Studies Volume 13 1996 25

Can be OneT

Céline Léon

Now that her Letters to Sartre (.Lettres à Sartre) and her war diaries (Journal de guerre) of September 1939 to January 1941 have been published, posthumously revealing her physical relationships with younger women, Simone de Beauvoir’s silence over her homosexuality—in fact, her outright denial of it—has puzzled critics and angered lesbians and/or feminists. Whereas lesbians have underscored Beauvoir’s failure to recognize heterosexuality as a choice equal to that of homosexuality, feminists have denounced her refusal to openly challenge her admiration for Sartre as an outstanding example of bad faith. On the basis of this recently disclosed and intensely publicized “homo-sexual secret”3 in Beauvoir’s life, many critics have concluded that either as a lesbian or as a heterosexual Beauvoir was inauthentic—a serious accusation for a philosopher whose entire life and œuvre were explicitly dedicated to the ferreting out of bad faith (Marks 184). Continuing the dialogue I initiated elsewhere between classical and neofeminism, I should like to propose that if, in the instance of Beauvoir—as in that of many others—the homosexual scenario fills interpretive lacunae no better than the heterosexual one, it is because the answer lies elsewhere—in what has identified as the “hom(m)o-sexual” orientation of Western patriarchal societies.4 Although Beauvoir theoretically saw the homosexual option open to her as to other women, the authenticity or inauthenticity of her lesbianism—like that of her heterosexuality—remains undecidable and, in her case, as in that of many women, the reason for the blurred outlines must be sought, not in personal deficiencies, but rather in a cultural context whose “hom(m)o-sexual” structure vastly confuses women’s self-perception.

“Pro-choice ” ? In the chapter called “The Lesbian,” at the end of the first section of the second volume of The Second Sex (Le Deuxième Sexe), Beauvoir introduces homosexuality as neither a deliberate perversion nor a fate understood as the ineluctable consequence of anatomic, psychological, or external circum¬ stances, but rather as an alternative lifestyle, “an attitude chosen in a certain

Céline Léon is a professor at Grove City College, PA. Her many conference contributions and articles center on Kierkegaard and feminism. Professor Léon’s new book, edited with Sylvia Walsh, is Feminist Interpretations of S0ren Kierkegaard (Pennsylvania State UP). 26 Simone de Beauvoir Studies

situation—that is, at once motivated and freely adopted” (DS 2:217; Beauvoir’s emphasis).5 While she does not exclude the idea (often denounced by lesbians as a conceit of patriarchal discourse) that hormonal or anatomical factors may contribute to lesbian object choices, Beauvoir resolutely rejects the notion that anatomy alone is responsible for (one’s) sexual orientation, or even that there is such a thing as a Sapphic predestina¬ tion. In effect, she adumbrates recent scientific findings according to which sexual preference results not from a single determining factor, but from a highly complex interplay of genetic and sociocultural elements.6 As is evident from the interview she granted Alice Schwarzer in 1982, Beauvoir challenges compulsory heterosexuality: “Women should no longer let themselves be conditioned exclusively by male desire” (Schwarzer 119; my translation). Behind every lesbian’s reason for “making” herself “lesbian” lies, she suggests, a different understanding of what being a lesbian means. Just as there is no general essence shared by all women, there is no common lesbian nature, for generalizing about lesbian identity while refusing to generalize about women’s identity would clearly constitute a contradiction. From Beauvoir’s existentialist perspective, there is no more an essence of (the) sexual preference than there is an essence of , for, as Judith Butler pertinently shows: “Any effort to ascertain the ‘natural’ body before its entrance into culture is definitionally impossible, not only because the observer who seeks this phenomenon is himself/herself entrenched in a specific cultural language, but because the body is as well. The body is, in effect, never a natural phenomenon” (Butler 46). That, some forty years earlier, Beauvoir was perfectly conscious that sex is always already gendered is manifest in her contention: “The data of biology take on the value that the existent bestows upon them” (DS 1:76). Furthermore, contrarily to what has on occasion been alleged, Beauvoir does not reproduce the misconception which since Freud has become cliché, to wit, that the masculine half of the homosexual couple acts as a man desiring a woman who is equivalent to the phallic and/or who possesses attributes reminiscent of man’s. She sees instead that the homologous character of the parties involved favors a fluidity of roles, an infinite variety of combinations, and a salutary and protean inventiveness. But, agreeing with Sartre and Hegel that the master-slave dialectics may be acted out between men and, in fact, even more between men and women, Beauvoir points out the danger in which female lovers may find themselves: They may reproduce (with each other) heterosexual patterns of fear, domination, jealousy, and oppressiveness.8 In her 1976 interview with Schwarzer, recognizing that “sexuality can be a dreadful trap,” she strongly refuses the emphasis that neofeminism places on the body, and warns that, far from representing a panacea, “in itself, homosexuality is as restricting as