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Pathologically selfless
A revolution with the economical force of an acerbic murmur in Simone de
By Diego Costa
“Woman Destroyed”
254 pages
On Amazon.com
$11.12 (new)
At Golda Meir Library
PQ2603.E362 F413 1987
Of authors who have a knack for transporting the reader into the visceral, aching female psyche, Simone de Beauvoir may be the most efficient at it.
She exposes the existential anguish of her characters not by what these women verbalize, but by subtly weaving a set of circumstances around them so unavoidably unbearable, and yet so familiar, so painfully ordinary, you can’t help but wear their pain around your own neck, feeling the weight of each swallowed frustration, each regretful memoir.
While Michael Cunningham can paint a pretty gloomy portrait of female angst with no exit besides quitting everything, his women can also seem as stand-ins for real people, narrative archetypes.
Helene Cixous seems as worried about the linguistic implications of her suffering as she is about the human behind them.
And Clarice Lispector, perhaps closer to de Beauvoir in intent, manages to delve deep into the politics of the self, avoiding politics per se.
With de Beauvoir, however, the muffled, disturbing sob of a mother seems to carry the political weight of generations. Her women are so multi-layered, so flawed, so bare we could never feel them as completely tangible. They are too real for short descriptions, too real for literary constraints.
In “Woman Destroyed” (“La Femme Rompue”), de Beauvoir enters the very private world of three different women who seem to be fed up with years of performing a kind of womanhood that wasn’t theirs, but served others quite well.
A socialist mother dealing with a son who suddenly betrays her, politically and emotionally. (“It is so tiring to hate someone we love.”)
A very honest, discreetly implacable, but mostly desperate woman and her self-directed monologue. (“My father loved me. No one else. That’s where everything started.”)
And a wife who allows her husband’s betrayal to become an extension of her own neurosis, which she nurtures like a prosthetic limb she has no choice but to accept. (“When we are used to living for someone else, it is quite hard to convert yourself to doing anything else.”)
All of these women overlap with each other most of the time. The details of their stories being just that, mere narrative elements to conjure up the same neurotic symptom that drives them so quietly incomplete, so knotted in their own frustrations.
They all want to scream. And they do, to their insides. But they see themselves needing men who don’t love them like women anymore, but as figures, household essentials. Their bodies decaying as their intellect gets painfully cleverer. They become more aware of their decay, of their last chances for redemption and for selfishness.
Their husbands take advantage of their impotence, of the emotional loopholes inertia produces, while they sit at home, mad, bleeding inside, drowning in self-pity, verbose about practicalities, but mute about all that truly matters.
“Woman Destroyed” speaks of a period in the lives of women who allow themselves the moral duty to look back and realize not much has been achieved for their own happiness by not putting their joy in front of everyone else’s.
The book links its characters in their mind-boggling, gut-wrenching attempt to make sense of the extreme dichotomies that keep life from collapsing, but also from ever feeling completely possible, tangibly absurd: the emotional and the intellectual, interiority and the mundane, contemplation and frivolity, conformity and ambition, the self and everyone else.
Perhaps de Beauvoir’s greatest contribution to feminism — “You aren’t born a woman, you become one.” — often coincides with her grandest gifts to literature. She distills her socio-political insights with such finesse, such subtlety they come off as harmless, strictly literary business.
But they reveal, in their fascinatingly discreet militancy, some of the strongest stances against social and personal conformism art has managed to produce.
Her revolution bears the economical force of an acerbic murmur, the quiet outburst of a dissimulated smile. De Beauvoir knew, like all good authors do, that there is much more desperation in a half-muddled cry than in a glass-shattering scream.
“In reality, I was disarmed because I had never imagined I had rights … I wait and I even ask. But I don’t know how to demand.”
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