Beauvoir in Time Value Inquiry Book Series Founding Editor Robert Ginsberg Executive Editor Leonidas Donskis† Managing Editor J.D. Mininger volume 348 Philosophy, Literature, and Politics Edited by J.D. Mininger (lcc International University) The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/vibs and brill.com/plp Beauvoir in Time By Meryl Altman leiden | boston This is an open access title distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license, which permits any non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided no alterations are made and the original author(s) and source are credited. Further information and the complete license text can be found at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ The terms of the CC license apply only to the original material. The use of material from other sources (indicated by a reference) such as diagrams, illustrations, photos and text samples may require further permission from the respective copyright holder. An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. More information about the initiative can be found at www. knowledgeunlatched.org. Cover illustration: Simone de Beauvoir in Beijing 1955. Photograph under CC0 1.0 license. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2020023509 Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 0929-8436 isbn 978-90-04-43120-1 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-43121-8 (e-book) Copyright 2020 by Meryl Altman. Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. 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This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner. <UN> Contents Acknowledgements vii Introduction: Before We Said “We” 1 1 Unhappy Bodies: The Frigid Woman in The Second Sex 15 1 A Passion for Frigidity? 19 2 Who Was Wilhelm Stekel? 22 3 Stekel (and Freud) in The Second Sex 25 4 Stekel par lui-même 35 5 What She Made of What He Made of Us 40 6 The Trouble with Happy 59 7 Misery, Agency, Ethics 66 8 Therapy and Self-Improvement 77 9 Last Thoughts 82 2 Simone de Beauvoir and Lesbian Lived Experience 84 1 Where the Lesbians Are 88 2 Reading in Time 91 3 The Time of Writing 99 4 Between Gide and Proust 103 5 Lesbian Reading 107 6 Lesbians and L’invitée 112 7 Last Thoughts 114 3 Nothing to Say about Race and Class? 116 1 Beauvoir’s Trip to America, and What She Found There 118 2 Materialist Analysis and Working Women’s Lives in The Second Sex 129 3 Questions of Exclusion, Questions of Method 148 4 “Others” and Analogies: Rereading the Introduction after Anna Julia Cooper 157 5 Imaginary Dialogues: Anna Julia Cooper, Other Black Women Writers 171 6 Spelman in Time: What Got Lost, and What Was Needed 176 7 Different Legacies: From Audre Lorde to Judith Butler 195 8 Beauvoir’s Other “Others”: Nation, Class, Colonialism 199 vi Contents 9 Beauvoir’s Early Political Thinking and Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté 206 10 Last Thoughts 235 4 Beauvoir and Blackness 237 1 Two-Way Streets: Richard Wright, Psychology, and Politics 237 2 Lost in Translation 242 3 Violence and Authenticity 250 4 Surrealism's Paradoxical Legacy 257 5 Surrealism and Politics: More Two-Way Streets 264 6 Who Was Michel Leiris? 273 7 Beauvoir and Surrealism: L’invitée (Again) 279 8 Myths and Travels 294 9 Meanwhile, Back in New York… 300 10 Beauvoir Reads America, America Reads Beauvoir 308 11 Reading Beauvoir with Fanon 320 12 Unflattering Portraits, New Ways to Live 337 5 The East Is Real: Orientalism and Its Enemies 347 1 Algeria without Apology 347 2 A Response to “Occidental Dreams” 364 3 Harem Trouble 375 4 Theories and Histories 387 5 The Myth Itself, and Not the Thing 394 6 Anti-orientalism in The Second Sex: Plus Jamais Claudel 407 7 Pour en finir avec Montherlant 421 8 But We Know So Much More about This Now 426 9 Harem Trouble 2.0: The Veil 432 10 One Last Imaginary Dialogue, and A Few Real Ones 448 11 Last Thoughts 462 6 Beauvoir in China 464 1 An Essay on China 464 2 Reality-Testing and Cold War Frames 477 3 Orientalisms, Anti-orientalisms, Alternatives 483 4 Last Thoughts: Dateline Beijing 494 Bibliography 501 Index 542 Acknowledgements This book has been so long in the making that I’ve mentally revised the ac- knowledgments many times, as blocking figures became helping figures and vice versa. It would be impossible to thank everyone properly, and an account of the project’s vicissitudes would be dull. I am certain that Beauvoir in Time could not have been completed without the intellectual and moral support of Sonia Kruks, Keith Nightenhelser, and Deborah Cameron. I am happy to acknowledge the generous and sustained assistance I’ve re- ceived from DePauw University’s Faculty Development Program, which sup- ported sabbatical leaves and crucial conference travel, and to express my grati- tude for the skilled and helpful staff at DePauw’s Roy O. West Library. Thanks are also due to several decades of Feminist Theory students who have worked through The Second Sex, and some other heavy books, with me, year after year. I am grateful also for the opportunity to spend winter and spring 2014 as a Visit- ing Fellow of Mansfield College, Oxford, and for the warm hospitality I was offered there by the Principal, Baroness Helena Kennedy, and by Ros Ballaster, Lucinda Rumsey, Kathryn Gleadle, Michèle Mendelssohn, and Dana Mills, among others. Digging further back, this project owes a great deal to French teachers, espe- cially Miss Ten Eyck at Croton-Harmon High School and then George Moskos at Swarthmore College. George and my other Swarthmore professors (Phil Weinstein, Craig Williamson, John Hinchey, Bob Roza, Lucy McDiarmid) passed on to us a training in close reading and literary history and theory that I’ve used constantly since, while encouraging us to pursue our own indepen- dent lines of thinking wherever these might lead, without regard to orthodox- ies or disciplinary boundaries. I cannot imagine who I would be if I’d gone to college anywhere else. Chapter 4 shows a particular debt to my American Studies coursework with Ann Douglas and Sacvan Bercovitch at Columbia University. The influence of seminars jointly taught there by Nancy Miller and Carolyn Heilbrun, and the intellectual community of graduate students that emerged from those classes, is visible throughout my work. Mary Dearborn and Julie Abraham have been indispensable interlocutors, then and long afterwards. I’m grateful also to two groups that met “off the grid” in those years, filling in the gaps in my formal edu- cation. The first was a graduate student work-in-progress group, mostly histori- ans, including Annelise Orleck, Nancy Robertson, Susan Yohn, Barbara Balliet, and Claire Potter, that met at NYU. The other group, which began as the plan- ning committee for “The Scholar and the Feminist Conference IX: Feminist viii Acknowledgements Politics of Sexuality” at Barnard College (1981), was led by Carole Vance and in- cluded Ann Snitow, Kate Ellis, Ellen Willis, Ellen DuBois, Francis Doughty, Am- ber Hollibaugh, and Esther Newton. From these women, and especially from Carole, I learned much of what I know about feminist activism, theory, and his- tory. I learned especially to look for, and value, complexity: to listen for all the parts of the story, to remember that there is always more than one story to tell. More recently, as I’ve branched out from literary study to engage increas- ingly with philosophical topics, I’ve been grateful for the welcome and the guidance I’ve found through FEAST (Feminist Ethics and Social Theory), the IAPh (International Association of Women Philosophers), and the Austral- asian Society for Continental Philosophy. Gaile Polhaus, Richard Lynch, Laura Werner, Lorraine Code, Margaret Simons, and Marguerite LaCaze have at dif- ferent times provided particularly meaningful help. Keith Nightenhelser has been a peerless philosophical cicerone and intellectual companion. Finally, the conferences of the International Simone de Beauvoir Society have been frequent, friendly opportunities to share work and to hear the latest develop- ments in Beauvoir scholarship, both from established scholars in the field and younger researchers who bring new ideas and new energy to the work. I am grateful especially to Margaret Simons, Tove Pettersen, and Jennifer McWeeny for their tireless work to sustain the shared project of Beauvoir studies. ... Specific chapters incur particular debts. Portions of chapter one appeared as “La Femme Frigide dans Le deuxième sexe” in Le Cinquantenaire du deuxième Sexe, ed. Sylvie Chaperon, Paris, Syllepse, 2002. An earlier version of Chapter 2 appeared as “Simone de Beauvoir and Lesbian Lived Experience,” Feminist Studies 33.1, Spring 2007. Some passages from Chapter 4 appeared in my 2013 article, “Was Surrealism a Humanism? The Case of Michel Leiris,” Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literature, 67:1. All this material is reprinted by permission. A conversation with Didier Eribon at the Future of the Queer Past conference (Chicago, September 2000) was crucial to the development of Chapter 2. Sara Lennox encouraged me to write a conference paper, “Beauvoir and Blackness,” for a 2006 conference in Berlin sponsored by BEST, “Black European Studies in Transnational Perspective,” which became the germ for what is now Chapters 3 and 4.