The Woman Destroyed (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)

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Witty, immensely adroit … These three women are believable individuals presented with a wry mixture of sympathy and exasperation.” My life was hurrying, racing tragically toward its end. And yet at the same time it was dripping so slowly, so very slowly now, hour by hour, minute by minute. 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 first novella, The Age of Discretion, centers around the aging process and the end of careers of both husband and wife. In addition, there’s the bitter disappointment the woman feels after the son she has ‘groomed’ to follow in her footsteps as a professor turns thirty and changes career and political outlook to go into government service. His mother feels it’s all about his wife and father-in-law pushing him to make more money and get a ‘real’ Job. Amazingly she turns against her son in an incredibly brutal way. She throws her son out of her house and says things like “I cannot love anyone I do not respect.” And to her husband: “Do you think I ought to see him again?” [This is their son!] When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values[...].” Though The Woman Destroyed was generally praised, not all reviewers were as enthusiastic as the one above. Following is a review of the American edition that, though critical of the book’s tone, nonetheless offers a succinct synopsis of each story:

much of what happens is a reflection and commentary on something that happens in day to day life—the grief, the loneliness, the loss of identity—one can make a point that this is something that happens to everyone. but de beauvoir portrays and conveys the three women’s stories with such care and compassion that it forces readers to truly be able to empathize and sympathize with such emotions. In the middle tale, the tone is strident, the pitch continuously noisy, rising over and over again to a hysterical note. “The silly bastards!” the woman cries at the first gasp. Her accusing, despairing monologue goes on and on about the ghastly mess in which she is drowning: a woman separated from her child and “ditched” by his “swine of a father.”

George Eliot

But so it is for me too. The heartbreaking side of growing old is not in the things around one but in oneself.” Tragedies are all right for a while: you are concerned, you are curious, you feel good. And then it gets repetitive, it doesn’t advance, it grows dreadfully boring: it is so very boring, even for me.” 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. 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.

urn:lcp:womandestroyed0000beau_b5u1:epub:1cd2a0a0-e352-42ab-ad45-53800491ff0f Foldoutcount 0 Identifier womandestroyed0000beau_b5u1 Identifier-ark ark:/13960/s2fsd3m71bb Invoice 1652 Isbn 0394711033 Lccn 84001846 Ocr tesseract 5.0.0-1-g862e Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 1.0000 Ocr_module_version 0.0.15 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-WL-0000209 Openlibrary_edition 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:

Bucolic Vermont

The title story, “The Woman Destroyed,” is told in a more modified tone; but the undercurrent of despair builds to uncontrolled proportions. In this monologue, the woman tells of a comfortable life that is being washed away by her husband’s affair with another woman.