Simone de Beauvoir's 'La femme rompue': reception and deception.(Critical Essay)

Publication: The Modern Language Review

Publication Date: 01-JUL-05

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This article aims to account for the 'misreading' of 'La femme rompue' by the readers of its serialized publication in French Elle magazine. It offers a close reading of the parallels between the protagonist's strategies for self-deception and Beauvoir's own attempts to deceive the reader as the creator of literary art as illusion. Using Pierre Macherey's theory of how the non-dit of the literary text comes to undermine the dit, it demonstrates that the 'misreading' of 'La Femme rompue' emerges from a resisting reading strategy that exceeds the boundaries of resisting reading prepared by the author.

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Simone de Beauvoir's short story 'La femme rompue' is the last of three that appear in the collection of the same name, published by Gallimard in 1967. (1) It is one of only two collections of short fiction ever written by Beauvoir and, together with the novel Les Belles Images, (2) represents both a return to fiction after a long period during which she published only autobiographical texts (1958-64) (3) and the close of Beauvoir's fiction-writing career. (4) The short story 'La femme rompue', however, distinguishes itself not simply by being one of Beauvoir's few experiments with the short-fiction form. More than any of the author's other fictional texts, this story has had something of a troubled reception. It is narrated in the form of a diary, whose entries, spanning a period of just over six months, from 13 September to 24March, bear on the discovery by the diarist, Monique, of her husband's in.delity, and the subsequent breakdown of her marriage. Intended by Beauvoir as the exposition of the protagonist's bad faith in having conformed too readily to a traditionally subordinate role in her relationship to her husband, the story has been subjected to what the author considered a 'gross misreading'. The readers of French Elle magazine, where the story was initially serialized, (5) empathized with the fate of the central character to such an extent that they failed to detect Beauvoir's denunciation of her tendency towards self-deception.

In this article I attempt to account for the 'misreading' of 'La femme rompue' by drawing on Marxist critic Pierre Macherey's theory of literary production and how the non-dit of the literary text comes to undermine the dit. The discussion will be conducted on two levels. Firstly, I shall offer an analysis of how the intended reading of the story is generated by the reader's response to a series of textual clues laid down by the author that point towards the bad faith of the narrator. The second level of the discussion sets out to account for the 'gross misreading' of the text through an analysis of how the non-dits of the text enable the reader to take up an alternative readerly position. I show firstly that Beauvoir's intended reading of the story depends on a resisting reading strategy that implicitly acknowledges the capacity of narrative to be read contrary to a speaker's intention. This reader position will therefore be referred to throughout as the text's 'intended resisting reader'. (6) Secondly, I demonstrate that the 'misreading' of 'La femme rompue' emerges from a resisting reading strategy that exceeds the boundaries of resisting reading prepared by the author. During the discussion of this alternative reading strategy, reference will be made to the 'unintended' or 'excessive' resisting reader. (7) In my own 'excessive' resisting reading, I offer a close reading of the text which focuses on the parallels between the protagonist's strategies for self-deception and Beauvoir's own attempts to deceive the reader in the act of literary creation.

Beauvoir makes two explicit statements about the intended meaning of 'La femme rompue', one in the priere d'inserer to the original 1967 Gallimard edition, the second, an attempt at clarification after the fact, in the final volume of hermemoirs, Tout compte fait. In the priere d'inserer she describesMonique, the anti-heroine of the story, as 'la victime stupefaite de la vie qu'elle s'est choisie: une dependance conjugale qui la laisse depouillee de tout son etre meme quand l'amour lui est refuse'. (8) In Tout compte fait Beauvoir attempts to defend herself in the face of the poor critical reception of 'La femme rompue', where her readers had largely failed to 'read between the lines'. She describes her motivation forwriting the story in terms of a desire to give literary expression to a situation in which women of her personal acquaintance, or from whom she had received correspondence, all too commonly found themselves--that of being abandoned by their husband for another woman:

J'avais recemment recu les conFIdences de plusieurs femmes d'une quarantaine d'annees que leurs maris venaient de quitter pour une autre. Malgre la diversite de leurs caracteres et les circonstances, il y avait dans toutes leurs histoires d'interessantes similitudes: elles ne comprenaient rien a ce qui leur arrivait, les conduites de leur mari leur paraissaient contradictoires et aberrantes, leur rivale indigne de son amour; leur univers s'ecroulait, elles finissaient par ne plus savoir qui elles etaient [...] elles se debattaient dans l'ignorance et l'idee m'est venue de donner a voir leur nuit. (9)

Beauvoir's statements do not suggest a complete lack of sympathy on her part with the sufferings of these women, since she contextualizes their various failings and weaknesses as testament to the fallibility of all existence:

Jeme sens solidaire des femmes qui ont assume leur vie et qui luttent pour la reussir; mais cela nem'empeche pas--au contraire--dem'interesser a celles qui l'ont plus ou moins manquee et, de maniere generale, a cette part d'echec qu'il y a dans toute existence. (10)

None the less, her motivation for writing the story is given in terms of shedding light on another's situation of suffering from a position of exteriority: to the ignorance of these abandoned women Beauvoir opposes her understanding; against their darkness, she offers enlightenment: 'elles se debattaient dans l'ignorance et l'idee m'est venue de donner a voir leur nuit'. In her characterization of the women who provided the real-life inspiration for the story, Beauvoir employs a homogenizing rhetorical gesture and reduces them to a common essence of ignorance and error: 'Malgre la diversite de leurs caracteres et les circonstances, il y avait dans toutes leurs histoires d'interessantes similitudes:

elles ne comprenaient rien a ce qui leur arrivait'. In a comically acerbic account of the story's reception, moreover, Beauvoir expresses frustration with what she sees as the 'misreading' of the story by the Elle readers. Their failure to grasp her intention is attributed by Beauvoir to a blindness to the reality of their situation that mirrors that of the protagonist:

je fus submergee de lettres emanant de femmes rompues, demi rompues, ou en instance de rupture. S'identiFIant a l'heroine, elles lui attribuaient toutes les vertus et elles s'etonnaient qu'elle restat attachee a un homme indigne; leur partialite indiquait qu'a l'egard de leur mari, de leur rivale, d'elles-memes, elles partageaient l'aveuglement de Monique....

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