Beauvoir, Simone de

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Simone de Beauvoir (January 9, 1908 – April 14, 1986) was a French author, philosopher, and feminist. The scope of her work is broad; she was a novelist, political theorist, essayist, as well as biographer and autobiographer. She is best known for her work Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex, 1949) which contained detailed analysis of women's oppression.

Contents 1 Early years 2 Middle years 3 Later years 3.1 The Second Sex 3.2 Farewell to Sartre 4 Death and afterwards 5 Bibliography 5.1 Translations 6 External links

Early years

Simone Lucie-Ernestine-Marie-Bertrand de Beauvoir was born on January 9, 1908 in Paris to Georges Bertrand and Françoise (Brasseur) de Beauvoir. The oldest of two daughters of a conventional family from the Parisian 'petite bourgeoisie', she depicts herself in the first volume of her autobiography (Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) as a conventional young girl with a strong commitment to the patriarchal values of her family, her religion and her country. From the beginning she is subject to the dual influences of her agnostic father and her devoutly Catholic mother. The two formative peer-relationships of her young childhood and adolescence are with her sister Hélène (whom she calls Poupette) and her friend Zaza. She traces back to her relationship with Poupette, whom she sought to teach and influence from an early age, her taste for teaching, and it is the tragic life and death of Zaza that forms the subject-matter for her first, unsuccessful, literary endeavours.

Middle years

After passing the baccalauréat exams in mathematics and philosophy, she studied mathematics at the Institut Catholique and literature/languages at the Institut Sainte-Marie, before studying philosophy at Sorbonne. At Sorbonne, in 1929, she met Jean-Paul Sartre, who was studying there through elite École Normale Supérieure (contrary to a common thought, she never studied there, but was familiar with it, through Jean-Paul Sartre and those within their philosophic circle).

In 1943, de Beauvoir published L'Invitée (She Came to Stay, 1943), a fictionalized chronicle of the relationship she formed with one of her students, Olga Kosakiewicz, while she was teaching in Rouen during the early 30s. The novel also delves into the complex relationship between de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as how their relationship was affected by the inclusion of Kosakiewicz.

Later years

At the end of World War II, de Beauvoir joined Sartre as an editor at Les Temps Modernes, a political journal Sartre founded along with the likes of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Aside from her editorship, de Beauvoir used Les Temps Modernes as a platform for her introducing various works and remained an editor until her death.

Although the work receives little attention, Pour Une Morale de L'ambiguïté (The Ethics of Ambiguity, 1947) is perhaps the most accessible point of entry into French existentialism. Its simplicity makes it reasonably understandable to readers, as opposed to the gnashing of teeth that many associate with reading Sartre's highly analytical Being and Nothingness. The ambiguity about which De Beauvior writes clears up some inconsistencies found by many, Sartre included, in major existential works such as Being and Nothingness.

The Second Sex

Simone de Beauvoir reasons through a feminist existentialism in The Second Sex, published first in French in 1949. As an existentialist, de Beauvoir accepts the doctrine that existence precedes essence; therefore one is not born, but becomes a woman. Her analysis focuses on the concept of The Other. It is the construction of woman as the quintessential other that de Beauvoir marks as fundamental to women's oppression.

De Beauvoir argues that women have historically been considered the deviation, the abnormality. She suggests that even Mary Wollstonecraft considers men to be the ideal toward which women should aspire. De Beauvoir says that this attitude has limited women's success by maintaining the perception that they are a deviation from the normal, outsiders attempting to emulate "normality". She says that for feminism to move forward, this assumption needs to be broken.

Simone de Beauvoir asserts that women are as capable of choice as men, and thus can choose to elevate themselves, reducing male consciousness to immanence. Although not stated explicitly by Beauvoir, an example that actualizes women choosing transcendence would be a sorority in which women could perceive their collective as a normal female "we," reducing male consciousness to The Other.

Farewell to Sartre

In 1981 she wrote La Cérémonie Des Adieux (A Farewell to Sartre), a painful account of Sartre's last years.

Death and afterwards

Simone de Beauvoir died of pneumonia on April 14, 1986 and was buried alongside Sartre at the Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris. After her death, de Beauvoir has garnered extreme praise, not only due to the growing acceptance of feminism in academia, but also as we have become more aware of the influence she had on Sartre's masterpiece, Being and Nothingness. She came to be seen as one of the great French thinkers in history, and later as the mother of post-1968 feminism, with a great number of philosophical writings linked to, though independent of, Sartrian existentialism.

Bibliography

Some of Simone de Beauvoir other major works include, Les Mandarins (The Mandarins,1954); Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée (Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, 1958).

• She Came to Stay, (1943)
• Pyrrhus et Cinéas, (1944)
• The Blood of Others, (1945)
• Who Shall Die?, (1945)
• All Men are Mortal, (1946)
• The Ethics of Ambiguity, (1947)
• The Second Sex, (1949)
• America Day by Day, (1954)
• The Mandarins, (1954)
• Must We Burn Sade?, (1955)
• The Long March, (1957)
• Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, (1958)
• The Prime of Life, (1960)
• A Very Easy Death, (1964)
• Les Belles Images, (1966)
• The Woman Destroyed, (1967)
• The Coming of Age, (1970)
• All Said and Done, (1972)
• When Things of the Spirit Come First, (1979)
• Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre, (1981)
• Letters to Sartre, (1990)
• A Transatlantic Love Affair: Letters to Nelson Algren, (1998)

Translations

Many of de Beauvoir works were translated into English by Patrick O'Brian, before he reached commercial success as a novelist.

External links

General

• The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Simone de Beauvoir
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Simone de Beauvoir
• Guardian Books "Author Page", with profile and links to further articles.
• Simone de Beauvoir Institute, Concordia University
• Stand By Your Man: The strange liaison of Sartre and Beauvoir, by Louis Menand (featured in The New Yorker)

English Translation online

'The Ethics of Ambiguity' by Simone de Beauvoir (Free Online Version - English Translation).

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