaine Marks’s piece, on the other hand, focuses on certain sexual associations embedded in the language of the autobiographi- cal accounts, betraying the influence of poststructuralism. Alex Hughes’s ar- ticle from 1994, “Murdering the Mother in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter,” is even more up-to-date in that it incorporates the perspectives of Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. Nor would Beauvoir object, I think, to commentators choosing to take this approach to her autobiographical writing. She and Sartre were far from hostile to psychoanalysis. But by attempting to write honestly about some of her most intimate experiences, Beauvoir opened herself up to being endlessly analyzed and sometimes judged harshly. In her early commentary on Beauvoir’s account of her mother’s death included here, for instance, Elaine Marks portrays her as a cold, selfish, globe-trotting careerist fixated on Sartre to the exclusion of everyone else. But in an imaginative bit of editing, Fallaize has paired this con- demnatory piece with an extract from a later article by Marks that views Beau- voir’s descriptions of her mother’s and Sartre’s death in a positive light as transgressions of the literary boundaries of phallocentric discourse. Beauvoir’s letters to Sartre and Nelson Algren were published in the 1990s, Book Reviews 189

after most of these pieces were written. They present a picture of her life some- what at odds with the official version put forward in her memoirs and inter- views. But I do not think that these documents, or any other documents wait- ing to be discovered, allow us to glimpse the true Beauvoir that she hid from public view. Rather, we now have many Beauvoirs. Indeed, someone attempt- ing to write today about her life must wander through a veritable hall of mir- rors. In her second later piece in this volume, Marks adopts the convention of putting the names of the people Beauvoir wrote about in single quotation marks (for example, ‘Sartre,’ ‘Franqoise de Beauvoir’) to show that she is talk- ing about the figures appearing in the texts, not the actual people. Beauvoir’s name itself is not treated in this way, but perhaps it should be. Granted, this would have the strange result of almost erasing the distinction between Beau- voir’s autobiographical writing and her fiction, especially because some of the central characters in her fiction seem to be stand-ins for herself. It is to Beauvoir’s fiction that the next and last section of this anthology turns. Again the time frame within which these pieces were composed spans a wide period. For instance, almost thirty years separate the first pair of articles on Beauvoir’s early novel She Came to Stay (1954).The influence of Lacan and Kristeva, apparent in the second piece by Jane Heath from 1989, shows how much literary theory has changed in the interim as well. Heath identifies Xavikre, the younger female in the love triangle the novel depicts, as “the lo- cus of the feminine within the text” (Fallaize 1998,173).Franfoise, the older female character and Beauvoir’s alter ego, is aligned with “the phallic econ- omy” (Fallaize 1998, 173), which Xavikre threatens to undermine. Heath’s reading has the interesting consequence of making Xavikre the true heroine of the book. Hazel Barnes’s piece, dated 1961, analyzes the same novel from the stand- point of Sartre’s theory of self-other relations in Being and Nothingness. Al- though this is the oldest piece in the collection, it may be the one that bears the most on current controversies. Barnes’s in-depth, subtle treatment of the complex themes these two works share in common could support two diamet- rically opposed opinions. First, it could support the commonly held assump- tion Barnes alludes to that the novel is just an application of Sartre’s theory to fictional characters. On the other hand, it can now be used to support the radical claim of Kate and Edward Fullbrook (1994) that Sartre took many of the central philosophical ideas of Being and Nothingness from an early draft of this novel. This is ironic, because Barnes has declared that she completely rejects the Fullbrooks’s thesis (Barnes 1997). Yet in 1961, Barnes did not rule out the possibility that Beauvoir “contributed to the formation of Sartre’s phi- losophy” (Fallaize 1998, 170), as an endnote included here shows. However, it is possible to accept that Beauvoir exerted an influence-even a strong in- fluence-upon the formation of Sartre’s philosophy and still reject the Full- brooks’s conclusions. 190 Hypatia

The two remaining pieces in this section, “Readings of the Fiction,” are not written from the standpoint of any specific intellectual doctrine. Anne Ophir’s piece from 1976 plumbs the emotional depth of Beauvoir’s late novella “The Woman Destroyed” (1969). The last piece in the anthology is the concluding chapter of Fallaize’s own book The Novels of Sirnone de Beauvoir (1988), still in print in the United States. This book focuses on the different narrative tech- niques Beauvoir uses throughout her fiction, managing to generate consider- able insight into its thematic content along the way. Even in Beauvoir’s early fiction, the book shows, the narrator is not always to be relied on. (So, for in- stance, the claim the character Blomart makes in The Blood of Others [1948] that he is responsible for the suffering of others, specifically for his lovet He- kne’s death, should not be taken at face value.) In the excerpt from the book included here, Fallaize traces how Beauvoir’s narrative strategy evolved over time. Whereas in Beauvoir’s early novels many voices are heard, some of them male and some of them quite authoritative, in her last work only a trio of quite unreliable female narrators speak, among them the suffering heroine of “The Woman Destroyed.” Fallaize speculates that this turn away from an authorita- tive male or third person narrator to a self-deceived female narrator reflects Beauvoir’s own anxiety about writing as a woman in the male literary tradi- tion in which she placed herself. Fallaize does not mention another possible explanation for Beauvoir’s later interest in female narratives of suffering. The letters in particular reveal how Beauvoir spent long hours listening to her friends Olga Kosakievitch, Bianca Bienenfeld, Natalie Sorokine, Violette Led duc, and Simone Jollivet’s tales of their troubles as they grew older. Fallaize’s collection is worthwhile as a resource for those interested in dif- ferent aspects of Beauvoir’s thought and for those teaching or taking courses and seminars on her. Fallaize also edits the collection well. Her introduction to the book and her summaries of the individual pieces ate concise and informa- tive. She is sensitive to the fact that the pieces were written at different times, some at times in which it was quite risky for a female intellectual to write about Beauvoir at all, much less to celebrate her work. Today it does not take quite so much courage, outside of France at least. Writers and scholars are approach- ing Beauvoir’s work, her life, and the history of her time from new and inter- esting angles. But it is important not to ignore the work of those who came before. This book familiarizes us with the earlier criticism as well as exposes us to some new approaches.

REFERENCES

Barnes, Hazel. 1997. The story I tell myself. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Beauvoir, Sirnone de. 1944. Pyrrhus et Cinias. Paris: Gallimard. Book Reviews 191

-. 1948. The blood ofothers. Trans. Y. Moyse and R. Senhouse. Cleveland: World Publishing. -. 1954. She came to stay. Trans. Y. Moyse and R. Senhouse. Cleveland: World Publishing. -. 1969. The woman destroyed. Trans. P. O’Brian. New York: Pantheon Books. Butler, Judith. 1986. Sex and gender in Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex. Yale French Studies 72: 35-39. Fallaize, Elizabeth. 1988. The novels of Simone de Beauvoir. London: Routledge. Fullbrook, Kate, and Edward Fullbrook. 1994. Simone de Beauvoir andJean-Paul Sartre: The remaking of a twentieth-century legend. New York: Basic Books. Kruks, Sonia. 1990. Situation and human existence. London: Unwin Hyman. Lundgren-Gothlin, Eva. 1996. Sex and existence. Hanover: University Press of New England. Moi, Toril. 1990. Simone de Beauvoir: The making of an intellectual woman. Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1953. Being and nothingness. Trans. Hazel Barnes. New York: Philo- sophical Library.