Genesis of ‘The Second Sex’

Press, 26 May 1984, Page 20

Genesis of ‘The Second Sex’

When Things of the Spirit Come First. By Simone de Beauvoir. Fontana, 1983. 202 pp. $5.95 (paperback). (Reviewed by Ralf Unger) The pioneer literary feminist and elegant author of numerous acclaimed novels, now in her mid-seventies, produced these curious short stories in 1940. They have all the flavour of a brilliant schoolgirl’s observation of her teachers and peers, of home, Paris, and the provincial environment of 20 years before that. The conflicts of the five young women in the tale are battles of the flesh against spiritual purity, a searching for a philosophy of the meaning or senselessness of existence, and a fascination with the male sex. Very little is resolved and the style, in a typical passage describing a young woman deserted by her lover, for example is: “Not all illnesses come from the body; too ardent a soul could wear its fleshly wrapping to the point

of destruction; but in this attempt at self-purification did not the soul destroy itself, alas? In that ultimate moment when the spirit broke free, did it not disappear for ever?” A lifetime spent as the consort of Jean-Paul Sartre, in spite of all his unfaithfulness, and her absorbing of Existential philosophy from his brilliant mind never let Simone de Beauvoir emerge as a full person in her own right, and that is not overlooking her revolutionary book “The Second Sex.” A masochistic subjugation of her own dreams to those supposedly more significant was foreshadowed in this early writing now published for the first time. It is a most valuable seam of gold for literary miners and, if seen from an age of souls and bodies covered over with many layers of stifling respectability, a worth-while little experience.