I haven’t been able to update, lately, since we haven’t had access to the internet. But, luckily, I’m able to go back and re-write history.
After reading Simone de Beauvoir, we were asked to respond to a prompt and write an essay. I’d like to share a little bit of mine with you:
“It’s fair to say that the model of didactic instruction reached its peak long ago. However, it’s also fair to assume that the significance of literature did not diminish with it; its purpose, to instruct and entertain, remains just as important. An author may fit their text with either paradigm, but the masters incorporate both into a text for our own contemplative diversion.
For Simone de Beauvoir, it seems obvious that, though her works are far from pleasing, they absorb and entertain the mind with the reality of someone else’s soul; we are introduced to other worlds, other perspectives that may intrigue or repulse us.
In her short story, The Woman Destroyed, we are presented with a narrator whose life is exceedingly tragic. Most of us, provided with a lens for viewing the character’s life and her woebegone state, critique her reactions to her circumstances. Simone de Beauvoir grants us the opportunity to view life from another’s perspective. We are given the ability to analyze, evaluate, and criticize, but we must ask if this is the author’s intention.
Beauvoir is a testament to the doctrine of existentialism, and her case, the narrator of The Woman Destroyed, is a study of a life in response to circumstance. Within the story, Monique is slowly destroyed by the consequences of adultery, and her own reactions to the incident.
If Beauvoir’s aim is to teach us how to fail in existentialism, then our own analysis of Monique’s life becomes entirely mechanical, and we lose sight of her existence, of her own motivations and compulsions. I highly doubt Beauvoir intended to deliver us with a life to dissect and subsequently dispose of. Rather, I believe the function of the narrator is twofold: to serve as an example of divergent actuality, and to illustrate the consequence of extraction from reality.
