Abstract

This article argues that although Simone de Beauvoir goes as far as any philosopher in her analysis of oppressive myths, she too creates ‘others’ for herself, such as children who believe in dreams or fairy tales. Beauvoir's The Second Sex appears to make a clear distinction between myths and facts with respect to women's situation. The first volume of her autobiography, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, also critiques some of the myths which dominate women's lives; at the same time, the adoption of Simone's mythologies by her younger sister Hélène is presented less as a myth structure than as an eclectic collection of good and bad objects that strives for coherence only in fantasy. Like the Greeks, the young Simone sets herself against ‘the Barbarians’ — to the embarrassment of the author. Myths and mythologies are the enemies of philosophy for Hegel amongst others. Yet while Beauvoir is clear about the importance of emancipation from religion, she does not find it easy to situate herself as a philosopher. Philosophy too has acted as an instrument of male domination. Perhaps Barthes's ‘mythologies’ provided a more comfortable framework for the analysis of bourgeois life in her autobiography — which includes a crucial element of self-critique. Equally, looking back on her later life, it is striking to what extent she continued to act out bourgeois mythologies of the role of the accepting woman in the face of male infidelity, just as her mother did. Perhaps her ascetic refusal to offer a positive image of a female heroine relates to this problematic relationship to the imaginary, saturated from childhood with mythologies that she wished to reject, and critiqued by the rational philosophical tradition which cannot acknowledge its own use of fiction.