A Life of One's Own by Joanna Biggs

Author:Joanna Biggs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Simone

Almost from the moment she published The Second Sex in November 1949, Simone de Beauvoir was asked why she’d never written a female character who lived a free life, the sort she envisioned in her final chapter, “The Independent Woman.” If the mother of twentieth-century feminism couldn’t imagine a free woman, who could? At first she would answer brusquely. “I’ve shown women as they are,” she told the Paris Review, “as divided human beings, and not as they ought to be.” (She’d said as much in an epigraph borrowed from Sartre: “À moitié victimes, à moitié complices, comme tout le monde.”) But in a later interview she answered the same question angrily:

The history of my life itself is a kind of problematic, and I don’t have to give solutions to people and people don’t have a right to wait for solutions from me. It is in this measure, occasionally, that what you call my celebrity—in short, people’s attention—has bothered me. There is a certain demandingness that I find a little stupid, because it imprisons me, completely fixing me in a kind of feminist concrete block.

I know what that feminist concrete block looks like—it has a turban, it wears a black polo neck, it works at the Café de Flore, it has contingent lovers around one essential love, it drinks, it dances, it travels, it talks, it marches, it writes—and I have loved that concrete block as long as I’ve known it existed. It was partly the glamour of that myth that led me to read Beauvoir in the first place, working through both volumes of Le Deuxième Sexe at twenty-one, leaving hopeful questions about the future in the margins: would it always be true that “men don’t like tomboys, or bluestockings, or clever women; too much daring, education, intelligence or character scares them?” Like so many other women, I wanted a feminist heroine, and Beauvoir seemed to fit: she had written a work of lasting value and she’d lived a life disdainful of convention—what more could one ask for? Surely that was why she’d written four volumes of memoir: to show us all, in an act of unprecedented generosity, how she’d freed herself. When she was buried in the Cimetière du Montparnasse, the waiters lined up outside La Coupole to see her coffin pass. A man carrying his toddler on his shoulders in the funeral throng told Beauvoir’s first biographer, Deirdre Bair, that he wanted to be able to tell his daughter when she was older that they’d paid homage to a great woman. (Engraved over the columns of the Panthéon, a short walk from La Coupole, is the line “Aux Grands Hommes, la Patrie reconnaissante.”)

But since April 1986, when Beauvoir died, the idea of her as a feminist heroine has faded. Her letters to Sartre, published four years later, showed her seducing her pupils and then passing them on to Sartre, in a bad modernist version of Les Liaisons dangereuses. She carried on a ten-year affair with the husband of one of her female lovers without the woman knowing.

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