Chapter 2 - American Bad Faith

Summary

I used to be very surprised to find so much indifference toward the position of women in the very person who would later write The Second Sex (but neither of us knew that at the time).

Colette Audry, “Portrait of the Writer as a Young Woman”

While Beauvoir recounted in her autobiography that she had paid no attention to women's suffrage activism, she had nonetheless greatly valued being considered the intellectual peer and colleague of the male philosophy students. She initially considered this evidence that being a woman had been of no significance in her life. Yet her depiction of many of the women characters in her fiction suggested a troubled preoccupation: she presented tremulous, selfish, capricious, narcissistic, and child-like characters, such as The Blood of Other's Hélène, All Men Are Mortal's Regina, and She Came to Stay's Xavière. Her view of women writers was ambivalent, expressing a creative ambivalence she attributed to them. She would claim (to Nelson Algren) that Colette was the only really great woman writer of France, describe Carson McCullers's writing as “too womanly, too poetical and quivering and full of secret meaning,” and comment that “nearly all women-writers are a little shy, even in the artistic ground, a little too sweet and subtle.” Though praising Violette le Duc's writing (le Duc's “feminine sensitiveness” notwithstanding), Beauvoir suggested she wrote “like a man.”