Simone de Beauvoir on Little Women

I'm guessing that this childhood favourite of Simone de Beauvoir's has been duly noted by scholars --  she loved Little Women. It was a book in which she thought she had "caught a glimpse" of her "future self":

The March girls were Protestants, their father was a pastor and their mother had given them a bedside book, not The Imitation of Christ but Pilgrim's Progress: these slight differences only made the things we had in common with the March girls stand out all the more. I was moved when Meg and Jo had to put on their poor brown poplin frocks to go to a matinee at which all the other children were dressed in silk; they were taught, as I was, that a cultivated mind and moral righteousness were better than money; their modest home, like my own, had something about it -- I don't know why -- that was quite exceptional. I identified myself passionately with Jo, the intellectual. Brusque and bony, Jo clambered up into trees when she wanted to read; she was much more tomboyish and daring than I was, but I shared her horror of sewing and housekeeping and her love of books. She wrote: in order to imitate her more completely, I composed two or three short stories. I don't know if I dreamed of reviving my old friendship with Jacques, or if, rather more vaguely, I was longing for the barrier between my own world and the world boys to be broken down, but the relationship between Jo and Laurie touched me to the heart. Later, I had no doubt, they would marry one another;  so it was possible for maturity to bring the promises made in childhood to fruition instead of denying them; the thought filled me with renewed hope. But the thing that delighted me most of all was the marked partiality which Louisa Alcott manifested for Jo. As I have said, I detested the sort of grown-up condescension which lumped all children under the same heading. The defects and qualities which authors gave their young heroines usually seemed to be inconsequential accidents; when they grew up they would all be as good as gold: moreover it was only their personal morality that distinguished one from another, never their intelligence; it was almost as if from this point of view their age had made them all equal. But in Little Women Jo was superior to her sisters, who were either more virtuous or more beautiful than she, because of her passion for knowledge and the vigour of her thinking; her superiority was as outstanding as that of certain adults and guaranteed that she would have an unusual life: she was marked by fate. I, too, felt I was entitled to consider my taste in reading and my scholastic successes as tokens of a personal superiority which would be borne out by the future. I became in my own eyes a character out of a novel.

I invented all kinds of romantic intrigues that were full of obstacles and setbacks for the heroine. One afternoon I was playing croquet with Poupette, Jeanne, and Madeleine. We were wearing beige pinafores with red scallops and embroidered cherries.  The clumps of laurel were shining in the sun, and the earth smelled good. Suddenly I was struck motionless: I was living through the first chapter of a novel in which I was the heroine; she was still almost a child but we, too, were growing up. I decided that my sister and cousins, who were prettier, more graceful, and altogether nicer than myself would be more popular than I; they would find husbands but not I. I should feel no bitterness about it; people would be right to prefer them to me: but something would happen which would exalt me beyond all personal preference; I did not know under what form, or by whom I should be recognized for what I was. I imagined that there was someone already watching the croquet lawn and the four little girls in their  beige pinafores: the eyes rested on me and a voice murmured, "She is not like other girls."

That quote is, of course, from Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. It'd be interesting to compile a list of women writers who have claimed Jo as an early influence.  It would be a long one. And it's sad to think of Simone de Beauvoir believing that Jo would one day marry Laurie. Instead Laurie ended up marrying the youngest sister, that twit Amy, after Jo refused him. Like Jo, Simone de Beauvoir refused to marry her suitor. And during her long and difficult to understand relationship with Sartre they both became sexually involved with a number of a young women who seem to have been somewhat Amy-like.  Furthermore, they referred to these young woman as part of their "family." (Someone could probably get away with writing a dissertation on these kinky parallels. Someone probably already has.) At any rate, as Louis Menand points out in this article, it's hard to believe Beauvoir actually enjoyed that aspect of her life. 

I find the Menand article interesting for another reason. In brief biographical pieces on Simone de Beauvoir, it is inevitably pointed out that she came in second to Sartre's first  in the agrégation, "the competitive examination for a career in the French school system." I noticed somewhere that she was 21 at the time and that Sartre was 24, which gives him three years of study on her. That's a lot when you're barely out of your teens. And in Menand's piece I found this:

Deirdre Bair, in her 1990 biography of Beauvoir, reported that the jury for the agrégation, in 1929, debated whether to award first place in the competition to Sartre or Beauvoir. They gave it to Sartre—he was, after all, a man, and it was his second try—but they agreed that Beauvoir was the real philosopher. She was the youngest agrégée in French history.

Sartre failed his first try.

Comments

[Aishwarya]

“There is one question that every thinking woman in the Western world must have asked herself at one time or another. Why is a nice girl like Simone de Beauvoir sucking up to a boring old fart like Jean-Paul Sartre?”
-Angela Carter

(grin)

[Stephany Aulenback]

It was strange, wasn't it? I've finished that memoir and I'm moving on to the next. There wasn't much about Sartre in it but that old Louis Menand article in the NYer made their relationship sound dreadful. I'm not sure she/they managed to improve on a traditional marriage although I certainly admire the attempt.