Didacticism and the Ethics of Failure: Beauvoir

Abstract

It has long been known that the fictional and non-fictional writings of Simone de Beauvoir are preoccupied with death and more specifically with murder.¹ Her first published work, the novel L’Invitée (1943), ends with the murder which the epigraph from Hegel (’Chaque conscience poursuit la mort de l’autre’)² (Each consciousness pursues the death of the other) had predicted from the very beginning. In Tous les hommes sont mortels (1946), Fosca kills his own son who is attempting to assassinate him.³ Une mort très douce (1964) and La Cérémonie des adieux (1981) chart the physical decline and death of Beauvoir’s mother and Sartre respectively. Moreover a number of critics (notably Jardine, Moi and Hughes) have related these deaths to a matricidal impulse through which the phallic mother (represented on occasion by Sartre) is dismembered and annihilated.⁴ Patricide, filicide, matricide: these are the various figures of a more generalized altericide, a murder of the Other, in which the very act of writing becomes embroiled. Beauvoir herself indicated that writing L’Invitée was an equivalent or substitute for the act of murder with which the novel culminates.⁵ In the words of Toril Moi, writing serves as ‘a weapon against the power of the Other’.⁶