Simone de Beauvoir

By the world-famous writer and feminist Simone de Beauvoir, here are three moving stories which eloquently express her understanding of women and the crises they face in mid-life.

The Woman Destroyed

bianca

It is only now that I realize how much value I had for myself, fundamentally. But [he] has murdered all the words by which I might try to justify it: he has repudiated the standards by which I measured others and myself; I had never dreamed of challenging them—that is to say of challenging myself. And now what I wonder is this: what right had I to say that the inner life was preferable to a merely social life, contemplation to trifling amusements, and self-sacrifice to ambition? My only life had been to create happiness around me. I have not made [him] happy. And my daughters are not happy either. So what then? I no longer know anything. Not only do I not know what kind of a person I am, but also I do not know what kind of a person I ought to be. Black and white merge into one another, the world is an amorphous mass, and I no longer have any clear outlines. How is it possible to live without believing in anything or in myself?

Your fault was believing that love could last. I’ve grasped the situation: as soon as I begin to grow fond of a man, I find another.

I’ve lost my own image. I did not look at it often; but it was there, in the background, just as [he] had drawn it for me. A straightforward, genuine, “authentic” woman, without mean-mindedness, uncompromising, but at the same time understanding, indulgent, sensitive, deeply feeling, intensely aware of things and of people, passionately devoted to those she loved and creating happiness for them. A fine life, serene, full, “harmonious.” It is dark: I cannot see myself anymore. And what do the others see? Maybe something hideous.

I realized that it was my past and my whole life that were going to be taken away from me—that I had already lost.

Sometimes I stand at that window from which I saw him leave, one Saturday morning an eternity ago. I said to myself then, He will not come back. But I was not certain of it. It was the lightning flash of intuition—the intuition of what would happen later, of what has happened. He has not come back. Not him: and one day there will no longer be even this semblance of him at my side. The car is there, parked against the pavement: he left it. It used to mean his presence, and the sight of it warmed me. Now it only emphasizes his absence. He is gone. Forever he will be gone.

That presence, as familiar to me as my own reflection, my reason for living, my delight, is now this stranger, this judge, this enemy: my heart beats high with fear when he opens the door.

A ring at the bell. A delivery boy put a great bunch of lilacs and roses into my arms with a note saying: Happy birthday. Maurice. As soon as the door was shut I burst into tears. I defend myself with restless activity, horrid plans and hatred; and these flowers, this reminder of lost, hopelessly lost, happiness, knocked all my defenses to the ground.

Why doesn’t he love me anymore? The question is why did he love me in the first place. One never asks oneself. Even if one is neither vain nor self-obsessed, it is so extraordinary to be oneself—exactly oneself and no one else—and so unique, that it seems natural that one should also be unique for someone else. He loved me, that’s all. And for ever, since I should always be me.

“Nothing has changed between us!” What illusions I built up for myself upon those words. Did he mean to say that nothing had changed because he had already been deceiving me for the past year? Or did he really mean nothing at all?

Oh, what does it matter? I’m beyond caring about what people think. I am too utterly destroyed. I don’t give a damn for the picture they may draw of me. It’s a matter of survival.

I realized that I had come here in the hope of once more finding that man so hopelessly in love: I had not seen him for years and years, although this memory lies like a transparency over all the visions I have of him. That evening, for the very reason that the surroundings were the same, the old image, coming into contact with a flesh and blood man smoking a cigarette, fell to dust and ashes. I had a shattering revelation: time goes by. I began to weep. He sat on the edge of the bed and took me tenderly in his arms. “Sweetheart, my sweetheart, don’t cry. What are you crying for?” He stroked my hair; he gave me little fluttering kisses on the side of my head.

“It’s nothing; it’s over,” I said. “I’m fine.”

I felt something piercing in my heart—a happiness that hurt, so unaccustomed had it become.

Usually I am not afraid of being alone. Indeed, in small doses, I find it a relief—the presence of people I love overburdens my heart. I grow anxious about a wrinkle or a yawn. And so as not to be a nuisance—or absurd—I have to bottle up my anxieties, rein back my impulses. The times when I think of them from a distance are restful breaks.

he disappeared. For ever. He will never come back. It will not be he who comes back.

I expect a lot of the people I love—too much, perhaps. I expect a lot, and I even ask for it. But I do not know how to insist.

They are in their pajamas; they are drinking coffee, smiling at one another.… There is an image that hurts me. When you hit against a stone at first you only feel the impact—the pain comes after. Now, with a week’s delay, I am beginning to suffer. Before, I was more bewildered—amazed. I rationalized, I thrust aside the pain that is pouring over me this morning—these images. I pace up and down the flat, up and down, and at each step another strikes me. I opened his cupboard. I looked at his pajamas, shirts, drawers, vests; and I began to weep. Another woman stroking his cheek, as soft as this silk, as warmly gentle as this pullover—that I cannot bear.

Idiotic vanity. All women think they are different; they all think there are some things that will never happen to them; and they are all wrong.

What an odd thing a diary is: the things you omit are more important than those you put in.

They are solid; they are real: yet their abandoned state changes them into a fantastic pretense—of what, one wonders.

People can’t bear being told what you really think of them. They want you to believe their fine words or at least to pretend to.

Would the dread of aging take hold of me again? Do not look too far ahead. Ahead there were the horrors of death and farewells: it was false teeth, sciatica, infirmity, intellectual barrenness, loneliness in a strange world that we would no longer understand and that would carry on without us. Shall I succeed in not lifting my gaze to those horizons? Or shall I learn to behold them without horror? We are together: that is our good fortune. We shall help one another to live through this last adventure, this adventure from which we shall not come back. Will that make it bearable for us? I do not know. Let us hope so. We have no choice in the matter.

And this rebirth and this permanence gave me a feeling of eternity. The world seemed to me as fresh and new as it had been in the first ages, and this moment sufficed to itself. I was there, and I was looking at the tiled roofs at our feet, bathed in the moonlight, looking at them for no reason, looking at them for the pleasure of seeing them. There was a piercing charm in this lack of involvement. “That’s the great thing about writing,” I said. “Pictures lose their shape; their colors fade. But words you carry away with you.”

We relapsed into silence. Was it going to settle there between us for good? A couple who go on living together merely because that was how they began, without any other reason: was that what we were turning into? Were we going to spend another fifteen, twenty, years without any particular grievance or enmity but each enclosed in his own world, wholly bent on his own problem, brooding over his own private failure, words grown wholly useless?

The woman destroyed… as in the woman who destroyed love but also as in the woman who was destroyed by love…

To be trapped in the belief that you merely exist for love, marriage and family, and that without these, life is meaningless and you are nothing… how devastating.

The woman destroyed… as in the woman who destroyed love but also as in the woman who was destroyed by love…

To be trapped in the belief that you merely exist for love, marriage and family, and that without these, life is meaningless and you are nothing… how devastating.

I think I liked this book, it just really sent me into a spiral about my relationship. 

The Woman Destroyed

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