Not long after abandoning her life as a "dutiful daughter" and fleeing to the unfettered freedoms of Paris, Simone de Beauvoir met, in 1929, the man who was to befriend, mentor and lover for the rest of her life, the philos0pher, Jean-Paul Sartre. They were both in their early twenties, he slightly older than she. In many ways, her quick and solid attachment to this man allowed her to give up her ties to the family that had so constrained her during adolescence.
It was a flight into the most exotic intellectual terrain. From the first, the two lovers spent virtually all their time together, read the same books, sought out the same friends, and in general developed their ideas so symbiotically that Simone would use such phrases in her memoir as "we thought" and "our idea".
When I began reading The Prime of Life (which picks up de Beauvoir's life where Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter leaves off) I was astonished by the amount of fusion she described in her relationship with Sartre. She seemed so entirely enmeshed in his sensibility it was hard to imagine how she would ever extricate herself sufficiently to pursue the fine intellectual and creative work she would one day accomplish. True, Sartre was a genius; still, this bright, zestful woman was virtually in his thrall. "I admired him for holding his destiny in his own hands, unaided," she wrote. "Far from feeling embarrassed at the thought of his superiority, I derived comfort from it." To know more here about this article cinderela solution review.
She was only twenty-one, and apparently as romantic as anyone that age. Still, it seemed that if she were going to disengage from the destructive pattern that was so clearly established itself in her relationship with Sartre, she was going to have to do something--something radical. "My trust in him was so complete," she wrote, "that he supplied me with the sort of absolute, unfailing security that I had once had from my parents, or from God."
Simone and Jean Paul walked the streets of Paris together, talked endlessly, drank aquavit in the bars until two o'clock in the morning. She experienced herself as almost levitating in a delirium of happiness. "My most deep-felt longings were now fulfilled," she wrote. "There was nothing left for me to wish--except that this state of triumphant bliss might continue unwaveringly forever."
The euphoria lasted for over a year--until something disquieting crept in to mar her perfect happiness. She came to suspect that she had relinquished some essential part of herself. Her abandoned response to the onslaught of sensual and intellectual distraction that Paris had to offer was beginning to have a fragmenting effect on her. Her stabs at writing fiction were half-hearted, lacking conviction. "Sometimes I felt I was doing a school assignment, sometimes that I had lapsed into parody," she wrote.
For eighteen months de Beauvoir lived in an acute state of conflict. "though I still enthusiastically ran after all the good things of this world, I was beginning to think that they kept me from my real vocation: I was well on the road to self-betrayal and self-destruction." The books she had always read so obsessively she now perceived she was reading in a scattered, unfocused way, with no real intellectual goal. She was writing in her journal only sporadically. Conflict, the desire to have it all ways, held her in its paralyzing web. "I could not bring myself to give up anything," she wrote, "and hence I was incapable of making my choice."
Simone began to be plagued by self-doubt. The longer she remained inactive--intellectually and emotionally enthralled to Sartre--the more convinced she became of her mediocrity. "I was, beyond any doubt, abdicating," she wrote, later. Existing in an ancillary relationship to Sartre had given her false peace of mind, a kind of blissful, anxiety-free state in which nothing much was expected of her except that she be a sprightly companion.
Inevitably, even her sprightliness began to deteriorate. "You used to be so full of little ideas, Beaver," Sartre said, using the nickname he had for her. (He went on to warn her against becoming "one of those female introverts.")
From the perspective of her mature years, de Beauvoir recognized how perilously easy it had been for her to exist, as a young woman, in subjugation to another. Someone "more fascinating" than she. Someone she could look up to, idolize, and in whose shadow she could feel small and secure.
There was, of course, a price. A small, self-effacing voice began to filter through to the young woman's consciousness. "I am nothing," it said.
She realized, "I had ceased to exist on my own terms and was now a mere parasite."
Though feminists think of her as one of the founding voices of modern feminism, Simone de Beauvoir did not view the solution to her predicament as merely cultural. Though she realized that her very way of thinking about the problem had to do with the fact that she was a woman, "it was as an individual," she says, "that I attempted to resolve it."
Abruptly, determinedly, Simone decided to take a year's teaching job--away from Sartre, away from Paris--in the city of Marseilles. The solitude, she hoped, would strengthen her "against the temptation I had been dodging for two years: that of giving up."
In Marseille Simone took up a remarkable, rigorous and obsessive activity in an attempt to exorcise her urge to be dependent. On her two days off a week she walked--not in a leisurely or casual fashion, but with the blindered perseverance of one who is out to overcome a severe handicap. She would put on an old dress and some espadrilles and take a small basket lunch with her; then she would proceed with her adventure into the unknown, climbing every peak, clambering down every gully, exploring "every valley, gorge and defile."
As her strength and endurance increased, so did her mileage. At first she would walk only five or six hours, but soon she was able to take routes requiring nine or ten. In time she was doing more than twenty-five miles a day. "I visited towns large and small, villages, abbeys, and chateaux.... With tenacious perserverance I rediscovered my mission to rescue things from oblivion."
Whereas once, she says, she had been "closely dependent upon other people," relying on the them to provide her with rules and objectives, now she was having to make her own way, unaided, from one day to the next. She thumbed rides from truckdrivers to get her over the most boring stretches of road fast. She took an active, aggressive stance in relation to what she was about. "When I was clambering over rocks and mountains or sliding down screes, I would work out shortcuts, so that each expedition was a work of art.
During that year three things happened that frightened her. Once a dog followed her on her solitary hike and became maddened by thirst as the day wore on. (Eventually he plunged himself into a brook.) Another time a truck driver with whom she'd hitched a ride suddenly pulled off the main road and headed for the only deserted spot in the entire area. When she recognized what was happening she devised a fast plan. As soon as the truck slowed down for a grade crossing, Simone opened the door and threatened to jump while the truck was still moving. The man, "rather shamefacedly," she wrote, pulled up and let her out.