The Woman Destroyed (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)

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De Beauvoir sincerely and authentically captures what life is like for middle-aged women in an emotionally resonant work. The stylistic diversity of the three stories successfully reflects the complexities of a woman’s mind and de Beauvoir’s unapologetic portrayal of women ‘past their prime’, replete with their doubts and failures. Each woman is a refreshing alternative to the feminist powerhouse in high demand by those looking for female protagonists, reflecting patterns of life, insecurities, and similarities with any number of women the most unsuspecting reader may know. The unraveling of these women’s lives is accessible and human, a humanity that is deeply intimate and painful. De Beauvoir manages this masterful piece of prose illuminating the inner workings of the middle aged woman’s mind in a way only a pioneer of existentialism could. One always has to wait until the sugar melts, the memory dies, the wound scars over, the sun sets, the unhappiness lifts and fades away.”

The writing device of "The Woman Destroyed" is not as psychologically oppressive to me as that of "The Monologue," because it includes dialogue quoted from various people and therefore is not a completely closed monologue. However, Monique's obsessions don't interest me much, and no advice that I would consider practical emerges until the very end, when Monique visits her younger daughter, Lucienne, in New York City: Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2022-05-04 16:21:33 Autocrop_version 0.0.12_books-20220331-0.2 Bookplateleaf 0010 Boxid IA40463807 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier As her marital relationship shifts into a different key, she and her spouse grow father and farther apart. At the end there is a suggestion of a new plateau of understanding, but it’s not convincing because non of the problems have been resolved. In three “immensely intelligent stories about the decay of passion” (The Sunday Herald Times [London]), Simone de Beauvoir draws us into the lives of three women, all past their first youth, all facing unexpected crises. Enthralling as faction, suffused with de Beauvoir’s remarkable insights into women, The Woman Destroyed gives us a legendary writer at her best. The Woman Destroyed by Simone de Beauvoir – eBook Details De Beauvoir plays with narrative form: a 1st person narrative, an inner monologue, a diary - and the three pieces build up an image of women and their fragile sense of identity and belonging.

A Family Wedding, March 1, 1899, London

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But so it is for me too. The heartbreaking side of growing old is not in the things around one but in oneself.” The French author, existential philosopher, political activist, and feminist has remained best known for The Second Sex (1949). But de Beauvoir also put her social theories, especially those pertaining to affairs of the heart, into several works of fiction. Several years ago, shortly after finishing “The Mandarins”, Simone De Beauvior's tour de force novel, I came across an article titled: “Are Good Books Bad for You?” I immediately thought of De Beauvior’s fiction. Like nothing else I’ve ever read, her fiction has the ability to influence my emotions and my opinions in a deep and powerful way. It’s nearly dangerous, I think, the depth at which she strikes chords in her readers. Reading “The Woman Destroyed”, I was reminded that all great writing is a warning, or at the very least, veiled advice on how one might attempt to live a meaningful life. In caliber, if not in content, this is comparable to Mme, de Beauvoir's last book, Les Belles Images—three first person, feminine, silky, shrewish, and on occasion shrill confessionals of unhappy women of a certain age. In two out of three, infidelity is once again that particularly parochial French concern and when one woman describes her husband's mistress as "pretty, dashing, bitchy, available," the same could be said of these novellas. In the longest title story, a woman who finds that her two daughters are now self-sufficient, also finds that her husband has moved on—elsewhere. In the short center piece, the fanged hostilities of a consumingly self-indulgent younger woman are applied to all the members of her family then and now. In the Age of Discretion—over sixty—a woman regrets more quietly not only the defection of her son but the reduction of her own life, her inability to love or create as the years narrow the margins. . . . All under glass, the stories reflect rather than extend situations as old as time—and time to a great extent is responsible for the dimming of desire and desirability. They're not important but they're as intimate as a tete-a-tete and read with glistening case. Even if one is neither vain nor self-obsessed, it is so extraordinary to be oneself – exactly oneself and no one else – and so unique, that it seems natural that one should also be unique for someone else.”

Pileated woodpecker

The riddle of men and women and their relationships is an omnipresent topic throughout centuries, and these stories are not even that remote to some of our current societal problems women face: Simone de Beauvoir´s impeccable writing style full of wits and eloquence paired with my curiosity about the destiny of three women in the book kept me engaged from start to end. PDF / EPUB File Name: The_Woman_Destroyed_-_Simone_de_Beauvoir.pdf, The_Woman_Destroyed_-_Simone_de_Beauvoir.epub No se trata de víctimas, sería pecar de condescendiente considerarlas “mujeres anuladas por relaciones absorbentes”, como se dice en la contraportada. Más bien son, como dijo la propia autora, tres mujeres que se sienten fracasadas, rotas. La única que puede considerarse víctima, que de hecho lo es, es la protagonista de la segunda de las historias, pero no tanto por sus relaciones como por la infancia que sufrió y que la condicionó de por vida. Las otras dos son mujeres cultas, inteligentes y liberales que eligieron la forma en la que quisieron vivir y que ahora pasan por circunstancias desagradables, circunstancias que pueden afectar tanto a hombres como a mujeres y que son sobrellevadas dependiendo de la personalidad más que del género. MONÓLOGO “Los niños nunca son otra cosa que semillas de canallas.” Un monólogo interior durísimo, devastador, fruto de la rabia, de la angustia, de una mujer de mediana edad afectada por serios problemas psicológicos y que se siente sola, abandonada y culpable. Una mujer con una infancia difícil, que, gracias a su belleza ahora marchita, ha vivido a costa de hombres ricos desde que su madre la arrojó en los brazos de su propio amante, y que, intentando no caer en los mismos errores con su hija, cometió otros de terribles consecuencias. “…hubiera merecido que me amaran. ¡Ah! he sido asquerosamente frustrada la vida no me ha hecho regalos.”