Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in
Book cover

Writing Feminist Lives pp 151–202Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Deconstructing the Life—Feminist Poststructuralist Biography

  • Chapter
  • First Online:

  • 536 Accesses

Part of the book series: Breaking Feminist Waves ((BFW))

Abstract

In this chapter, Lidström Brock critically examines the feminist potential of two poststructuralist biographical approaches to Simone de Beauvoir. The chapter clarifies how skepticism of the rational and coherent biographical subject and the biographer as the sole authority of the life causes Beauvoir’s biographers to openly acknowledge the ideological foundations of their own works. When the biographers define their subject as an overdetermined textual network that is always subject to change, and emphasize the historical and political specificity of their respective perspectives, they simultaneously admit that their own author positions are similarly temporary and ambiguous. The chapter ends by demonstrating that the biographers leave it to readers to decide which aspects of the biographies to consider as true and relevant to their own lives.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   79.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD   99.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD   99.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    The “concrete case” is a central concept in Moi’s feminism. As she expresses elsewhere, “any theory of subjectivity that fails when confronted with a concrete case is not going to be able to tell us much of what it means to be a man or a woman today.” Toril Moi, What is A Woman? And Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1999), viii–ix. Stanley expresses a similar opinion when she argues that “if structural analyses do not work at the level of particular lives then they do not work at all.” Stanley, The Auto/biographical I, 5.

  2. 2.

    Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report of Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984).

  3. 3.

    Kjell Jonsson, “Frihet eller determinism: principiella problem i den idéhistoriska biografins genre,” in Att skriva människan: essäer om biografin som livshistoria och vetenskaplig genre, ed. Sune Åkerman, Ronny Ambjörnsson and Pär Ringby (Stockholm: Carlsson, 1997), 89–91.

  4. 4.

    Epstein, “Introduction: Contesting the Subject,” 1.

  5. 5.

    Ibid.

  6. 6.

    Johanna Essevald and Lisbeth Larsson, “Inledning,” in Kvinnopolitiska nyckeltexter, ed. Johanna Essevald and Lisbeth Larsson (Lund: Studentlitteratur, 1996), 18.

  7. 7.

    Toril Moi, “Feminism, Postmodernism, and Style: Recent Feminist Criticism in the United States,” Cultural Critique 9 (Spring 1988): 44.

  8. 8.

    Poststructuralism is a loosely applied term for theories within a number of fields, such as literary theory, linguistics, psychology and archeology.

  9. 9.

    Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 15.

  10. 10.

    Lyotard, “Defining the Postmodern,” in The Norton Anthology: Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 1612. See also Barthes, who views writing as “the destruction of every…point of origin.” Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 142.

  11. 11.

    Sara Mills, Discourse (New York: Routledge, 2004), 1, 3.

  12. 12.

    Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge, trans. Sheridan Smith. (London: A. M. Tavistock, 1972), 49.

  13. 13.

    David Howarth and Yannis Stavrakakis, “The Political Construction of Social Identities,” in Discourse Theory and Political Analysis: Identities, Hegemonies and Social Change, ed. David Howarth et al. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 6.

  14. 14.

    Ibid., 3.

  15. 15.

    See Barthes, Image-Music-Text; and Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, in Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 1998).

  16. 16.

    Jonsson, “Frihet eller determinism,” 89.

  17. 17.

    In Barthes’ words, “thus is revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made of multiple writing, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation.” Barthes, Image-Music-Text, 148.

  18. 18.

    Jonsson, “Frihet eller determinism,” 89.

  19. 19.

    Barthes, Roland Barthes, 60–61.

  20. 20.

    According to Barthes, biographical discourse is “uttered in the name of the Law and/or of Violence” (ibid., 84).

  21. 21.

    As Barthes explains it, “the Doxa…is Public Opinion, the mind of the majority, petit bourgeois Consensus, the Voice of Nature, the Violence of Prejudice” (ibid., 47).

  22. 22.

    Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality I: The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1998), 95.

  23. 23.

    Ibid., 6.

  24. 24.

    Barthes clarifies his position thus: “To write by fragments: the fragments are then so many stones on the perimeter of a circle: I spread myself around: my whole little universe in crumbs; at the center, what?” Barthes, Roland Barthes, 92–93.

  25. 25.

    Epstein, “(Post) Modern Lives: Abducting the Biographical Subject,” 217–218.

  26. 26.

    Ibid., 229–230.

  27. 27.

    Ibid., 231.

  28. 28.

    Ibid. According to Epstein, “disruptive mimicry” involves exaggerating certain “feminine” characteristics to reveal their constructed nature (ibid.).

  29. 29.

    Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 205.

  30. 30.

    Luce Irigaray, “When Our Lips Speak Together,” trans. Carolyn Burke, Signs 6, no. 1 (Autumn 1980), 69–79.

  31. 31.

    Julia Kristeva, “Women’s Time,” trans. Alice Jardine and Harry Blake, Signs 7, no. 1 (Autumn 1981), 13–35.

  32. 32.

    Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 68.

  33. 33.

    Ibid., 190–191.

  34. 34.

    O’Brien, “Feminist Theory and Literary Biography,” 129–131.

  35. 35.

    Stanley, The Auto/biographical I, 249–253.

  36. 36.

    Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 15–16.

  37. 37.

    Wallach Scott warns readers that “those seeking for a biographical narrative with causal links between personal experience and individual action will not find them in this book” (ibid., 15).

  38. 38.

    Wallach Scott motivates her anti-biographical approach to women’s history by arguing that “agency” is not “an expression of autonomous individual will, rather [it is] the effect of a historically defined process which forms subjects” (ibid., 16).

  39. 39.

    Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, 42.

  40. 40.

    Ibid.

  41. 41.

    Ibid., 35. See also Moi, who similarly questions “linguistic disruption” as feminist strategy: “It is still not clear why it is so important to show that certain literary practices break up the structures of language when they seem to break up little else.” Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics, 171.

  42. 42.

    Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, 42.

  43. 43.

    Moi, “Feminism, Postmodernism, and Style,” 5.

  44. 44.

    Ibid., 6.

  45. 45.

    Moi’s italics.

  46. 46.

    Moi, “Feminism, Postmodernism, and Style,” 6.

  47. 47.

    See Alice Jardine, Gynesis; Configurations of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985) and Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), discussed in Moi, “Feminism, Postmodernism, and Style,” 13–19.

  48. 48.

    Moi, “Feminism, Postmodernism, and Style,” 12.

  49. 49.

    Ibid., 15. Moi’s italics.

  50. 50.

    Ibid., 7. Moi’s italics.

  51. 51.

    Ibid., 9.

  52. 52.

    Ibid., 7. Postfeminism (or postmodern feminism) fails, Moi argues, because it does not take into account the other two conflicting feminist discourses. Thereby, it “unwittingly enacts a scenario of exclusion and delimitation as rigorous as any Enlightenment taxonomy” (ibid., 19).

  53. 53.

    Ibid., 7.

  54. 54.

    Ibid.

  55. 55.

    Ibid.

  56. 56.

    Moi, Simone de Beauvoir, 3–4. Moi’s italics.

  57. 57.

    Ibid., 4. Moi’s italics.

  58. 58.

    Karen Vintges, Philosophy as Passion: The Thinking of Simone De Beauvoir (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), 15.

  59. 59.

    Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier, Simone de Beauvoir, a Life, a Love Story, trans. Lisa Nesselson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), 223–225.

  60. 60.

    In the USA, the two philosophers gave interviews to mainstream publications such as Vogue, Time and Harper’s Bazaar. In 1967, Boris Vian observed that the popularity of the quarter Saint-Germain-Des-Prés in Paris was due mainly to Sartre and Beauvoir. Boris Vian and Noël Arnaud, Le Manuel De Saint-Germain-Des-Prés (1967; repr. Paris: Pauvert, 1997), 162–163.

  61. 61.

    George Cotkin, “French Existentialism and American Popular Culture, 1945–1948,” The Historian 61, no. 2 (January 1, 1999): 327.

  62. 62.

    According to Cotkin, “nearly everyone…coming of age in 1950s and 1960s America danced to the song of French existentialism.” George Cotkin, Existential America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 1.

  63. 63.

    Hazel Rowley, Tête-à-Tête: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), x.

  64. 64.

    Because the differences between the original French text and the first English translation are significant, both versions are discussed in this book. To separate the two versions, they are referred to by their respective French and English titles when appropriate. Unless otherwise stated, the English title refers to the 1952 translation into English, by H. M. Parsley. A second and complete English translation was published in 2009 and translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevalier, but in this book, The Second Sex refers to the 1952 translation only.

  65. 65.

    Simone de Beauvoir, After the War: Force of Circumstance I (New York: Paragon House, 1992), 94. See also Simone de Beauvoir, Le deuxième sexe I (1949; repr. Paris: Gallimard/Folio, 2001), 14.

  66. 66.

    Beauvoir, Le deuxième sexe I, 20–21.

  67. 67.

    See Beauvoir’s famous statement: “On ne naît pas femme: on le devient.” Simone de Beauvoir, Le deuxième sexe II (1949; repr. Paris: Folio, 2001), 13.

  68. 68.

    Le deuxième sexe was published in two volumes. The first volume was well received, while the second volume caused a scandal, mainly because of its discussion of women’s sexuality. Extracts from Vol. II were first published in Les Temps Modernes in the June, July and August issues in 1949. Jo-Ann Pilardi, “The Changing Critical Fortunes of The Second Sex,” History and Theory 32, no. 1 (February 1993): 56. See also Beauvoir, After the War: Force of Circumstance I, 186.

  69. 69.

    On the French reception of Le deuxième sexe, see Beauvoir, After the War: Force of Circumstance I, 186–193. See also Pilardi, “The Changing Critical Fortunes of The Second Sex,” 56; and Francis and Gontier, Simone de Beauvoir, 251–252. For an overview of French criticism of Beauvoir in the 1990s, see Moi, Simone de Beauvoir, 73–92.

  70. 70.

    Pilardi, “The Changing Critical Fortunes of The Second Sex,” 59–60.

  71. 71.

    Suggested reasons for the essay’s unpopularity include Beauvoir’s expressed socialist opinions and the book’s radical content. The essay’s scientific status increased only with the publication of The Kinsey Report in 1965, which cited The Second Sex as a source of evidence on issues regarding human sexuality. Sandra Dijkstra, “Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan: The Politics of Omission,” Feminist Studies 6, no. 2 (Summer 1980): 290–303. For more on Beauvoir criticism before the feminist movement in 1970, see Pilardi, “The Changing Critical Fortunes of The Second Sex,” 52.

  72. 72.

    According to Pilardi, The Second Sex’s status as classic feminist text corresponded with the women’s movement’s increasing representation in academia. Pilardi, “The Changing Critical Fortunes of The Second Sex,” 61–62. Pilardi defines a “classic” as a text that “creates a new paradigm, that is, that virtually ‘reorients our most basic way of viewing an object or a concept’” (ibid., 52).

  73. 73.

    C. B. Radford, “Simone de Beauvoir: Feminism’s Friend or Foe?,” Part II: Nottingham, French Studies 7, no. 1 (May 1968): 44, qt. in Pilardi, “The Changing Critical Fortunes of The Second Sex,” 62.

  74. 74.

    Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, discussed in Pilardi, “The Changing Critical Fortunes of The Second Sex,” 62–63.

  75. 75.

    Dijkstra, “Simone De Beauvoir and Betty Friedan,” 292.

  76. 76.

    For example, see Judith Sabrovsky, From Rationality to Liberation: The Evolution of Feminist Ideology (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979), 113–124; and Anne Whitmarsh, Simone De Beauvoir and the Limits of Commitment (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 160, discussed in Pilardi, “The Changing Critical Fortunes of The Second Sex,” 62–64.

  77. 77.

    Margaret Simons, Beauvoir and the Second Sex: Feminism, Race and the Origins of Existentialism (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), 61.

  78. 78.

    See, for instance, Moi, Simone de Beauvoir, 157, n281 and n282. She points out that “the philosophical incompetence of the [1952] translation produces a text that is damaging to Beauvoir’s intellectual reputation in particular and to the reputation of feminist philosophy in general.” Toril Moi, “While We Wait: The English Translation of ‘The Second Sex,’” Signs 27, no. 4 (Summer 2002): 1007.

  79. 79.

    The 2009 English translation of Le deuxième sexe has been subjected to criticism as well. See, for example, Toril Moi, “The Adulteress Wife,” London Review of Books 32, no. 3 (February 11, 2010): 3–6.

  80. 80.

    Pilardi, “The Changing Critical Fortunes of The Second Sex,” 65.

  81. 81.

    See Jean Leighton, Simone De Beauvoir on Women (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1975), 29, 40 and Dorothy Kaufmann McCall, “Simone De Beauvoir: The Second Sex, and Jean-Paul Sartre,” Signs 5, no. 2 (Winter 1979): 209–223, footnoted in Pilardi, “The Changing Critical Fortunes of The Second Sex,” 65.

  82. 82.

    According to Moi, Beauvoir describes pregnancy as a state of passivity or “immanence” (an existentialist term that equates to living in “bad faith”) in Le deuxième sexe. In contrast, men’s actions, particularly risking their lives (e.g. in war), signify “transcendence” of the present state and are therefore acts of “good faith,” or examples of “authentic” living. The belief that Le deuxième sexe presents an argument against motherhood, Moi continues, is an example of the many misconceptions caused by the mistranslation of the original French text. She writes: “Once I took at look at the translation of the passages concerning mothers and motherhood in [Le deuxième sexe] I realized that Parsley’s translation techniques have a lot to do with [the widespread impression that the book is hostile to motherhood.]…I can’t find any advocacy of childlessness in [Le deuxième sexe].” Moi, “While We Wait,” 1025–1026. For an explanation of Beauvoir’s use of the terms “good” and “bad” faith in an existentialist context, see Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. Bernard Frechtman. New York: Citadel Press, 1976.

  83. 83.

    Charlene Haddock Seigfried, “Gender-Specific Values,” The Philosophical Forum 15, no. 4 (Summer 1984): 425–442, quoted in Pilardi, “The Changing Critical Fortunes of The Second Sex,” 66.

  84. 84.

    Naomi Green, “Sartre, Sexuality, and The Second Sex,” Philosophy and Literature 4, no. 2 (Fall 1980): 199–211.

  85. 85.

    See Irving Singer, The Nature of Love, Vol. 3: The Modern World (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 312–316, mentioned in Pilardi, “The Changing Critical Fortunes of The Second Sex,” 70. Ann Ferguson observes that Beauvoir’s description of lesbianism similarly lacks a social and historical base, which reduces her definition of lesbianism to a matter of choice. Ann Ferguson, “Lesbian Identity: Beauvoir and History,” in Hypatia Reborn: Essays in Feminist Philosophy, ed. Azizah al-hibri and Margaret A. Simons (Bloomington, MN: Bloomington and Indianapolis University Press, 1990), 280–289, mentioned in Pilardi, “The Changing Critical Fortunes of The Second Sex,” 69.

  86. 86.

    Singer, The Nature of Love, 313, qt. in Pilardi, “The Changing Critical Fortunes of The Second Sex,” 70.

  87. 87.

    Judith Okely, Simone de Beauvoir (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 71.

  88. 88.

    Eva Lundgren-Gothlin, Sex and Existence: Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, trans. Linda Schenck (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 14.

  89. 89.

    Pilardi argues that Beauvoir’s emphasis on the psychological differences between the sexes prophesized some of the ideas brought forth by later French feminists, such as Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva. Pilardi, “The Changing Critical Fortunes of The Second Sex,” 68–69.

  90. 90.

    Ibid., 55.

  91. 91.

    Ibid., 56.

  92. 92.

    Pilardi refers to a 1949–1986 bibliography, complied by Joy Bennett and Gabriella Hochmann, where The Second Sex leads with 114 entries (the number of citations in critical works until 1987), but is closely followed by Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, with ninety-six entries. See Joy Bennett and Gabriella Hochmann, Simone de Beauvoir: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland Publishing, 1988), discussed in Pilardi, “The Changing Critical Fortunes of The Second Sex,” 55.

  93. 93.

    After a memorial service of Beauvoir sponsored by the feminist group Redstockings, Carol Ascher wrote that “most of the women who spoke after the memorial, if they mentioned Beauvoir at all, admitted to not having read much of her work.” Carol Ascher, “Simone de Beauvoir: Mother of Us All,” Social Text, no. 17 (1987): 109. Nancy Bauer observes that the study of Beauvoir in feminist theory classes usually consists of reading “the ‘Introduction’ and maybe another chapter of The Second Sex…as though Beauvoir’s writing were theoretically passé and of purely historical interest.” Nancy Bauer, “Must We Read Simone De Beauvoir?,” in The Legacy of Simone de Beauvoir, ed. Emily R. Grosholz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 116. The initial dismissal of existentialism as a “fashionable” philosophy by American academics might have contributed to an unfavorable perception of Beauvoir. In the New York Magazine from 1947, Sartre and Beauvoir’s early bohemianism is already described as a thing of the past: “Sartre is a pontiff, de Beauvoir a well-groomed literary lady who has abandoned hand-knitted hose for the sheerest nylons.” John L. Brown, “Chief Prophet of the Existentialists: Sartre of the Left Bank Has a Philosophy that Provokes both Sermons and Fistfights,” New York Magazine, February 2, 1947, 20, qt. in Cotkin, “French Existentialism,” 327.

  94. 94.

    Moberg, Simone och jag, 11.

  95. 95.

    Ann Curthoys, “Adventures of Feminism: Simone De Beauvoir’s Autobiographies, Women’s Liberation and Self-Fashioning,” Feminist Review 64, no. 1, “Feminism 2000 One Step Beyond?” (Spring 2000): 4.

  96. 96.

    The “universal” aspects of her autobiographical writing are stressed by Beauvoir herself: “On the one hand this ‘I’, when I use it, is also a female ‘I’…the ‘I’ that I use is universal, it concerns a large number of women.” Moberg, Simone och jag, 112. Here, Moberg quotes from Simone de Beauvoir, Les écrits de Simone de Beauvoir, la vie—l’écriture, Avec en appendice Textes inédits ou retrouvés, ed. Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), 451. Les écrits de Simone de Beauvoir has not been published in English.

  97. 97.

    Moberg emphasizes the importance of Beauvoir’s autobiography: “She had the courage to insist on a place in literature, why not in history?” Moberg, Simone och jag, 271. Beauvoir’s five-volume autobiography was published between 1958 and 1972. It has been translated into English as Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, trans. James Kirkup (London: Penguin, 1963); The Prime of Life, 1929–1944, trans. Peter Green (New York: Paragon House, 1992); Force of Circumstance I: After The War, 1944–1952; Force of Circumstance II: Hard Times, 1952–1963, trans. Peter Green (New York: Paragon House, 1992); and All Said and Done, 1962–1972, trans. Patrick O’Brien (1974; repr. New York: Paragon House, 1993).

  98. 98.

    Curthoys, “Adventures of Feminism,” 3.

  99. 99.

    Curthoys refers to an Australian readership, but the number of critical works on the autobiography suggests that the American and European readers have consisted mainly of equally young, university-educated women, who ended up writing about her professionally.

  100. 100.

    Curthoys, “Adventures of Feminism,” 12.

  101. 101.

    Ibid., 13.

  102. 102.

    Ibid.

  103. 103.

    See, for example, Pierre/Françoise in She Came to Stay, and Henri/Paula and Anne/Robert in The Mandarins.

  104. 104.

    Francis and Gontier, Simone de Beauvoir, 2–3.

  105. 105.

    Joint biography of Sartre and Beauvoir suggests that their two lives are often interpreted in relation to each other. For example, see Axel Madsen, Hearts and Minds: The Common Journey of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (New York: William Morrow, 1977); Kate Fullbrook and Edward Fullbrook, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre: The Remaking of a Twentieth-Century Legend (New York: Basic, 1994); and Rowley, Tête-à-Tête. The American title to Francis and Gontier’s biography of Beauvoir, Simone de Beauvoir: a Life, a Love Story, also plays up the love story element.

  106. 106.

    Carol Ascher, Simone de Beauvoir: A Life of Freedom (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1981), 1.

  107. 107.

    Beauvoir died before the project could be realized. Bair, Simone de Beauvoir, 16.

  108. 108.

    See Simone de Beauvoir, Journal de Guerre: septembre 1939 janvier 1941, ed. Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1990); Simone de Beauvoir, Letters to Sartre 1940–1963, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1991); Simone de Beauvoir, A Transatlantic Love Affair: Letters to Nelson Algren, ed. Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, trans. Ellen Gordon Reeves (New York: New Press, 1998); Simone de Beauvoir, Correspondance croisée: Simone de Beauvoir et Jacques-Laurent Bost, 1937–1940, ed. Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir (Paris: Gallimard, 2004); Jean-Paul Sartre, Witness to My Life: The Letters of Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir, 1940–1963, trans. Lee Fahnestock and Norman MacAfee (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1992); Jean-Paul Sartre, War Diaries: November 1939–March 1940, trans. Quintin Hoare (1983; repr. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984); and Jean-Paul Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, Septembre 1939–Mars 1940, ed. Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre (Paris: Gallimard, 1995). Francis and Gontier based their biography mainly on “the tracing down of the handwritten, [then] unpublished letters between Simone de Beauvoir and the American author Nelson Algren, with whom she had fallen in love.” Francis and Gontier, Simone de Beauvoir, ix. Rowley based her joint biography of Sartre and Beauvoir primarily on published and unpublished letters. Her interpretation of the effect the letters had on the public’s perception of the couple corresponds with mine: “In recent years, Sartre and Beauvoir have continued to divulge their tangled secrets from beyond their graves. Beauvoir’s love letters to Nelson Algren…astonished readers. Her correspondence with Jacques-Laurent Bost…surprised readers again.” Rowley, Tête-à-Tête, xiv.

  109. 109.

    Curthoys, “Adventures of Feminism,” 10.

  110. 110.

    Mary Evans, Simone de Beauvoir (London: Sage Publications, 1996), 45.

  111. 111.

    Curthoys, “Adventures of Feminism,” 15.

  112. 112.

    Ellen Willis, No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1992), 162–163, qt. in Curthoys, “Adventures of Feminism,” 15.

  113. 113.

    Curthoys, “Adventures of Feminism,” 15.

  114. 114.

    Lyotard, “Defining the Postmodern,” 1613.

  115. 115.

    Moi, Simone de Beauvoir, 2.

  116. 116.

    Ibid., 3.

  117. 117.

    Ibid., 1.

  118. 118.

    To Moi, Simone de Beauvoir was “more purely an intellectual…than any other woman of her era.” She also became an intellectual in France at a time when “intellectuals were considered important members of society” (ibid., 1).

  119. 119.

    Ibid., 3. Moi refers to The Second Sex in her biography of Beauvoir, but she bases her analyses on Le deuxième sexe, which is why I use the original French title in conjunction with her study.

  120. 120.

    Moi, Simone de Beauvoir, 3.

  121. 121.

    Ibid., 7.

  122. 122.

    Ibid., 4.

  123. 123.

    Ibid., 7.

  124. 124.

    Ibid.

  125. 125.

    Ibid., 4. Moi also reads texts about Beauvoir, which she finds condition the perception of her subject’s texts “in themselves” (ibid., 6).

  126. 126.

    Ibid., 5.

  127. 127.

    Ibid., 7.

  128. 128.

    Moi understands the “making” of her subject in three ways. First, she focuses on Beauvoir’s education, or more precisely “the educational structures that produced her as a philosopher and an intellectual in the first third of this century.” Second, she studies the works that “made” Beauvoir a major twentieth-century intellectual, as well as the works that explain how she managed to make it as an intellectual in the first place. Third, Moi speaks of Beauvoir as an intellectual woman in a more general sense, as “an extraordinary complex effect of a whole network of different discourses or determinants” (ibid., 6).

  129. 129.

    Ibid., 7.

  130. 130.

    Ibid., 8.

  131. 131.

    According to Moi, the term “overdeterminism” was used by Freud to argue the complexities of the human psyche. In Moi’s study it refers to “textuality” as an overdetermined process (ibid., 7).

  132. 132.

    Ibid.

  133. 133.

    Moi, “Appropriating Bourdieu: Feminist Theory and Pierre Bourdieu’s Sociology of Culture,” New Literary History 22, no. 4, Papers from the Commonwealth Center for Literary and Cultural Change (Autumn 1991): 1018.

  134. 134.

    Moi, Simone de Beauvoir, 7–8.

  135. 135.

    Ibid., 7.

  136. 136.

    Moi sees such readings as especially rewarding: “To read an overdetermined textual element, then, is to point to its potential plurality of meaning…There is nothing reductive in this procedure” (ibid., 7–8).

  137. 137.

    Moi, “Appropriating Bourdieu,” 1028–1029.

  138. 138.

    Moi mentions the following “generalizable factors that help to explain my interest in Beauvoir. There are, first, my political affinities with the kind of materialist feminism she represents; second, my need to reflect on my own identity as an intellectual woman; third, the fact that I was never socialized to accept the high bourgeois standards of taste that tend to make Beauvoir unpalatable to many, and fourth, the effects of geography.” Moi, Simone de Beauvoir, 10.

  139. 139.

    Ibid., 213.

  140. 140.

    Materialist feminists tend to disagree on the precise definition of the term “materialist feminism.” There is particular disagreement regarding the precise relationship among materialist feminism, Marxist feminism and socialist feminism. Toril Moi and Janice Radway, “Editors’ Note,” South Atlantic Quarterly 93, no. 4, Special Issue: Materialist Feminism (Fall 1994): 749.

  141. 141.

    Wicke, “Celebrity Material,” 385.

  142. 142.

    Ibid., 385.

  143. 143.

    Moi, “Appropriating Bourdieu: Feminist Theory and Pierre Bourdieu’s Sociology of Culture,” 1020.

  144. 144.

    Ibid., 1021.

  145. 145.

    Ibid.

  146. 146.

    Ibid., 1037.

  147. 147.

    Moi, Simone de Beauvoir, 5.

  148. 148.

    Moi, “Appropriating Bourdieu: Feminist Theory and Pierre Bourdieu’s Sociology of Culture,” 1019–1020.

  149. 149.

    Ibid., 1020.

  150. 150.

    Moi, Simone de Beauvoir, 174–175.

  151. 151.

    Ibid., 30.

  152. 152.

    “I’m no longer sure what I think, nor whether I can be said to think at all.” Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, 344.

  153. 153.

    Moi, Simone de Beauvoir, 30.

  154. 154.

    Ibid., 28.

  155. 155.

    Ibid., 30.

  156. 156.

    Michèle LeDoeuff, Hipparchia’s Choice: An Essay Concerning Women, Philosophy, Etc., trans. Trista Selous (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 135–137, discussed in Moi, Simone de Beauvoir, 15.

  157. 157.

    According to Moi, “[m]any critics, misled by the fact that [Sartre and Beauvoir] sat the same examination in 1929, apparently believe that [the ENS] is where” they met. In fact, Beauvoir attended Sorbonne. Moi, Simone de Beauvoir, 48–49.

  158. 158.

    This exam was open to students both from the ENS and Sorbonne (ibid., 48). Moi observes that the philosophy subject was described as “virginal” in the exam, waiting to be “penetrated” by the supposedly male philosophy student. In her study of the French reception of both Le deuxième sexe and Beauvoir’s other writing, she demonstrates how Beauvoir’s femaleness is always central in the different “topoi” by which French (male) critics have attempted to discredit the author and her work (ibid., 58).

  159. 159.

    Ibid., 56.

  160. 160.

    Ibid., 65.

  161. 161.

    Ibid., 66.

  162. 162.

    Moi, “Feminism, Postmodernism, and Style,” 5–7.

  163. 163.

    Moi, Simone de Beauvoir, 66.

  164. 164.

    Ibid., 68. Moi’s italics are removed.

  165. 165.

    Ibid., 194, 68. Moi’s italics. According to Moi, refusing girls and women access to the universal is at the heart of an unequal society: “Sexism, for Beauvoir, consists in refusing women—and little girls—access to the universal. As long as women continue to be defined as the particular, she argues, men and women will tend to develop different sets of values and attitudes, even when it comes to intellectual and philosophical choices” (ibid., 194).

  166. 166.

    Ibid., 67, 145.

  167. 167.

    Ibid., 145–146. Moi reads the finished essay, Le deuxième sexe, as more transparently autobiographical than, for example, Sartre’s philosophical texts.

  168. 168.

    Ibid., 146.

  169. 169.

    Ibid., 68.

  170. 170.

    Moi argues “the startling originality of” Le deuxième sexe by pointing out that in France in 1949, women’s issues were not central to the political agenda of any major party or faction, nor was there an independent women’s movement outside the established parties; in this historical context, The Second Sex is nothing short of unique” (ibid., 189–190).

  171. 171.

    Ibid., 155. In other words, women under patriarchy are torn between states of “freedom and alienation” (ibid., 156).

  172. 172.

    In Beauvoir’s theory, some (“independent”) women paradoxically become more authentically human than men, because women occupy the space of both subject and object. Moi reads this argument as overdetermined and deeply indebted to Beauvoir’s tendency to idealize (and thereby dehumanize) men and their position in society (ibid., 155).

  173. 173.

    Ibid., 198.

  174. 174.

    Moi mentions the social instigation of “maternity leave” as an example of concrete equality (ibid., 209). According to Wicke, “there are areas of material interest in the fact that women can bear children…Materialist feminism…is less likely than social constructionism to be embarrassed by the occasional material importance of sex differences.” Wicke, “Celebrity Material,” 392. Moi also stresses that “nothing in particular follows from the recognition of biological difference, since…the meaning of that difference is never given but always to be constructed anew.” Moi, Simone de Beauvoir, 172. Moi’s italics.

  175. 175.

    Moi, Simone de Beauvoir, 213.

  176. 176.

    Ibid., 144.

  177. 177.

    Ibid.

  178. 178.

    Ibid., 211–212.

  179. 179.

    In other words, Beauvoir views women’s revolution as “a slow and contradictory process, the one truly non-violent revolution in history” (ibid., 208).

  180. 180.

    Ibid.

  181. 181.

    Ibid., 213.

  182. 182.

    Ibid., 208.

  183. 183.

    Ibid., 217.

  184. 184.

    Curthoys, “Adventures of Feminism,” 4.

  185. 185.

    Moi, Simone de Beauvoir, 255. According to Moi, the woman in love is a recurring and “overdetermined” figure in Beauvoir’s texts (ibid.).

  186. 186.

    Ibid., 254. Moi further argues that “our interest in [Beauvoir’s] love life is not fortuitous” (ibid., 255).

  187. 187.

    There is, Moi observes, “an extraordinary consistent vision of freedom” in The Second Sex (ibid., 185).

  188. 188.

    Ibid., 209.

  189. 189.

    Ibid.

  190. 190.

    Ibid., 198.

  191. 191.

    Ibid., 253.

  192. 192.

    Ibid.

  193. 193.

    Ibid., 191.

  194. 194.

    Ibid., 208.

  195. 195.

    Ibid., 198.

  196. 196.

    Despite her economic and social independence, Beauvoir still displayed “the most painful conflicts and contradictions when it comes to asserting emotional autonomy or intellectual independence in relation to Sartre.” Moi, “Appropriating Bourdieu,” 1032. Moi acknowledges that these problems could be interpreted from a psychoanalytic perspective, but argues that “they should also…be grasped as the political effects of the socially constructed habitus of a bourgeois woman brought up in Paris in the 1910s and 1920s” (ibid., 1033). Moi’s italics.

  197. 197.

    Beauvoir, Le deuxième sexe II, 616, trans. and qt. in Moi, Simone de Beauvoir, 199.

  198. 198.

    Moi, Simone de Beauvoir, 256.

  199. 199.

    According to Moi, “the discovery of what Beauvoir’s life was ‘really’ like makes it difficult to continue to imagine that perfect satisfaction is to be had in this world: perhaps it is not only Beauvoir who has some difficulty in coming to terms with the reality principle, but her readers as well (ibid., 254–255).

  200. 200.

    Ibid., 254.

  201. 201.

    Ibid., 257.

  202. 202.

    Ibid.

  203. 203.

    Moi, “Appropriating Bourdieu,” 1017.

  204. 204.

    Ibid., 1029.

  205. 205.

    Ibid.

  206. 206.

    Ibid.

  207. 207.

    Ibid., 1034. Moi’s italics removed.

  208. 208.

    Ibid.

  209. 209.

    Ibid., 1028–1029.

  210. 210.

    Ibid., 1036. Pierre Bourdieu’s theory permits the materialist feminist critic to “grasp the immense variability of gender as a social factor” (ibid., 1035–1036).

  211. 211.

    Ibid., 1040.

  212. 212.

    Ibid.

  213. 213.

    Diana Knight, “What Is a Woman? And Other Essays by Toril Moi,” MLN 115, no. 4, French Issue (September 2000): 829. Knight quotes Moi, What Is a Woman?, 302.

  214. 214.

    Knight, “What Is a Woman?,” 829.

  215. 215.

    Moi, “Appropriating Bourdieu,” 1028.

  216. 216.

    Moi, Simone de Beauvoir, 8.

  217. 217.

    Moi, “Feminism, Postmodernism, and Style,” 7.

  218. 218.

    Ibid.

  219. 219.

    Stanley, The Autobiographical I, 17.

  220. 220.

    Stanley, The Autobiographical I, 121.

  221. 221.

    Ibid.

  222. 222.

    Elaine Marks, “Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman,” South Central Review 14, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 95.

  223. 223.

    Ibid.

  224. 224.

    Moi, Simone de Beauvoir, 84.

  225. 225.

    Ibid., 87–88.

  226. 226.

    Ibid., 87.

  227. 227.

    Marks, “Simone de Beauvoir,” 96.

  228. 228.

    Moberg, Simone och jag, 11.

  229. 229.

    Ibid., 11.

  230. 230.

    Ibid., 9.

  231. 231.

    Essevald and Larsson, “Inledning,” 18.

  232. 232.

    Ibid., 18. Moberg, Simone och jag, 50.

  233. 233.

    Ibid., 59.

  234. 234.

    According to Moberg, Odulf “had strong opinions about everything, including details in my life” (ibid., 193).

  235. 235.

    Ibid., 9.

  236. 236.

    Ibid., 76. Moberg admits that she “played a free and independent woman, which I don’t think I could have managed for a second if he hadn’t stood by me…I had to pretend that he didn’t exist.” The admission offers clues to what caused her to feel shame, namely a lack of “independence” (ibid., 77).

  237. 237.

    Bair’s biography seems to have had a particularly strong effect on Moberg. When she read Deirdre Bair’s biography of Beauvoir in 1990, “it was a relief to discover that this megastar in the category of independent women had lived in a lifelong relationship of emotional dependency, never revealing its inequality to the world” (ibid., 78).

  238. 238.

    Ibid., 202.

  239. 239.

    Ibid., 117.

  240. 240.

    Ibid., 87.

  241. 241.

    Ibid., 57.

  242. 242.

    Ibid., 33.

  243. 243.

    Moberg believes that “the pact required hypocrisy in order to be upheld. The diaries and the letters reveal a systematic lying” (ibid., 120).

  244. 244.

    Ibid., 61.

  245. 245.

    Evans, Missing Persons, 45.

  246. 246.

    Moberg, Simone och jag, 38.

  247. 247.

    Ibid., 190.

  248. 248.

    Ibid., 223.

  249. 249.

    Ibid., 189.

  250. 250.

    Ibid. Moberg argues that “there is no shame in being dependent on others. Only stupid people try to remain independent” (ibid., 219).

  251. 251.

    Here, Moberg’s defense of Beauvoir resembles Heilbrun’s defense of Steinem. Moberg writes: “Simone de Beauvoir had the courage and the fantasy to create a completely new role for women. Partly, it had to consist of lies” (ibid., 78).

  252. 252.

    “To me,” Moberg writes, Beauvoir’s “unique talent for happiness sounds more like a political statement than a personal point of view” (ibid., 78).

  253. 253.

    Ibid., 94.

  254. 254.

    Ibid., 191.

  255. 255.

    Ibid.

  256. 256.

    Ibid., 11.

  257. 257.

    Ibid.

  258. 258.

    Sharon O’Brien, “Feminist Theory and Literary Biography,” 126.

  259. 259.

    Moberg, Simone och jag, 168.

  260. 260.

    Ibid., 160.

  261. 261.

    Ibid., 96.

  262. 262.

    Ibid., 77.

  263. 263.

    Ibid., 22.

  264. 264.

    Gale Bell Chevigny warns that “the confusions about the personal in [feminist] theory” risks making feminist biographers “more susceptible to uncritical identification” with their subjects. Gale Bell Chevigny, “Daughters Writing: Toward a Theory of Women’s Biography,” Feminist Studies 9, no.1 (Spring 1983): 81.

  265. 265.

    Moberg, Simone och jag, 160.

  266. 266.

    Beauvoir, Les écrits de Simone de Beauvoir, 518, qt. in Moberg, Simone och jag, 54.

  267. 267.

    Moberg points to the underlying inequality behind many “happiness” projects. The dream “of the exemplary self, as part of a larger social vision, must be understood in the context of antiquated beliefs in authority. Educated people with a social conscience seem to have taken for granted their positions as role models,” she observes. Moberg, Simone och jag, 90.

  268. 268.

    Ibid., 116.

  269. 269.

    Ibid., 11–12.

  270. 270.

    For example, see Elizabeth Kamarck Minnich, “Friendship between Women: The Act of Feminist Biography,” Feminist Studies 11, no. 2 (Summer 1985): 287–305.

  271. 271.

    Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Subject to Biography: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and Writing Women’s Lives (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 2.

  272. 272.

    Ibid.

  273. 273.

    Moberg, Simone och jag, 220.

  274. 274.

    Moberg expresses it thus: “I was happy. Suddenly I thought I understood one of the conditions for equality between the sexes: It is a dream” (ibid., 78).

  275. 275.

    See also Barthes, who argues that “everything comes back, but it comes back as Fiction, i.e., at another turn of the spiral.” Barthes, Roland Barthes, 68–69.

  276. 276.

    Moi, “Feminism, Postmodernism, and Style,” 17.

  277. 277.

    Moberg, Simone och jag, 191.

  278. 278.

    Moi, “Feminism, Postmodernism, and Style,” 6.

  279. 279.

    Ibid.

  280. 280.

    See also Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject, 179.

  281. 281.

    Moi, “Feminism, Postmodernism, and Style,” 22.

  282. 282.

    Epstein, “(Post) Modern Lives,” 228.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Luleå University of Technology, New York, New York, USA

    Malin Lidström Brock

Authors
  1. Malin Lidström Brock
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2016 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Lidström Brock, M. (2016). Deconstructing the Life—Feminist Poststructuralist Biography. In: Writing Feminist Lives. Breaking Feminist Waves. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47178-5_5

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation