On Simone de Beauvoir’s birthday, revisit Merve Emre on how the philosopher’s life with Sartre was shadowed by the memory of a friend who died young.
There is something mesmerizing about these absurdly specialized utensils; one can almost hear them clattering their way into the girls’ hands. Yet the pleasure of abundance quickly yields to the claustrophobic hell of domesticity, the spiritual death of the girl in the process of becoming the good wife. For all Madame Gallard’s talk of God, there is no room for divinity amid such clutter.
The true “inseparables” are not Andrée and Sylvie, or Zaza and Simone, but the discarded novel and the wildly successful memoir. The novel restores Zaza to her rightful place as a subject, presenting her as a singular being, incomparable and ultimately unknowable to the narrator herself. It is propelled by the jealous, curious, melancholy, and blissful contractions of eros without any expectation of reciprocity.
To read “The Inseparables” is to learn what could have been, and to judge what was a little more harshly. It is to see in the memoirs a lingering refusal to give Zaza the autonomy that everyone in life seems to have denied her at the greatest possible cost. And it is to see in “The Second Sex” an inability, or perhaps an unwillingness, to make as affirmative a case as possible for lesbian identity.
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