Liberty, Equality, Maternity by Alison Fell

Author:Alison Fell [Fell, Alison]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Women's Studies
ISBN: 9781900755733
Google: 849cAAAAMAAJ
Goodreads: 99093
Publisher: European Humanities Research Centre
Published: 2003-01-15T02:26:42+00:00

Une mort très douce

By the time Beauvoir published Une mort très douce six years later in 1964, the political and cultural context had begun to evolve. The 1960s saw a significant rise in the numbers of French women in paid employment. At the same time, the pro-contraception and proabortion movements, founded in the 1950s, had become more organized and more influential. In a survey in 1965, for example, when French women were asked if they would use modern contraception were it to become legally available, 80 per cent of them answered in the affirmative.27 The 1950s discursive ideal of the happy modern housewife and mother was increasingly challenged by other discourses that incorporated women's working identities. It became more common and more acceptable in the early 1960s to challenge the conventional wisdom that constructed women primarily as devoted mères an foyer. Numerous television and radio programmes in the early 1960s openly discussed the everyday conditions of women's lives—marriage, motherhood, contraception and the conditions of work. It was this climate of discussion and debate regarding la condition féminine that, at least in part, led to the dramatic upsurge of the 'second-wave' feminist movement after 1968. Beauvoir's ideal of an independent working woman, free to control her fertility, was no longer as taboo in the early 1960s as it had been in the previous two decades. If, in the late 1950s, Beauvoir felt isolated and insecure about her identity as a French intellectual, and produced an autobiography marked by a highly controlled narrative voice, the narrator of Une mort très douce lacks that degree of confidence.

Two main factors help to explain the change in narrative tone in the latter text. First, the changing climate of attitudes to female identity and to motherhood in the early 1960s made Beauvoir less belligerent and uncompromising in her attack on the existing discursive norms that prescribed marriage and motherhood as women's only acceptable destiny. Secondly, the Mémoires and Une mort très douce have differing foci, and Beauvoir had differing motives for writing them. If the Mémoires follow, to a large extent, the familiar autobiographical tradition of spiritual quest, of the journey from ignorance to enlightenment, Une mort très douce is more difficult to categorize.28 Although unquestionably autobiographical, Beauvoir's account of her mother's death bears little resemblance to the more public autobiographical narratives with their lengthy descriptions of the foreign visits and political activities of the successful Beauvoir–Sartre couple published in the 1960s and 1970s. In Tout comptefait (1972), the final volume of her autobiography, Beauvoir implies that in 1964 she felt the need to write about her mother's death in order to come to terms with it on a personal level: 'Je n'avais pas prémédité d'ecrire Une mort très douce. Dans les périodes difficiles de ma vie, griffonner des phrases — dussent-elles n'etre lues par personne —m'apporte le même reconfort que la prière au croyant: par le langage je dépasse mon cas particulier, je communie avec toute l'humanité.'29 Beauvoir articulates a desire in Une mort très

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