By “If I smoked cigarettes, I would sit at a train station with this book and light up.” – Me when I was 19 and thought smoking looked super cool, maybe in part due to this book’s iconic cover, but that’s a conversation for another day.
About the Book
Title: The Woman Destroyed
Author: Simone de Beauvoir
Published: 1967
Genre: fiction, classics, feminism
My Rating: 4/5 stars
The Premise
Synopsis (from Goodreads):
“Three long stories that draw the reader into the lives of three women, all past their first youth, all facing unexpected crises.“
My Thoughts
The Woman Destroyed contains three separate stories, each about a different woman, all middle-aged, and all dealing with a crisis of some sort.
Story #1 follows a mother whose son grows up, gets married and begins to turn against the political and social beliefs she taught him, leaving her distraught. Surprisingly, this story gave me a bit more empathy for my own mother, who didn’t approve of the majority of lifestyle choices and political beliefs I adopted after I moved out at 17. (It also made me glad I don’t plan to have kids of my own)
Story #2 was a jarring transition from the first. It’s told in a run-on rant from a woman whose angry screed and unpleasant characterization, we learn, is a defense mechanism to mask a tragedy she will do anything to run from. I really liked the stylistic choices made in this story, because I think it made the emotion and characterization much more raw.
Story #3 follows a woman who discovers her husband, to whom she’s been married for years, is having an affair with another woman. Despite finding out about this, she stays with him. Is it love? I was surprised that she stayed with him.
I know de Beauvoir and Sartre had an open relationship, so maybe it seems more reasonable to de Beauvoir for her protagonist to stay with a man like that? I don’t know, because the situation in the book didn’t seem to be an agreed upon open relationship, just plain cheating. But I guess that’s part of the destruction– our protagonist is tortured by the thought of her lover being with someone else, and yet, she can’t bring herself to leave him, because his attention is her validation. She is stuck hoping for an outcome that will never come– an outcome where he renounces the mistress and comes back to only her.
One of my biggest fears is that I will grow old and never have accomplished what it is that I am “meant” to accomplish. I guess this is nonsensical because I don’t believe in fate, so I don’t even believe that there are specific things I am “meant” to accomplish. Nevertheless, this book struck a chord with me, as if I was looking into the future and seeing myself in a worst-case-scenario. My parallel selves, I guess. Each of the women in the stories must face the loss of their core motivation, the meaning they have derived for themselves in an Existentialist sense. What do you do when you lose that?
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