Feminist Defeat and Perseverance

In Simone de Beauvoir's The Woman Destroyed, the reader is given a deep psychological portrait of a women's failing marriage. Not only does Beauvoir show us the thoughts and confidences of one beset by inner turmoil, she also portrays for us the marriage as it appears from the outside. The main character in The Woman Destroyed is the narrator Monique. She has been married to her husband Maurice for over twenty years and is trying to keep herself emotionally together after the realization that he is having an affair. Other characters the author introduces are the couple's two daughters, Colette and Lucienne. Colette has recently married and moved out of her parent's house. Lucienne, the younger of the two children, has moved to America to live an independent life from her family.

The turmoil of Maurice's affair has begun a series of emotional challenges for Monique. It is interesting to note that these challenges may possibly have related to Beauvoir's own personal life. She was also in a long-term romantic relationship with a man, although she never married. This adds a deeper psychological aspect to the plight of Monique. Monique seems, on the surface, to hold herself together both emotionally and physically. However, as we explore further, we find that she is actually falling apart. Similarly, Beauvoir's romantic partner, Jean Paul Sartre, had many affairs with women. This presumably forced her to keep herself emotionally stable. As Bethany Latimer explains in her book, Colette, Beauvoir, and Duras: Age and Women Writers, writers tend to repeatedly explore subjects in their fiction to help solve seemingly unsolvable problems:

What seems undeniably personal, autobiographical, is a writer's decision to repe...

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...re fully-realized self. The strong, modern woman exists in the complexity of character that perseverance brings. Not for her is suffering worthless, but rather meaningful in the fullest sense of developed character and triumphant renewal.

Works Cited

De Beauvoir, Simone. "Introduction." The Second Sex. 12 July 2005. http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/debeauv.html

De Beauvoir, Simone. "The Woman Destroyed." The Woman Destroyed. New York: Random House, Inc. 1969.

Ladimer, Bethany. "Reconciling Femininity an Aging." Colette, Beauvoir, and Duras: Age and Women Writers. Tallahassee: University Press of Florida, 1999.

Weinstein, Arnold. A Scream Goes Through the House: What Literature Teaches Us About Life. New York: Random House, Inc. 2003.