Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

by Simone de Beauvoir

Existentialism acknowledged the absurdity of the human condition, while at the same time insisting on individual freedom and choice.

We see young Simone in a stifling, repressive environment, painfully alone and often quite desperate.

Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter carries a strong message: Have the courage to go toward freedom, however difficult this might be.

She makes you want to read more books, travel across the world, fall in love again, take stronger political stands, write more, work harder, play more intensely, and look more tenderly at the beauty of the natural world. That is a beautiful gift.

I kept on growing and I realized that my fate was sealed: I was condemned to be an outcast from childhood.

But I refused to submit to that intangible force: words. What I resented was that some casual phrase beginning ‘You must . . .’ or ‘You mustn’t . . .’ could ruin all my plans and poison all my happiness.

I seemed to be confronted everywhere by force, never by necessity.

Altogether, the scanty resources of my city childhood could not compete with the riches to be found in books.

I stored the smiles away in my memory and developed a taste for unstinted praise.

But I never realized that my father was in danger. I had seen wounded men; I knew there was a connexion between war and death. But I could not conceive that this great collective adventure could possibly concern me.

I had made a definite metamorphosis into a good little girl. Right from the start, I had composed the personality I wished to present to the world; it had brought me so much praise and so many great satisfactions that I had finished by identifying myself with the character I had built up: it was my one reality.

‘The wife is what the husband makes of her: it’s up to him to make her someone,’ he often said.

but I did not attempt to bridge the distance that lay between us; there were many subjects that I could not imagine myself discussing with him; to him I was neither body nor soul, but simply a mind.

Her youth, her inexperience, her love for my father all made her vulnerable: she dreaded criticism, and, in order to avoid it, took pains to be ‘like everybody else’.

Although she had been without doubt happy in her marriage, she was apt to confuse sexuality with vice: she always associated fleshly desires with sin. Convention obliged her to excuse certain indiscretions in men; she concentrated her disapproval on women; she divided women into those who were ‘respectable’ and those who were ‘loose’. There could be no intermediate grades.

I did not look upon her as a saint, because I knew her too well

If she had been more impeccable in her conduct, she would also have been more remote, and would not have had such a profound effect upon me.

My father treated me like a fully developed person; my mother watched over me as a mother watches over a child; and a child I still was.

I wanted to be taken notice of; but fundamentally I needed to be accepted for what I was, with all the deficiencies of my age;

If her disapproval touched me so deeply, it was because I set so much store by her good opinion.

And that is how we lived, the two of us, in a kind of symbiosis. Without striving to imitate her, I was conditioned by her. She inculcated in me a sense of duty as well as teaching me unselfishness and austerity. My father was not averse to the limelight, but I learnt from Mama to keep in the background, to control my tongue, to moderate my desires, to say and do exactly what ought to be said and done. I made no demands on life, and I was afraid to do anything on my own initiative.

The consequence was that I grew accustomed to the idea that my intellectual life – embodied by my father – and my spiritual life – expressed by my mother – were two radically heterogeneous fields of experience which had absolutely nothing in common. Sanctity and intelligence belonged to two quite different spheres; and human things – culture, politics, business, manners, and customs – had nothing to do with religion. So I set God apart from life and the world, and this attitude was to have a profound influence on my future development.

This imbalance, which made my life a kind of endless disputation, is the main reason why I became an intellectual.

I owe a great debt to my sister for helping me to externalize many of my dreams in play: she also helped me to save my daily life from silence; through her I got into the habit of wanting to communicate with people.

She alone endowed me with authority; adults sometimes gave in to me: she obeyed me.

time, I, too, was being of service to someone. I was breaking away from the passivity of childhood and entering the great human circle in which everyone is useful to everyone else.

My entire upbringing continually re-affirmed that virtue and culture were more desirable than material wealth, and my own tastes encouraged me to believe it;

In the sight of God, my soul was no less precious than that of His little boys: why, then, should I be envious of them?

The truth was that, separated from my family, deprived of those affections which assured me of my personal worth, cut off from the familiar routine which defined my place in the world, I no longer knew where I was, nor what my purpose was here on earth. I needed to be confined within a framework whose rigidity would justify my existence.

I would think of the past as a long-lost paradise. Would we ever find it again? The world no longer seemed the safe place I had once thought it to be.

People said sometimes in front of my sister and myself: ‘They are lucky to be children! They don’t realize. . . .’ But deep inside I would be shouting: ‘Grown-ups don’t understand anything at all about us!’ Sometimes I would feel overwhelmed by something so bitter and so very definite that no one, I was sure, could ever have known distress worse than mine. Why should there be so much suffering? I would ask myself.

I had to surpass myself all the time, or at least to equal my previous achievement. There was always a fresh start to be made; to have failed would have filled me with consternation, and victory exalted me.

To live without expecting anything seemed to me frightful.

Why should I want to develop capabilities which would always remain fatally limited, and have only a relative importance in my life?

If I was describing in words an episode in my life, I felt that it was being rescued from oblivion, that it would interest others, and so be saved from extinction.

There was only one thing that sometimes cast a shadow on this happy state: I knew that one day this period in my life would come to an end. It seemed unbelievable. When you have loved your parents for twenty years or so, how can you leave them to live with a stranger, without dying of unhappiness? And how, when you have done without him for twenty years, can you up and love a man who is nothing to you?

I didn’t know a single grown-up who appeared to enjoy life on earth very much: life’s no joke, life’s not what you read about in novels, they all declared.

Already I was in mourning for my past.

I had the habit of obedience, and I believed that, on the whole, God expected me to be dutiful:

She sought in heaven the love that was refused her upon earth; she was very devout.

Papa used to say with pride: ‘Simone has a man’s brain; she thinks like a man; she is a man.’ And yet everyone treated me like a girl.

Women, by the exercise of talent or knowledge, had carved out a place for themselves in the universe of men. But I felt impatient of the delays I had to endure.

Even more than death itself I feared that terror that would soon be with me always.

had stopped believing in God when I discovered that God had no influence on my behaviour: so this did not change in any way when I gave Him up.

I was determined not to let any of the good things of this world slip through my fingers.

I was beginning to emerge from the difficult age; instead of regretting my childhood I turned towards the future; it was still far enough away not to alarm me and already I was dazzled by its brilliance.

It seemed to me a most enviable thing to have a past all to oneself: almost as enviable as having a personality.

My school life was coming to an end, and something else was going to begin: what would it be?

My heart had died and the world was empty: could such an emptiness ever be filled? I was afraid. And then time started to flow again.

Cut off from my past, I felt out of place; my life seemed out of joint, and I had still not discovered any really broad new horizons. Up to now, I had made the best of living in a cage, for I knew that one day – and each day brought it nearer – the door of the cage would open; now I had got out of the cage, and I was still inside. What a let-down! There was no longer any definite hope to sustain me; though this prison was one without bars, I couldn’t see any way out of it.