Beauvoir

		By J.N.C.
Simone De Beauvoir Jean Paul Sartre Nelson Algren Home Link #1 Link #2		Through her writings and the way she lived her life, Simone de Beauvoir helped many find a different perspective on their own lives, especially women. She was a professor, political activist, feminist, philosopher and author who published more than thirty writings. In her personal life, she was probably best known for being the life-long companion of Jean Paul Sartre, a founder of modern existentialism. She met Sartre while a student at The Sorbonne University, Paris. Beauvoir soon became a disciple of his views of existentialism, a philosophy that emphasizes the need for individual responsibility for choices about ones life and beliefs.
Background		Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris in 1908. Her mother, Francoise de Beauvoir, was a timid, devout Catholic from Verdun, France. Her father, Georges de Beauvoir, was an agnostic Parisian with a debonair approach to life. This contrast between her parent's beliefs and personalities left the young Simone to figure out her life by herself. In her adolescence she began to question what she called her parents' bourgeois, materialistic values. At one point in her life, her mother sent Simone and her sister, Helene, to a private Catholic school. While rebelling against the Cours Adeline Desir and its many restrictions, Beauvoir compared and contrasted the two paths in this fork-in-the-road of her life. One path was the sacred belief of preparing for and looking forward to an afterlife. On the other hand, there was the option of living her life here on earth, with its many pleasures, and concentrating on reality. By picking the latter, communication was difficult with her mother from then on.
Teaching		Beauvoir received her philosophy degree, Licencie des Lettres and Agrege des Lettres, from The Sorbonne University, Paris, in 1929. From 1931 to 1933 she taught philosophy at Lycee Montgrand in Marseilles, France. She also taught at Lycee Jeanne D'Arc in Rouen from 1933 to 1937, and from 1938 to 1943 at Lycee Moliere and Lycee Camille-See in Paris. At the Lycee Jeanne D'Arc, it took a while for Beauvoir to gain respect from her fellow professors until they realized that she was naturally brilliant at what she did which was teach philosophy. She described her teaching style as disorganized, therefore receiving mediocre evaluations from her superiors.
Writing		Beauvoir quit teaching in 1943 and began her writing career. While she was writing she was influenced by the political atmosphere of post-war France. She was also stongly influenced by the memory of Sartre, having been a prisoner of war in Germany for nine months during World War II. During the German occupation of France, Beauvoir, Sartre and their friends had been bound in unity, hoping for an Allied Forces victory in Europe. After the war, they refused to join the ruling communist party in France. They were active in trying to start a new democratic party, RDR or Rassemblement Democratique et Revolutionnaire. They were very optimistic, but it failed to take hold. Beauvoir, Sartre and their fellow intellectuals and philosophers were disillusioned after many years of struggle. Beauvoir was also active in supporting abortion legislation and gave generous support to battered women's shelters. At the same time of this political activism, Beauvoir was collecting stories about women's lives. After years of preparation, these stories became the basis of one of her most widely published books, The Second Sex. Though written in 1949, the impact of The Second Sex on women's rights movements continues to be felt today. British, French and American feminists such as Fredan and Steinem credit her with having led the way in the current international women's movement. In the book, Beauvoir expresses the realization of her own life, and that is that womanhood is not acquired naturally, rather it is brought forth by society's judgmental means. In this controversial book she explains that women are placed in an inferior position by a male-dominated society, and are not biologically, psychologically or intellectually less capable than men. She presented many difficult concepts. In this passage she described man: He dreams of quiet and disquiet and of an opaque plenitude that nevertheless would be endowed with consciousness. This dream incarnated is precisely woman; she is the wished-for intermediary between nature, the stranger to man, and the fellow being who is too closely identical. She opposes him with neither the hostile silence of nature nor the hard requirements of a reciprocal relation (Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949). Another passage states that women have no myths, religions or poetry of their own and so have to dream through men's dreams of Greek mythic heroes created by men. Women play only a secondary part in the destiny of such heroes she said. Beauvoir wrote five novels in her lifetime, the first of which she began in 1938 and published in 1943, entitled She Came To Stay. In this novel, as in all of her novels, Beauvoir puts fictional characters in the place of real-life people, basically just changing their names. This book entails Beauvoir's three way relationship with Sartre and Olga Kosakiewicz, one of her Lycee students from 1933. She dedicated the novel to Olga, yet in the story she chose to kill Xaviere, who represented Olga. Her second novel, The Blood of Others, deals with the consequences of guilt between intellectuals and violence. The story takes place during the German occupation of France and is centered around the French resistance. Her other novels included: All Men Are Mortal (1946); The Mandarins (1954), which won her a Goncort Prize; and Les Belles Images (1966). In addition to novels, Beauvoir also wrote five autobiographies. The first, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, was published in 1958 and delt with her early childhood up through adolescence. Her first sentence in the book is well-known, "I was born at four o'clock in the morning on the ninth of January 1908, in a room fitted with white- enameled furniture and overlooking the Boulevard Raspail" (Beauvoir, Memoirs, 1958). The Prime of Life, published in 1960 starts off in 1929 when she met Sartre, to whom she dedicated the book. It continues past the German Occupation and concludes with this description of Liberation Day, in August of 1944, when the Allied troops freed Paris: What a tumult of emotion surged through my heart! Seldom indeed does one achieve a long-awaited pleasure and find it all one could have hoped for; but such was my good fortune on this occasion. We met various acquaintances of ours who frowned and said our real troubles were only just beginning, we'd get them in every size and shape and color from now on. I was sorry for them; this feverish, buoyant excitement escaped them precisely because it had not been in their nature to desire it. We were no blinder than they; but come what might thereafter, nothing was going to take these moments from me, and nothing has ever done so: they shine out from my past with perennial and untarnished splendor (Beauvoir, The Prime of Life, 1960). Her third autobiography was entitled The Force of Circumstance, and was published in 1963. This picks up where her last autobiography left off, and ends in early 1963. It delt with the issues of success, aging and death, and included such topics as the Algerian War and the Cold War. A Very Easy Death (1964), was a small book written shortly after the death of her mother and described her with affection. Her last autobiography, All Said and Done (1972) covered a decade from 1962 to 1972. It delt with a variety of philosophical topics, not necessarily the events of her life year by year. She reflected on meeting Sartre: How should I have developed if I had not met Sartre? Individualism, idealism and spiritualism (in the philosophical sense) were still hanging about me; should I have got rid of them earlier or later? I cannot tell. The fact is that I did meet him and that that was the most important event in my life (Beauvoir, All Said and Done, 1972). On top of receiving the Prix Goncourt in 1954 for The Mandarins, she was awarded the Jerusalem prize in 1975, the Austrian State Prize in 1978, and the Sonning Prize for European Culture in 1983; not to mention a LL.D. from Cambridge University.
Jean Paul Sartre		She met Sartre while a student at the Sorbonne in 1929 when she was 21. From the day they met, they would remain life-long friends for 51 years. Together, they published Les Temps Modernes, a literary magazine. They also hosted a weekly radio show for several years, they often lectured on a variety of topics in many different countries. Beauvoir and Sartre traveled extensively together and individually. She was a prolific letter writer in her travels and at home. After her death, two volumes of letters were published, totaling more than one thousand pages. One book, Letters to Sartre (1990) was published four years after her death. In one of the letters, Beauvoir is writing to Sartre from California, describing her stay in the United States, "I'm attached to it as though to a kind of motherland, in spite of . . . . disappointment it causes me on the political side" (Beauvoir, Sartre, 1990). The other volume, A Transatlantic Love Affair (1997) was about her letters to Nelson Algren.
Nelson Algren		Beauvoir was known for unconventional relationships throughout her life. For example, she and Sartre discussed marriage, but thought that it would be best if they did not marry, and leave themselves open to "contingent loves", besides their love for each other. One of Beauvoir's "contingent loves" was Nelson Algren, a Chicago author and Pulitzer Prize winner. She met him in Chicago on her first trip to the United States in 1947. In one of her letters to Algren, she describes her everyday life: I'll tell you how I live day after day a really good girl's life: I get up between eight and nine, I arrive to Cafe des Deux Magots half an hour later and I have tea with little cakes. I write my book the whole morning after reading the newspapers. Often I have lunch with my Russian or Jewish Girlfriends, or with other friends, or at my mother's. Then I meet Sartre and we talk together or see people (we have meetings for the radio or about politics), at the end of the day we work for two or three hours . . . . Then we spend the evening together, alone or with nice friends, and at midnight I am asleep (Beauvoir, Transatlantic, 1997). Probably the most unconventional part of her relationship with Algren is that it lasted seventeen years, but they only saw each other eight times. Some visits were as short as three days, others were for several months. Simone de Beauvoir died on April 14, 1986. Her funeral service was held five days later. Five thousand individuals from various parts of the globe gathered at the Montparnasse cemetery in Paris. The Simone de Beauvoir Society, various political organizations, women's study groups and health centers were in attendance; as well as numerous publishers who aided her in touching thousands of lives through her books; the same people that these five thousand represented. These supporters filled the streets of the cafes and former meeting places of Simone and her acquaintances, as well as her birthplace were she had been seventy-eight years prior to this gathering. She was laid to rest next to Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980). Beauvoir wrote and taught about what was going on in her life and how she chose to live it. Many people took this insight of hers into consideration, having a direct impact on their lives. Her numerous careers and roles in life taught us that one person can make a difference in the world, no matter how they chose to live their life. References Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. New York: Bantam Books, 1965. Beauvoir, Simone de. Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. Cleveland, Ohio: World Publishing, 1959. Beauvoir, Simone de. The Prime of Life. Cleveland, Ohio: World Publishing, 1962. Beauvoir, Simone de. All Said and Done. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1974. Beauvoir, Simone de. Letters to Sartre. New York: Arcade Publishing, 1991. Beauvoir, Simone de. A Transatlantic Love Affair. New York: New Press, 1998. http://home.interlynx.net/~hecate/beauvior.html Date: 1 / 12 / 99 Last modified: 1 / 14 / 98 http://userzweb.lightspeed.net/~tameri/debeauv.html Date: 1 / 12 / 99 Last modified: 12 / 23 / 98 This page was created by J.N.C. for History and Thought of Western Man, Rich East High School. Last revised 4/1/99. Return to Index