Becoming Beauvoir Read online

  Although Beauvoir’s relationship with religion would become increasingly ambivalent as she approached her twenties, in childhood it inspired her to question the role of girls in her society. In the sight of God, she wrote in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, her soul was no less precious than those of little boys: so why should she envy them?14 In a 1965 interview, Beauvoir reiterated that her strict religious upbringing ‘helped her enormously’ precisely because she thought of herself as ‘a soul’. ‘At the level of souls,’ she said, there was no variable valuation of human beings: ‘God would have loved me as much if I had been a man, there was no difference between male and female saints, it was a completely asexual domain.’ Before encountering intellectual egalitarianism, Beauvoir wrote, she found in her religion ‘a species of moral, spiritual equality’ that counted for a lot in the shaping of her life’s convictions.15 But a dissonance dawned in her awareness – between equality preached and inequality practised. She remembered her father saying with pride, ‘Simone has a man’s brain; she thinks like a man; she is a man.’ And yet, she objected, ‘everyone treated me like a girl’.16

  As she grew, Beauvoir noted that her father’s interest in her education increased – and so did his interest in her appearance.17 Beauvoir wrote in her memoirs that she ‘began to take an interest in the sort of figure I thought I should cut in life’, taking inspiration from Jo March in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Even at the age of 11 Beauvoir was captivated by her.18 Jo was not the most virtuous or beautiful of her sisters, but her passion for learning and desire to write shone like a beacon in the imagination of the young Simone. Georges de Beauvoir saw things differently. As long as he approved of her, Beauvoir felt, she could be sure of herself. But gradually the years of flowing praise gave way to disappointment. He appreciated elegance and beauty in women; her sister demonstrated these qualities to a higher degree and so she, like Amy in Little Women, won affirmation and affection.

  Simone, like Jo, threw herself into books: she read religious works – The Imitation of Christ, a Handbook of Ascetic and Mystical Theology – and parentally approved works of history and literature, French and English. She loved English literature, reading Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan as a child, honing skills she would later use to read the Brontës and Virginia Woolf in their native tongue.19 Over time, her parents’ prohibitions and her cousin Madeleine’s insinuations led her to realize that books could teach her things her parents wouldn’t. Madeleine was allowed to read whatever she wanted to; what was she missing?20 When left alone in the flat, she raided the bookshelves, reading her father’s worn copies of Bourget, Alphonse Daudet, Marcel Prévost, Maupassant and the Goncourts: they supplemented her sexual education.21

  Novels also helped her see the questions hanging unanswered in the world around her. Jo March did not want to do housework because it kept her from what she loved: so why did so many women do it when so few men did? Convention told her that marriage was her future, but Jo March resisted this unwanted fate: could she, too?22 George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, which Beauvoir read at the tender age of 11 or 12, raised other questions that would recur in her life and her philosophy. Eliot’s character Maggie Tulliver hated wasting her time on the repetitive labour of patchwork, where the same stitches had to be sewn again and again. How, if this domestic drudgery was what was expected of her, could Beauvoir be faithful to both herself and the desires of others? If ‘love’ meant that women sacrificed much and men little, was it worth it? In Beauvoir’s student diaries in 1926 she was still pondering the question of how much of herself to keep and how much to give away.23 Maggie Tulliver had fallen in love with the unworthy Stephen; but Beauvoir could not understand her attraction: ‘The only relationship I could imagine was a love-friendship one; in my view, the exchange and discussion of books between a boy and a girl linked them forever.’24

  Books offered Beauvoir more than an education: they were a refuge from the physical and emotional deprivation she encountered when she lifted her eyes from the page. They charted paths of resistance to the life that had been mapped out for her, even if they didn’t yet lead to places where women could make choices or give and receive bodily affection without shame. While the young Beauvoir was inspired by characters’ intellectual lives, she was discomfited by the physical; she was, to use her own word, prudish. She knew her own parents’ relationship was physically passionate – and later grieved the injustice of her mother’s loss when, at the age of 35, her father spurned her for extramarital pleasure.25 But the young Beauvoir found the sexual a matter of disgust: ‘Love, in my view, had nothing to do with the body.’26

  In the five years after the move to the rue de Rennes Beauvoir experienced the tumult of adolescence, the increasing tensions between her parents, and the end of two lives. After marrying, her beloved Louise had a baby, a little boy. But the boy developed bronchial pneumonia and died. It was an abrupt death, the first Simone had ever known, and she found it terrifying. Louise and her husband lived in a single room in a sixth-floor garret with their child – when they went to visit her afterwards she saw not only death for the first time, but also the sixth-floor hallway, where the landing had a dozen doors, each of which led to single rooms that housed entire families.27 Not long afterwards, the concierge’s son in the rue de Rennes became ill. He had tuberculosis and meningitis – and died a painful and protracted death. Simone and her family daily watched his decline; anyone who entered or exited the building had to pass the sick child on the way to the staircase. She worried, since children were dying, that she or Hélène would be next.

  Beauvoir would later write narratives that closely resembled her life in her novels, which has often obscured the line between the facts and fictions of her own biography. In her 1946 novel The Blood of Others she revisited these childhood memories of premature death. The novel’s protagonist, a man by the name of Jean Blomart, discovers ‘original evil’ when he hears the words ‘Louise’s baby is dead’:

  Once again I see the twisted staircase, the stone corridor with those many doors, all alike; mother told me that behind every door there was a room in which a whole family lived. We went in. Louise took me in her arms, her cheeks were flabby and wet; mother sat on the bed bedside her and began to talk to her in a low voice. In the cradle was a white-faced baby with closed eyes. I looked at the red tiles, at the bare walls, at the gas ring, and I began to cry. I was crying, mother was talking, and the baby remained dead.28

  How, Blomart asks a few pages later, can he smile when he knows Louise is weeping? Throughout her life Beauvoir would find herself aghast at the scandal of human indifference to the suffering of others.

  At home, however, Simone wished that her mother would show her daughters a little more indifference. Both sisters described their adolescence as painful, and their relationships with their mother as particularly tense. From the age of 12 or 13 Simone found her hostile and even ‘unbearable’; Hélène described her concept of motherhood as ‘totally tyrannical’29 and thought that she wanted to live through her daughters, and for her daughters to live for her – a desire they were unwilling to fulfil.30

  It is not difficult to understand their unwillingness: their mother played the dutiful wife while their father’s behaviour became ever more objectionable. Bridge in the afternoon had already given way to bridge after dinner; he spent more and more of his hours and his earnings on drinking and games while Françoise scrimped to meet the needs of their household. By daylight, Simone and Hélène watched their mother struggle to provide and care for them and their father make scenes when she asked for housekeeping money; after nightfall they heard late homecomings, fights, and talk of brothels, mistresses, gambling.

  In A Very Easy Death, Beauvoir recounted her mother’s loss of patience with the situation – eventually Madame de Beauvoir would slap and needle her husband, making scenes in private and public alike. Later in life, Beauvoir reflected on the way her mother felt torn between contradictory desires:

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bsp; It is impossible for anyone to say ‘I am sacrificing myself’ without feeling bitterness. One of Maman’s contradictions was that she thoroughly believed in the nobility of devotion, while at the same time she had tastes, aversions and desires that were too masterful for her not to loathe whatever went against them. She was continually rebelling against the restraints and the privations that she inflicted upon herself.31

  How to resolve these conflicting desires – to live a life of devotion to others or to live life for oneself – was to become one of the central questions of Beauvoir’s student diaries, existentialist ethics and feminism. Madame de Beauvoir was a devout Catholic woman, who raised her daughter on a spiritual diet of saints and martyrs. This provided Simone with a catalogue of exemplary lives in which self-sacrifice was always a key ingredient. In some cases, this self-sacrifice resulted in apotheosis – making oneself nothing was the way to become divine. Simone began to find solitude the most exalting state; she wanted to reign ‘alone over [her] own life’.32 Religious refrains would reverberate in her later works, as would her mother’s loss of prestige. Although she does not claim it to be autobiographical, there is a passage in The Second Sex where Beauvoir discusses the rebellion of daughters as especially violent when daughters have watched their mothers sacrifice themselves on undeserving altars: they see that in ‘reality this thankless role does not lead to any apotheosis; victim, she is scorned; shrew, she is detested. […] Her daughter wants not to take after her’.33

  The circumstances at home were increasingly stressful, but school still offered stability and one companionship that rivalled even the deliciousness of solitude. Zaza’s friendship continued to bring Simone pleasure and confidence: they were competitive, studious and dubbed ‘the inseparables’ by their teachers and peers. Their fathers were of the same social class, and by some miracle Madame Lacoin endeared herself to Madame de Beauvoir, so the girls were allowed to go to the Lacoins’ house for visits. The Lacoins did not know about the Beauvoirs’ relative poverty, and the Beauvoirs did not know about the Lacoins’ relative informality at home (their children were allowed to run and jump indoors, to overturn furniture!),34 but apart from Hélène – who initially felt displaced by the presence of Zaza in Simone’s affections – all parties were satisfied that this friendship was suitable.

  Both girls were interested in ideas: Simone could talk with Zaza about the things that interested her and voice her questions aloud. Simone usually came in first place in academic subjects at school, but Zaza beat her in athletics and music. As they grew into young women together, Zaza became increasingly pretty and graceful; Simone’s face grew blotchy and her body awkward. This changed when Simone was around 17; but at the time she was self-consciously aware that her friend’s life had many physical, financial and familial charms that were conspicuously absent from her own.

  They shared a great deal – but Simone’s desire for closeness was not fully reciprocated, in part because Zaza wanted a kind of relationship with her mother that Simone either did not want or could not have. Zaza had a full life, with eight siblings and a successful father, but she only felt special when she was singled out in her mother’s attention. Simone believed that Zaza was Madame Lacoin’s only confidante – once, in a rare moment of intimacy, Zaza told Simone that her mother had told her about the ‘horror’ of her wedding night. Madame Lacoin told her daughter that she was disgusted by sex and that the conceptions of her nine children had all been devoid of passion.35 Madame Lacoin had only had an elementary education, and while it was fine for Zaza to get good grades it was more important that she assume her family responsibilities, for these would prepare her for her own future as a wife. She expected her to make the best marriage in the family.

  Simone had always been perplexed by the dynamics of this family, but she was taken aback one summer when she went to visit Zaza at the Lacoin’s estate in the Landes. When she arrived, Zaza was confined to a sofa with a large gash on her leg. Once they were alone, Zaza admitted that the wound was self-inflicted: she had hit her own leg with an axe. Why!? Beauvoir asked. Because she wanted to be free of the expectations of her able-bodied self: social visits, garden parties, watching her younger siblings. Although she didn’t mention Zaza by name, Beauvoir would write this incident, too, into The Second Sex.36

  As Simone and Hélène grew older, their shared loneliness gave way to shared resentment. The sisters were also beginning to rebel – albeit in less violent ways. They sneaked out of the apartment when their parents weren’t home to have café-crèmes at La Rotonde – a place whose glamourous clientele had fascinated them for hours as they watched from the balcony of their flat.37

  When their parents were home it was increasingly clear that their father took it to be a sign of personal failure that his daughters required formal qualifications: had they had dowries they could have aspired to good marriages rather than employment. After the First World War this situation was far from unique: the dowries of many bourgeois Frenchwomen had been destroyed by inflation, and education was the necessary path in ensuring that they would have the means to live. But this did not stop people of Simone’s parents’ class thinking it was beneath them for their daughters to receive higher education. For them, training for a profession was a sign of defeat.

  Simone’s father’s early pleasure in her precocious intelligence was rooted in his expectation that it would help her shine in the glittering social spheres of his childhood: to succeed there a woman needed to be beautiful, of course, and to be well read in order to be a good conversationalist. He liked intelligence and wit, but he did not like intellectuals and women’s rights. Even so, eventually the reality sunk in that, unlike her cousin Jeanne, who would go on to be the châtelaine of the family estate, Simone would inherit nothing. He used to say to his daughters that they would never marry, announcing with bitterness in his voice that they would have to work for their living.38

  So Simone confronted confusingly contradictory expectations: to succeed as a woman she must be accomplished and educated; but not too accomplished, not too educated. Her mother’s wishes provided her with a catch-22 of a different kind. Since their household had no servants, Françoise would have liked her daughters’ help. But Simone needed to study to succeed, and refused to spend time learning the ‘feminine’ skills she had no desire whatsoever to employ. The anger and ambivalence Françoise felt at her own situation was often unleashed on Simone.

  Everywhere Simone looked she felt the weight of the expectations of others: often these were oppressive; occasionally they would let in fresh air instead of shutting it out. Jacques Champigneulle, Simone de Beauvoir’s childhood fiancé, admired both Beauvoir sisters as they were, and continued to pursue their conversation when their father no longer considered them worthy interlocutors. Jacques’ father owned a stained glass manufacturing plant on the boulevard du Montparnasse, and he frequently visited the Beauvoirs: Georges listened to him, treating him like an adult; Françoise loved his manners.

  When Georges no longer found Simone’s ideas interesting or amusing – reminding him, as they did, of his own failure – Jacques filled the conversational gap. At first Simone was puzzled by the way they would sit in the drawing room: Jacques and Georges would discuss something interesting while the women, much like Maggie Tulliver, were expected to sit quietly and sew or sketch. Initially Jacques deferred to Georges, but then became more liberal and more vocal, challenging his uncle’s conservatism. So Georges decided not to delay his nightly bridge game by staying in the apartment to chat; he dismissed Jacques to his daughters. This intended slight delighted the cousins: now they could be together, exchanging ideas and books more freely. Conversations with Jacques led Simone to realize that her body was not the only attractive thing about her; a man might be – in fact, this man was – attracted to her mind.

  But Jacques’ attentions were hot and cold: sometimes he visited regularly and sometimes he was absent for unexplained and prolonged periods of time. Although she later
downplayed the relationship, claiming in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter that she looked on him ‘as a sort of elder brother’,39 for a long time Simone dreamed of a future with him – and even at the time of meeting Sartre, he was one of the three men who, in different ways, vied for her affections.40

  Although it lasted for years, Simone’s desire for Jacques may have arisen as a response to parallel movements in the life of Zaza, whose mother had started introducing her daughter to one man after another. This repulsed Zaza, who didn’t see the difference between marrying ‘for convenience’ and prostitution. She had been taught to respect her body and it seemed to her that – whatever financial or family reasons there may be – it was not respectful to give it to a man without love. And yet, in the Lacoin family there were two paths open to women: a marriage or a convent.41 Zaza was beginning to dread both.

  Nevertheless, her family – with dowries of more than 250,000 francs for each of their five daughters – were identifying potential suitors in a systematic fashion. The Beauvoirs were in no position to do the same, so in later years Simone thought Jacques was her way of coping: to keep in step with Zaza she imagined her love for him. But those around her at the time – and, indeed, her diaries from the late 1920s – attested to the strength of her feelings for him. They also expressed indignation at his treatment of her: Hélène thought Jacques played the coquette, and that he wasn’t worthy of her sister.