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From International Socialist Review, Vol.21 No.2, Spring 1960, pp.60-61.
Transcription & mark-up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Memoirs of a dutiful daughter
by Simone de Beauvoir
The World Publishing Co., Cleveland and New York. 1959. 382 pp. $5.
“I was and I would always remain, my own master,” writes Simone de Beauvoir about her childhood. Born in Paris in 1908, her childhood was happy and secure. “Sheltered, petted and constantly entertained by the endless novelty of life, I was a madly gay little girl.” Yet in her twenties, she was to write in her diaries, from which she reconstructed her autobiography, “I was cabin’d, cribb’d, confined! I felt suffocated, I was eating my heart out, I wanted to hammer my head against those prison walls.”
While later gaining fame as a champion of women (The Second Sex) she never resented being a girl. She enjoyed her position as the older daughter in a middle-class family, secure in her Roman Catholic faith which protected her from fear of death as a child, and convinced her of her immortality.
In the bourgeois environment, in which the family belonged, the contradiction between religion and patriotism put national values before Catholic virtues.
“At an early age I was indoctrinated ... to make a clear distinction between God and Caesar and to render unto each his due; all the same, it was most disconcerting to find that Caesar always got the better of God.”
She decided that religion was for purely spiritual matters.
She received a shock at confession when the priest to whom she was confessing her spiritual “sins” interrupted with a scolding about her behavior in school.
“I gazed with horror upon the impostor whom for years I had taken as the representative of God on earth; it was as if he had suddenly tucked up his cassock and revealed the skirts of one of the religious bigots; his priest’s robe was only a disguise; it covered an old busybody who fed on gossip.”
Even when she became a university student she dared not tell her parents that she had been an atheist for many years. Actually her intellectual break with the church was of little help in mitigating her own confusion and despair in growing to maturity. Although a brilliant student at the university, so imbued was she with Catholic restraints and inhibitions that she was prevented from any participation in student activities, or even interest in the people around her, in the world at large, in politics, or especially any relationship with men. Having logically fought out the battle against religion and her family, she still had to learn how to participate in the world as a free person, not one bound by the invisible bonds of bourgeois-Catholic conditioning.
Fortunately for her, her father lost his money. Because she would have no dowry and hence could not marry in bourgeois French circles, the only alternative was to be educated to make a living. Her brilliance finally brought her into the circle around Jean Paul Sartre.
The author was later to become a radical. One of the interesting anecdotes in a book filled with illustrations of honesty in self-evaluation is about her meeting with Simone Weil, who told her,
“in no uncertain tones that only one thing mattered in the world today: the Revolution which would feed all the starving people on the earth. I retorted no less peremptorily, that the problem was not to make men happy, but to find the reason for their existence. She looked me up and down: ‘It’s easy to see you’ve never gone hungry,’ she snapped ... I realized that she had classified me as a ‘high-minded little bourgeoise,’ and this annoyed me ... I believed that I had freed myself from the bonds of my class ...”
Americans are surprised to find in French literature that many of the heroes and heroines are radicals; however Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter tells the story of another aspect of French life: the steeping of the young in conservative property-preserving precepts of behavior.
How one woman freed herself in a mighty struggle, told in a rapid, compressed, highly readable style with great honesty and without self-pity, makes an absorbing book.
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