writing_womans_lives_symposium_paper_book_v2

or embroidery, serving only for entertainment purposes. Beauvoir draws attention to stereotypicality
of women's writing, which is associated with a certain inability of the writeresses to transcend
specified roles: a bluestocking, a petty‐bourgeois writeress, a pillar of society, a poetic being. They do
not try to present their subjectivity and experience, but make an act of self‐affirmation. They are
(using the terminology of Sartre) inauthentic in it, guided by bad faith.
For Simone de Beauvoir, the literature, however, may be a space of a certain liberation – provided
it could find a way to express its authentic voice. It appears that Beauvoir perceives a voice in
literature as another element – between a content and a form. It can perhaps be best described as a
way of storytelling, but also as searching for ways to speak/write. The voice is invariably associated
with the experience – the individual and singular one – and with attempts to express it.
Telling oneself – this is the basis of Beauvoir's writing practice. The narrative in La Femme rompue
is based on the diary of the main character – the title “woman destroyed.” She attempts not only to
record her everyday life, but also to tell it (and to understand it through the story) to herself. It is the
diary – as an open form, susceptible to certain changes, non‐ordered and created ad hoc – here and
now – seems to be, for Beauvoir, a significant form, the one close to everyday life, not moralizing nor
out of touch with reality. At the same time, making the act of story, of writing, is for her synonymous
with acting, and this acting results from the structure of existence, from the need to transcend
oneself. And this is the meaning of human existence, which has no such meaning itself. As Simone de
Beauvoir states that every individual who feels the need to justify her/his existence, feels it as an
infinite desire to transcend herself/himself – to the transcendence. This transcending is in the act of
writing. The writer goes beyond himself, sees herself/himself in a certain context, conditions, a
connection with others, transcends the loneliness and singularity of herself/himself. At the same
time (as noticed by Estelle Jelinek) 10 women's autobiographies are fragmentary, open, constructed
differently from the “classic” autobiographies, are subjective, point – this technique can be seen in,
e.g., La Femme rompue and Les Belles Images. The introspection and self‐exploration – those terms
are crucial for Simone de Beauvoir’s vision of literature.
Beauvoir, as a diarist, treats herself as an example – as does her heroins in her novels. The writer
concentrates on herself and studies herself just as a philosopher studies existence. The journal
becomes intimate space in which she reflected upon herself. In La Femme rompue, the main
character, Monique is going through breakdown and she screams in her flat “Je me suis clöitrée. [... ]
J'ai choisi de me terrer dans mon caveau.” 11 She spends her days alone in the flat, she stops eating
and washing, and starts abusing drugs and alcohol. All she does is reading her diary, traces her
relationship and break up with her husband, tries to understand her relationships with her daughters
and faces the pain of disappointment and waste life. But before that happens she loses everything.
She discovers that everything in her life was a lie, that everyone (including herself) was lying to her.
Monique's sense of self has depended on Maurice, she is defined as a wife and mother and her
husband guaranteed her identity. In fact she was blinded (“aveuglee”) by her memory (“une image”)
of Maurice as he had been when he was first in love with her. She realises that for years she has seen
Maurice as through the veil of this image, as well as she has seen herself through the images if their
past. And what is more she realizes that she cannot and does not tell the truth of her experience.
Monique begins to write in it again to resist her consciousness of emptiness: “le vide etait si immense
en moi, autour de moi, qu'il fallait ce geste de ma main pour m'assurer que j'etais encore vivante.” 12
Diary is her cure – as well as her poison since she is perceiving her life through her diary. 13
Ursula Todd exploring the issue of Beauvoir’s “autobiographical project” notes the therapeutic
character of production of narratives, which allows her to organize and to understand her
experience. These “therapeutic” dimension of diary can be seen as well in Simone de Beauvoir’s
novels. In her novels and short stories female heroines (like Monique or Laurence) try to tell their
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