Background
Until recently, I thought I read de Beauvoir in my undergraduate degree. It was actually Simone Weil’s “A Poem of Force” I read alongside The Iliad. I’m aware of de Beauvoir through The Second Sex since it’s such a central text to feminist thinking. Recently, I learned that de Beauvoir considered herself a writer as opposed to a philosopher.
I wanted to read She Came to Stay or The Mandarins as these are her most well-known works. A small bookstore I visited with a friend had a copy of The Woman Destroyed.
Summary
The book is a collection of three short stories.
“The Age of Discretion” is about a woman’s struggle to let go of various things as she grows older. There are three main conflicts: her son’s decision to leave academia and work within the ministry of culture (I think), her husband’s increasingly soft and slow approach to things, and her intellectual stagnation. The first conflict drives the story as her son’s departure from academia to his new station is rife with political implications. I ranked this 2/3.
“The Monologue” was a stream of consciousness piece from a woman on new years. She’d been abandoned by her son and husband, whom she blamed for her loneliness. The narrator is really nasty, and the stream of consciousness is hard to follow. I had to parse sentences a couple of times. I didn’t like this story much at all, though I have a feeling the original French is better. This book was published in 1967. The main conflict in this story (and what makes the narrator so nasty) is her daughter’s suicide. Her daughter’s name is Sylvie, and Sylvia Plath committed suicide in 1963. I initially assumed this book was published before Plath… I’m unsure if there’s really a connection, but it just feels a bit tasteless. I ranked this 3/3.
“The Woman Destroyed” is about a woman—Monique—who allows her husband—Maurice—to maintain an affair. The story captures Monique’s spiral as she is unable to accept the reality of her circumstance. As Monique spirals, she becomes unlikable and increasingly unreliable. This story was difficult in that it opens with a likely heroine who progressively dissolves into a vestigial appendage of her husband who no longer wants her. Monique’s obsession is tragic when contrasted with her personality in the story’s beginning pages, and I found this made Maurice’s conflict avoidance abhorrent. This was particularly effective as Maurice continually cooed about not wanting to hurt Monique—while he plunged a knife into her. Ultimately, Monique was to blame—which her daughter Lucienne points out in the final pages of the story. I ranked this 1/3.
Thoughts
At first, I did not like this book. As I wrote out my thoughts, I realized the opposite was true. That said, my initial dislike was not entirely unfounded. I agree with the philosophy, but not with the politics.
Philosophy
As one may glean from the summaries, the reader is not supposed to relate to, or empathize with, each story’s narrator. The format of puppeting a caricature of that which the author seeks to critique can be awkward. De Beauvoir seems to blame each woman for her conflicts.
In this case, to blame the victim is not entirely bad. I liked “The Woman Destroyed” the most because I identified with Monique. Consequently, to judge Monique is to judge myself. Monique’s absurd passivity struck me as so familiar, as I used to slip into a similar frame of mind when in relationship with men.
If I don’t blame myself for what I went through, then who’s responsible? I must blame myself precisely so I can hold myself accountable. I write this now in the context of interpersonal affairs, but I operate with this interpretation of responsibility at my core.
So no, to blame the victim isn’t always an inherently bad thing. To blame the victim in literature is probably a safe way to extract any positive lesson from conflict. The written word is suitable for an exploration of one’s own circumstances for this reason. But this does not mean it is politically responsible.
Political
Relationships between people are complicated. Deleuze and Guattari discuss fluid systems of interconnected machines; people are their own collection of machines that have a logical boundary. There are a stunning number of ways one system of machines can interface with another system of machines. I spell this out because de Beauvoir casts people (I’ll expand this beyond just women) as somewhat simplistic in their social configurations.
I am attracted to the idea that I can be responsible for everything. I understand the Nietzschean superman as this: the one who is fully responsible for everything. This underlines the idea of “god is dead”—if you take full responsibility, you do not need god. Unfortunately, this perspective contains a fatal flaw. Nietzsche’s superman could only exist in a vacuum where the individual is somehow an individual without being part of a wider collective, and thus subject to influences beyond the scope of one’s control. The Nietzschean superman cannot selectively decide when to maintain responsibility and when to concede it.
Accountability sounds nice, but accountability can be farcical. One must understand the limitations of responsibility, which requires navigation between individual and collective weights. Weight changes constantly. Accountability diminishes in lucidity as time moves away from its articulation.
Right now, I like “The Woman Destroyed” so much because I see so much of my prior self in Monique—which in turn sharpens my awareness of how I may be like Monique right now. In the throes during my younger years, this would not have been helpful. As a political text—which contributes to discourse—The Woman Destroyed seems like a book of internalized misogyny. Indeed, a deeper read on my fondness of the titular story is it allows me to hate a projection of myself on the page. This is personally useful, but politically detrimental. Politics is not about the personal; it’s about the polis (duh). Answering “what is the text’s main point for women as a social group” would produce “stop being the victim” or “move on”. Profoundly easy to say, profoundly difficult to do.
The difficulty in “stop being the victim” or “move on” comes from how people are manufactured by their society. The hardware of the individual’s psyche is configured by various pressures—social, mental, and physiological—pulling and pushing constantly until a general shape takes form. This shape is both informed and reinforced by resultant material conditions—think to Monique’s economic reliance on Maurice, and how she could no longer engage work with any level of enthusiasm. It is inappropriate to tell a disabled person to walk faster or take the stairs; to help that person identify different means of mobility is productive, respectful, and spiritually significant.
I write all of this with awareness that de Beauvoir knew what she was doing. It’s in the title: this is the woman that has been destroyed. I think The Woman Destroyed is a good text from an educational perspective—woman to woman—but I would not recommend it as a political one.
The Woman Destroyed
The more I reflect on this particular story, the more detail strikes me as significant. I think I would like to write a longer-form essay on this story. Perhaps I will take what I’ve written here a bit deeper.
Quotes
Page 17; “The Age of Discretion”
The less I identify myself with my body the more I feel required to take care of it. It relies on me, and I looked after it with a bored conscientiousness, as I might look after a somewhat reduced, somewhat wanting old friend who needed my help.
Page 34
His sensitivity and moral values had lost their fine edge. Will he follow this tendency? More and more indifferent… I can’t bear it. This sluggishness of the heart is called indulgence and wisdom: in fact it is death settling down within you.
Page 48
Sometimes I would go so deeply to sleep on my divan that on waking I felt dazed and intensely distressed—it was as though my consciousness, rising up secretly from the darkness, was hesitating before taking up the flesh again. Or else I stared round at these familiar surroundings with unbelieving eyes—they were the illusory, shimmering other side of the void into which I had sunk. My gaze lingered with astonishment upon the things I had brought back from every part of Europe.
Page 52-53
It was an odd experience, this bringing to life of pages born of my pen and forgotten. From time to time they interested me—they surprised me as much as if someone else had written them; yet I recognized the vocabulary, the shape of the sentences, the drive, the elliptical forms, the mannerisms. These pages were soaked through and through with myself—there was a sickening intimacy about it, like the smell of a bedroom in which one has been shut up too long.
Page 54
One always has to wait until the sugar melts, the memory dies, the wound scars over, the sun sets, the unhappiness lifts and fades away. Strange anomaly of these two rhythms. My days fly galloping from me; yet the long dragging out of each one makes me weary, weary.
Page 117; “The Woman Destroyed”
Patience is not my outstanding virtue. But I certainly must do my best. And not only from a tactical point of view, but a moral one too. I have had exactly the kind of life I wanted—now I must deserve that privilege. If I fail at the first little snag everything I have thought about myself will have been mere vapouring.
Page 214
'It's a matter of statistics. When you put your money on married love you take the risk of being left flat at forty, empty-handed. You drew a losing ticket: you're not the only one.'
'I haven't crossed the Atlantic to hear you utter commonplaces.'
'It is so far from being a commonplace that you had never thought of it and that you don't even want to believe it now.'
'Statistics don't explain why it should happen to me personally!'
She shrugs; she changes the conversation; she takes me to the theatre; to the cinema; she shows me the town. But I go on relentlessly.