Beauvoir’s Reception in France and Spain

–Maria Isabel Corbí-Sáez, Universidad de Alicante

In a short oral contribution devoted to the reception of Simone de Beauvoir’s literary work, making choices is unavoidable. Such a broad subject is hardly approached in a few minutes. So let me give some hints on this interesting matter in Simone de Beauvoir studies. I’ll first recall some aspects of Beauvoir’s own perceptions of her literary works’ reception in France, especially of her novels, then I’ll present what happened in the mid-nineties, and finally what has been happening in recent years, laying stress, on one hand, on the way scholars have received her novels and, on the other, giving brief insights into publishing campaigns both in France and abroad.

As readers of Simone de Beauvoir’s memoirs, especially of La force de l’âge (1960) [The Prime of Life], La force des choses (1963) [The Force of Circumstance], and Tout compte fait (1972) [All Said and Done], will certainly remember, the author narrates how her works were received in the French literary field at those times. For the very first novels she speaks of a success among the general public (L’invitée [She Came to Stay],[1] Le sang des autres [The Blood of Others],[2] for instance), and in general terms of a favorable reception on the part of critics. But things didn’t always work that way. After the storm provoked by The Second Sex,and especially by the second volume,[3] among a quite huge sector of the critics, the author admits that from that moment on she had been afraid of contrary reactions. In the case of The Mandarins,[4] which had been a crushing success, winning her the 1954 Goncourt prize, and a significantly widened readership, she wonders nevertheless what effect the critics’ legends about her could have had or still do have on her readers.[5] And her memoirs unveil these suspicions toward bad faith critics who could drive off readers or make them wrongly interpret her works.[6] Critics’ valuations often reveal some kind of thinking in the background which has to do with Simone de Beauvoir as a person, her way of life, her convictions as an intellectual, thus as Danièle Fleury points out, “biasing the criticism,” “not to forget the reference to Sartre’s influence being almost always evoked” (Fleury, 2008; our translation).

In case of Spain, subdued to a dictatorship till the mid-seventies, it might be guessed that Simone de Beauvoir had been entirely unknown and unread till the advent of Democracy. The reality is that she had been read beginning decades earlier —  the first mention of The Second Sex goes back to 1949, when the first review of her essay was published by Mercedes Formica, a woman law professor.[7] And although Tous les hommes sont mortels [All Men are Mortal] was the first novel published in Spain in 1956, we know that Simone de Beauvoir’s earlier works circulated on the black market. The first translations into Catalan and Spanish are situated between the mid-sixties and the mid-seventies (see Corbí-Sáez, 2010; Godayol, 2015). Simone de Beauvoir, in Spain, became a point of reference in the fight to recover women’s civil rights and the fight for equality. In parallel with the Spanish feminist movement’s claims and struggles, where The Second Sex‘s author was invoked, publishing companies promoted the dissemination of her works, and through the end of the eighties we observe new printings of her novels,  translations, and new editions, at a good pace[8] (see Corbí-Sáez, 2010).

If, in 1983, on one hand, Lettres au Castor [Letters to the Beaver], had shown an unexpected image of Sartre (let’s remember the attacks and mockeries), on the other hand, they also created curiosity among a wide readership about what Simone de Beauvoir’s responses could have been, which at that time was obviously still unknown. When seven years later, in 1990, her Journal de Guerre and Lettres à Sartre [War Diary and Letters to Sartre] were published, Simone de Beauvoir’s image received an even harder setback in many countries (especially, via the press, even before the translated editions appeared). Those publications aroused a great deal of public outrage, insofar as they unveiled a striking new image of Simone de Beauvoir at the beginning of the 1940s as a “young bourgeoise pretending to write without any compromise,” “indifferent to the rest of humanity,” “sectarian,” with a “maternal attitude to her beloved partner”; commentators referred to her “feelings of suffering or of jealousy toward Sartre’s contingent love affairs,” the “scabrous” tricks with the “Trios,” and so on (see Galster, 2007 and Corbi-Saez, 2010). If the hostility attached to her had shown at several flashpoints, like that of The Second Sex’s publication decades earlier, with those posthumous works another unfortunate summit was reached. And we must not forget Lettres à Nelson Algren (1997) [Letters to Nelson Algren] where readers were confronted with another surprising image of Simone de Beauvoir, the image of a passionate lover, very far from the one on display in her Letters to Sartre.

Many confessions in her diary and in her correspondence generated a great deal of indignation (see for instance, Galster, 2007: 247-266; Corbí-Sáez, 2010) and that had a deeper impact, which we can evaluate, in France, for instance, with the reduced number of reprints/re-editions of Simone de Beauvoir’s literary work at that period (we guess that the regrettable delay in assigning her an edition in the distinguished Pléiade collection of the French classics can also be traced to the contents of these posthumous publications).

Abroad, in Spain for instance, re-prints/or new editions of her literary work in translation were also very few in those years. We dare say that, in general terms, her worsened image embarrassed a certain sector of academic critics in many countries, with repercussions for the publishing campaigns.

However, while the publications of her correspondence and diary generated a good deal of bad faith on the part of critics (as recalled above), on the other hand, they started to allow readers and critics to revise many previously warped and widely held views of Simone de Beauvoir’s vision of life, her mythical couple with Sartre, her place among intellectuals, the role she played in the construction of existentialist thought, among many other key issues.

We can affirm that some cultural contexts were much less vulnerable to shifts in Simone de Beauvoir’s image (this is especially true for North America and England, due in part to the fundamental role played by the Simone de Beauvoir Society and its international yearly conference, as well as the Simone de Beauvoir Studies journal). If in the nineties, the fields of philosophy, feminist studies, and gender studies moved to give Simone de Beauvoir her rightly deserved place (Tidd, 2008), literary studies still held back rather shyly. In fact, Simone de Beauvoir was still suffering from other clichés: the doubtful quality of her literary works, her works as mere time witnesses, the distorted relation to existentialism, the interest of her memoirs as a mere source of information on her life, etc. Fortunately, by the end of the eighties there were a few prominent studies that tried to bring some new insights to some features of Simone de Beauvoir’s literary works: see for instance Elisabeth Fallaize’s The Novels of Simone de Beauvoir (1988), a pioneering work, the first in-depth study of Beauvoir’s novels, dealing with textual representations of gender and identity. Fallaize’s use of the methods of narrative theory, breaking with previous approaches based on socio-political and existentialist discourse, was a significant breakthrough.

From the end of the nineties on, we could already observe a resurgence of interest in Simone de Beauvoir in all her dimensions, in anticipation of celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of The Second Sex’s publication and thereafter as a consequence of those celebrations. With respect to scholarly reception of her literary works, the turning point was a bit later, with the worldwide celebrations of Beauvoir’s centenary in 2008, which has sped up the rhythm of publications.

In the closing panel of the International conference celebrating that centenary held in Paris in 2008, and in the closing chapter of (Re) découvrir Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvie Chaperon, summing up the current state of “Simone de Beauvoir Studies,” expresses her delight at seeing the success of these studies, in contrast to what had happened not too long before, and as she recalls it, above all in the case of France where the climate was not so favorable to the author. “[I}n the history of Beauvoir’s posterity we went from backlash to revival, from rejection to rebirth” (2008: 467; our translation). Chaperon makes a special mention of literary studies, which at that time seemed to be much more productive.

Embracing all the aspects dealt with and listing all the titles published in the latest years is obviously impossible for reasons of space. Broadly speaking, we can affirm that a very rich international dialogue has nowadays arisen among worldwide scholars interested in restoring to Simone de Beauvoir the place she fully deserves as a literary writer, taking into account all the dimensions which shape her personality as a creator. Simone de Beauvoir’s literary works are being revisited by scholars who propose new accurate readings which tend to break with all the previous underestimations and distortions, to focus on and highlight key aspects that define Simone de Beauvoir as a writer.

In the past, her fictions were approached from restrictive points of view. We can distinguish two periods: first the moral one, that of the “roman metaphysique,” supposedly based on the “roman à thèse” technique; then the view that her novels were popular best-sellers, deprived of any philosophical or literary quality, and scorned by the French postmodern feminist critics because of their allegedly enhanced masculine values and phallocentric discourse, etc. Nowadays, with the guiding assumption that her aspect as writer cannot be separated from her aspect as philosopher,[9] from her own existentialist ethics developed in her essays[10] and her conception of literature,[11] her fictional works are being analyzed starting from their “ethics of authenticity,” which allows us to situate Simone de Beauvoir in line with “existential French novelists,” to value her contribution and to assign her a deserved place in the tradition (see Nicholas-Pierre, 2016). We must not forget the new readings done on how Beauvoir’s use of language to reflect the heroine’s crises of subjectivity involves innovative narrative techniques, so that Simone de Beauvoir could be situated, obvious differences notwithstanding, among the French “new narrative” writers of the sixties (Holland, 2017, see especially chapters 3 & 4). Furthermore, while novels such as The Mandarins, Les belles images, La femme rompue [The woman destroyed], and Tous les hommes sont mortels [All men are mortal] continue to interest critics, we can observe worldwide scholars’ attention to previously ignored works as Les Bouches inutiles [The Useless Mouths] or Quand prime le spirituel [When Things of the Spirit Come First], and to works such as L’invitée [She came to stay] which have been to some extent neglected. New readings of her fictional works have led to new publishing campaigns and reprints of her fictions in France, and new translations abroad.[12]  

 Works cited

Altman, M. (2017), “Beauvoir as Literary Writer,” in A Companion to Simone de Beauvoir (Hengehold, L. & Bauer, N., coord.), pp. 341-355.

Chaperon, S., (2008), “Les études beauvoiriennes aujourd’hui,” in (Re) découvrir l’œuvre de Simone de Beauvoir, Du Deuxième sexe à la Cérémonie des Adieux¸ (Kristeva, J. et alii¸ dir.), Paris, Le Bord l’Eau, pp. 467-470.

Corbí Sáez, M. I., (2010), “Simone de Beauvoir en España: sus obras traducidas y su recepción en la prensa,” ¿Feminismo de la igualdad, Feminismo de la diferencia? (Najera, E., coord.), Feminismo/s, nº 15, 2010, pp. 165-192.

Fallaize, E., (1988), The Novels of Simone de Beauvoir, London, Routledge.

Fallaize, E., (1995), “Reception Problems for Women Writers: the Case of Simone de Beauvoir,” in Women and Representation (Still, J. & Knight, D., eds.), pp.43-56.

Fleury, Danièle, (2008), “À propos de la reception de l’Invitée et des Bouches inutiles,” in (Re) découvrir l’oeuvre de Simone de Beauvoir, Du Deuxième sexe à la Cérémonie des Adieux¸ (Kristeva, J. et alii¸ dir), Paris, Le Bord l’Eau, pp. 457-466.

Galster, I., (2007), Beauvoir dans tous ses états, Paris, ed. CNRS, coll. “Biblis”.

Godayol, P. (2015). “Simone de Beauvoir bajo la dictadura franquista: las traducciones al catalán,”Quaderns de Filologia: Estudis Literaris XX, pp. 17-34.

Holland A., Louise Renée, (eds), (2005), Simone de Beauvoir’s Fiction. Women and Language, New York, Peter Lang.

Holland, A., (2017), Excess and Transgression in Simone de Beauvoir’s Fiction. The Discourse of Madness, London, Routledge.

Klaw, B., (2000), “Simone de Beauvoir, du journal intime aux Mémoires,” in Génèses du “je”. Manuscrits et autobiographies, (Lejeune, P. & Viollet, C., dir.), Paris, CNRS, pp. 169-179.

Klaw, B., (2008), “Simone de Beauvoir, Cousin Jacques, du journal intime à l’autobiographie,” in (Re)découvrir l’oeuvre de Simone de Beauvoir, Du Deuxième sexe à La Cérémonie des Adieux¸ (Kristeva, J. et alii¸ dir.), Paris, Le Bord de l’Eau, pp. 84-91.    

Levéel, E., (2008), “Le tout voir beauvoirien ou pour une philosophie des voyages,” in (Re) découvrir l’oeuvre de Simone de Beauvoir, Du Deuxième sexe à La Cérémonie des Adieux¸ (Kristeva, J. et alii¸ dir.), Paris, Le Bord l’Eau, pp. 202-207.

Nicholas-Pierre, D., (2016), L’existence comme un roman¸ Paris, Classique Garnier.

Nielfo, G., (2002), “La difusión en España de El Segundo Sexo de Simone de Beauvoir,” Arenal, pp. 151-162.

Simons, M. A. & Timmerman, M.B., (2011), The Useless Mouths and Other Literary Writings, Chicago, Springfield, Illinois Press.

Simons, M. A., (2017), “Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Autobiography,” in A Companion to Simone de Beauvoir (Hengehold, L. & Bauer, N., coord.), pp. 393-405.

Stauder, T., (2008), Simone de Beauvoir cent ans après sa naissance. Contributions interdisciplinaires de cinq continents, Tubingen, Gunter Narr Verlag.

Tidd, U., (2008). “État présent: Simone de Beauvoir Studies,” French Studies 62, nº 2, pp. 200-208.

Tidd, U., (2011), “Telling the Truth in Simone de Beauvoir’s Autobiography,” New Readings, pp. 7-19.·

Tidd, U, (2017), “Witnessing Self, Witnessing Other in Beauvoir’s Life Writings,” in A Companion to Simone de Beauvoir (Hengehold, L. & Bauer, N., coord.), pp. 406-417.

[1] See, for instance, M. Arland’s critique in Comedia.

[2] “The success was much noisier than the one of She Came to Stay; all the critics placed my second novel above the first; it raised excited editorials in several newspapers […]” (La force des choses [The Force of Circumstance], 1963, vol. 1, p. 59, our translation).

[3] With the publication of her memoirs, beginning with Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée (1958) [Memoirs of a dutiful daughter], in the context of very high expectations from her huge and already consolidated readership, her image took an even harder hit, according to Elisabeth Fallaize. The publication of her memoirs damaged Simone de Beauvoir’s image as “she had shown crystal clear her own life, and revealed her whole world unveiling her weaknesses” (Fallaize, 1995: 48). We do agree with the critic in this respect, but we think that the autobiographic works reawakened the hostilities The Second Sex had already aroused and spread them more widely through the public sphere. Her later novels, Les belles images (1966) and La femme rompue [The Woman Destroyed] (1967), which had a very good reception from the general public, in contrast received a hostile one from the critics, and we must not forget the French feminist circles that lashed out against Simone de Beauvoir as the author describes in Tout compte fait (1972) [All Said and Done].

[4] “I had put so much of myself in this book, that at times my cheeks burned with the idea that indifferent or hostile people would run their eyes over it” (La force des choses, vol. 2, pp. 54-55, our translation).

[5] “[…] my only trouble came from the legend, propagated by the critics, according to which I would have written an exact chronicle; my inventions became indiscretions or denunciations. I am afraid that my book has generated many other misunderstandings as people have concurred in taking it for a faithful copy of reality” (La force des choses, pp. 57-58, our translation).

[6] See for instance another example with respect to La femme rompue [The Woman destroyed]: “[…] the clumsiness of my censors did not surprise me. What I did not understand is why this little book unleashed so much hatred […] with rare exceptions the judgment of critics left me indifferent […] I regretted that because of their malevolence a part of the public did not want to read me and another approached my novel with prejudice (Tout compte fait, p. 179, [All Said and Done], our translation).We could quote many more fragments similar to this one.

[7] See Gloria Nielfo (2002) and Corbí-Sáez (2010).

[8] We can observe a similar pattern (differences aside obviously) in other European countries which had suffered at some periods under totalitarian regimes. In many cases, in the periods of liberation and return to democracy and the subsequent recovery of women’s civil rights, Simone de Beauvoir was considered a point of reference, and that had repercussions for the publication of her works in translation.

[9] See the interesting approaches dealing with this particular matter in the collective volume edited by Thomas Stauder (2008), Simone de Beauvoir cent ans après sa naissance. Contributions interdisciplinaires de cinq continents. See as well Meryl Altman, 2017; Altman argues that Simone de Beauvoir’s literary work must be approached from interdisciplinary perspectives, since her literary production cannot be valued accurately without taking into account her philosophy, and vice versa, and since her consciousness of women’s problems in patriarchal societies can be seen, not only in the period of writing The Second Sex where she theorizes woman as the Other, but years earlier, in her first novels which already explore to some degree the problems of  women in situation.

[10] See Pyrrhus et Cineas and Pour une morale de l’ambiguité (The Ethics of Ambiguity).

[11] See the interesting volume edited by M. A. Simons and Maybeth Timmermann: The Useless Mouths and Other Literary Writings (2011), which offers translations into English of some of Simone de Beauvoir’s unknown literary works and essays on literature, all of them prefaced by insightful approaches from Beauvoir scholars.

[12] Due to the format of the brief contribution we have dealt with fictional works. Space constraints do not allow us to deal with the autobiographic genre Simone de Beauvoir practiced while exploring its potentialities. Let us recall that her practice of this genre is also being deeply revisited by scholars. Far from considering her memoirs,  the space where Simone de Beauvoir gave accounts of her life while disclosing the intimate, as the mere source of biographic information and anecdotes (the traditional conception), critics now offer new readings to measure to what extent she innovates in the genre (Tidd, 2011; 2017), to what extent memoirs for Simone de Beauvoir were an instrument to seize and set her status of an intellectual woman, anchored in a historical moment, in commitment to her society, institutionalizing her status of intellectual woman as a true model of self-fulfillment. Memoirs and other autobiographical texts also allow readers to approach and interrogate Simone de Beauvoir’s earlier refusal to identify herself as a philosopher and the status and role she really played (M. A. Simons, 2017). Moreover memoirs constitute an indispensable source of information to acknowledge how Beauvoir conceives travel in her philosophy. Far from being solely entertainment, journeys constitute a key aspect of her life and her philosophy (Levéel, 2008). See as well the important data brought to light by recent Beauvoirian genetic criticism (see for instance, Klaw, 2000; 2008), unveiling essential aspects which allow us to determine much more accurately and understand Simone de Beauvoir’s “life and writing enterprises.”

Dr Maria Isabel Corbí Sáez is a permanent/tenured lecturer at the Alicante University in Spain, specializing in French Literature and Culture. Her research interests in French women writers and in XXth century French Literature led her to Simone de Beauvoir. Interested in the literary aspect of Beauvoir’s writing and also in Beauvoir’s reception in Spain, Dr. Corbí Sáez has published to date around ten papers and edited a collective volume on Beauvoir.