on refusal
Simone de Beauvoir, women's choices and the audacity of wanting something else
Sometimes her life is described as a casualty of patriarchal norms which suggest, among other things, that an ageing or intellectual woman was not as romantically desirable as an ageing or intellectual man. And sometimes she is the dupe of her own foolishness. As her former student, Bianca Lamblin, put it: Beauvoir ‘planted the seeds of her own unhappiness’ by refusing marriage and family.
- Becoming Beauvoir, Kate Kirkpatrick
Recently I went to Paris for a few days on my own. When I was studying philosophy at college, Paris took on a sort of insane shine to me, a place where it seemed you could live a life that was diametrically opposed to the one people were living in Rotherham. I loved the work of Sartre and de Beauvoir but I also fell in love with the image of them, and most of all her; the idea of sitting around in cafes in the 6th arrondissement all day drinking coffee and wine, smoking and writing and talking and having non monogamous relationships with both men and women seemed both fiercely chic and totally sensible. Why would you ever want to do anything else?
It’s still a place I go when I want to re-embed myself in the things I love—art, food, walking for hours, being ostentatiously pensive—and this time I took with me a biography of Simone de Beauvoir by Kate Kirkpatrick. It does a good job of laying out the life of a complex and undeniably privileged person who did cause harm in her life (as we all do) but who also carved a path into feminism for a whole generation, and whose work continues to influence philosophical and feminist thought to this day. De Beauvoir was both self-reflective and single-minded; she wanted what she referred to as a “thinking life”, and she lived it intensely. Despite this, endless articles and even books have been written implying that her lifelong intellectual and romantic partnership with Jean-Paul Sartre—which eschewed marriage, cohabitation, monogamy and children—made her unhappy, that she was basically a woman living her life subject to the whims of a man who wouldn’t give her what all normal women want: a ring on their finger and a bun in the oven.
If they don’t patronise de Beauvoir, they characterise her as somehow deficient; this was the case with her former lover and student Bianca Lamblin, with whom de Beauvoir had a sexual relationship when Lamblin was just 17 and de Beauvoir in her 30s. Lamblin ended up feeling used, as did many people who were de Beauvoir’s “contingent” lovers, the ones that always ran secondary to the connection she had with Sartre; for those who latterly recognised the power dynamic of these relationships, the feeling was twofold. Decades after their entanglement, incensed at the public humiliation of de Beauvoir’s letters being posthumously published, Lamblin wrote her own book, and in it she claimed not only that her former tutor was fundamentally unhappy, but that this unhappiness was her own fault—because she refused marriage and family.
I have been thinking about this use of the word refusal since I read it, sitting in a cafe across from the Centre Pompidou, drinking a whisky sour and eating a mediocre pasta. De Beauvoir did write against the fundamental sexism of marriage, and against the practice of women staying at home to raise children, which she saw as central to their oppression. But the indignancy here is not that she critiqued or spoke against these choices; it is that she herself would not submit to be married or have children. It’s that she refused what’s implied to be the natural way.
Not wanting to marry and have kids both does and doesn’t feel like a refusal, to me. On the one hand, neither has been an active decision; I simply don’t understand why I’m supposed to want to get married, and have known since my early teens that kids weren’t for me. No fretting, no weighing up, just not interested. On the other hand, as you slide into your late 30s, you are made acutely aware that these are the expectations of you—whether it’s the jokes, comments and questions from those around you or the understanding of the ways in which you’ll lose out by not doing these things; how difficult things will be for your partner when you die, the tax benefits you won’t receive, etc. Sometimes it’s people lamenting what they won’t get if you don’t marry and have kids, whether that’s grandchildren or a collegiate experience of parenting. Then there’s the re-emergence of the ‘maiden/mother/crone’ rhetoric, which comes from Paganism but has recently been reappropriated (mostly by people who run instagram accounts celebrating the “divine feminine”) and heavily implies that if you’re a woman not having kids you’re either an unformed child or a haggard old bitch.
Realistically, this positioning of a non-traditional life is vaguely annoying but largely unimportant; it’s very easy to ignore other people’s opinions. What it does suggest, however, is that (some) people who have chosen those paths are affronted by your decision to choose otherwise. Even when, as in Bianca Lamblin’s case with de Beauvoir, they have been part of that “otherwise” life—or, perhaps, because of it.
On the subject of choice, in his seminal lecture Existentialism is a Humanism (on which de Beauvoir almost certainly had an enormous influence), Jean-Paul Sartre said this:
To choose between this or that is at the same time to affirm the value of that which is chosen; for we are unable ever to choose the worse. What we choose is always the better; and nothing can be better for us unless it is better for all.
The way this was summarised to me in university was this: choice bestows value. By choosing something for yourself, you are, in effect, choosing it for all humanity, and therefore giving it value. You are saying this is the way things should be. And of the converse, the other options, you are saying this is not the right thing to do. From those choices, you are removing value—and by extension, from the people who choose them, you are removing legitimacy.
I do not know if I agree with this summation; perhaps I am too cynical, but I think people often choose what they know to be the worse, and often they don’t even go to the trouble of convincing themselves otherwise. I understand that this was an attempt to give an unshakeable moral underpinning to existentialism, which was often characterised (wrongly) as a nihilistic doctrine, but I just don’t think it’s accurate as an absolute. What I know to be true, though, is many people do feel that other people’s choices delegitimise their own—especially if they are not entirely certain in the path that they have gone down. The cause of the rage Lamblin voices above is not that de Beauvoir stated all women should live their lives as she chose to live hers; it is that she refused to grant Lamblin’s choices value by choosing the same.
When writing on how a life should be lived, de Beauvoir and Sartre had little interest in prescriptiveness of action; instead, their preoccupation was with authenticity.
For the existentialists, the concept of authenticity is tied up with the concept of bad faith. For them, humans are born into total freedom, a freedom which is tempered only by the immutable facts of your life (the situation into which you were born, your unchangeable physical characteristics, etc). Sartre famously wrote that humans are “condemned to be free”, in that we are thrown into life, and before us lies every possibility of action, and in this overwhelming state of freedom we must struggle to define ourselves, via our actions. To deny this freedom is to live in bad faith (mauvaise foi); to embrace it is to live authentically, which, for existentialists, is the goal: to live in acceptance of our total freedom, and the resulting responsibility, and to make something of ourselves, and our lives, in this knowledge.
An authentic choice, then, is one that’s made accepting that all other choices are possible. You may choose to marry, or not marry; to convince yourself that only one option was open is to to engage in bad faith. You may choose to bear a child or not bear a child; rejection of the “otherwise” is what makes either choice inauthentic.
I wonder if it is this—the insistence on possibilities outside of those expected of us—that really drives the rage towards those who “refuse” what is socially conditioned as “natural and normal”. Those who choose (either option) through a sense of duty, or a social pressure, might later find themselves suffering, and a way to rationalise suffering is to understand it as necessary; to accept that another course could have been chosen is to accept responsibility and culpability for our choices, which is painful. And who wants to feel pain?
Of course, there is no one better than de Beauvoir herself to explain what she felt about authenticity and her “refusal” of marriage and family, and she did just that in third volume of her autobiography, Force of Circumstances (emphasis mine):
It was said that I refused to grant any value to the maternal instinct and to love. This was not so. I simply asked that women should experience them truthfully and freely, whereas they often use them as excuses and take refuge in them, only to find themselves imprisoned in that refuge when those emotions have dried up in their hearts. I was accused of preaching sexual promiscuity; but at no point did I ever advise anyone to sleep with just anyone at just any time; my opinion on this subject is that all choices, agreements and refusals should be made independently of institutions, conventions and motives of self-aggrandizement; if the reasons for it are not of the same order as the act itself, then the only result can be lies, distortions and mutilations.