Customer Reviews

Woman Destroyed (Pantheon Modern Writers)

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This was my first experience of de Beauvoir, and I remember it vividly: I was seventeen and staying at my grandparents house, supposedly studying for my final high school exams, but it was a sweltering afternoon and I was bored and listless; I found an old 70s copy of "The Woman Destroyed" on the bookshelf (it must have belonged to my radical aunt during her university days.) Anyway, I picked it up and couldn't stop reading until I finished it. While "The Woman Destroyed" described experiences very removed from my own limited seventeen year old world - mainly, the pain experienced by three different women as they grow old and watch their children, husbands and even sanity abandon them - these stories absorbed me totally. These are intense, complicated, ambiguous tales, and de Beauvoir has a breathtaking ability to capture and elucidate the knottiest of emotions. It's certainly a bleak collection of stories; de Beauvoir is unflinching and sheds no sentimental tears for her women characters. They are wrenchingly, sometimes pathetically human, and that's why you come to inhabit them so completely and care about them so much. Highly recommended.

This are three short stories potraying three middle class women who are past their prime and face crisis in their lives. Simone de Beauvoir - existentialist philosopher and feminist reflected the conditiion of her contemporaries with genuine insight and understanding. Written almost 40 years ago the book did not loose its actuality, to the contrary , it's very moving.
I would recommend this small masterpiece to anyone, but I think that mature women's audience is going to appreciate and understand it the most.

Good gods, how French women needed the feminism De Beauvoir sought to bring them. I wish I didn't sometimes think they still did....

When Monique in the title story reflects that she should have known her marriage was on the skids when her husband told her she should buy a one-piece bathing suit, she immediatley reflects guiltily that she has let her thighs get fat, that her stomach is no longer completely flat... If I were Monique, I might reflect that it was a missed chance to craquer cher Maurice on the head with a deckchair.

Instead, Monique immediately stops eating (quelle surpise) and the first thing her estranged daughter says to her is that her resulting weight loss suits her. It's no wonder that after fifteen years of this, Monique is gimpless when Maurice starts an affair with a younger woman.

Sans doute, de Beauvoir was attempting a critique of such overmastering dependency, but it's also very, very raw-feeling. The price paid by those chic women for thier polish and beauty is this overpowering, constant self-scrutiny; no wonder existentialism, no wonder a modern book like Thornytorinx (in case you think the problem is solved).

This is powerful, true stuff, then, which reminded me of some of Dorothy Parker's best stories (without the humour) but I also felt irrtated with the spineless protagonists of all three stories. Don't be so needy, I wanted to scream. Go to a bar. Go to a jardin. Go to a boulanger. Live a little, before you finally die. In other words, the book feels not so much dated as in need of contestation. I would have enjoyed it more if another character had voiced the limitations of the protagonists' viewpoints.

Too many people can't separate the ideas of "militant feminism" from De Beauvoir, and why this is, I can't understand. De Beauvoir is hardly extreme or radical; she simply advocates equality between the sexes... and who among us doesn't? How is this radical.

Anyway, to get to the book, this book is not like "All Men are Mortal" or "The Second Sex" in that, there is less advocation and pontificating going on here (this is a neutral judgment, by the way). It is more straightforward fiction; I would liken it to a minimalization of Balzac's view for the French society: It captures three woman in sharp, short snapshots at specific points in lives. What comes of this? Read and find out.

The title story teaches us: Nothing can destroy a woman but a man, or even better, a woman can destroy herself only because of a man!

There is no woman who will not identify with most of the story. I was clearly thinking - only a woman can write such a story, becuse a man would never get it. Getting so desparate as to do the handwriting analysis, reading the horosocpes, seeking advice from anyone, and NOT LETTING GO, becuse she lost herself in this marriage and she can't bear the thought of finding herself back. I felt for both women in the story and both were so real.

A woman who ever denies feeling even parts of what Monique is feeling is lying to herself and others.

This is so painfully realistic!

This book contains three short stories, each of them about a "Woman Destroyed." Two are utterly depressing, and one is incoherent. The middle story was stream of consciousness babbling by a mad woman character, and I couldn't even finish it. The first story was depressing, and compelling enough to finish. The third story, the title story, was very compelling, defintely a page-turner, but also depressing.

This third story, A Woman Destroyed," tells the tale of a woman whose children have left home, and she experiences empty nest syndrome, only to find out her husband has been having an affair for years, while discouraging her from seeking emplyment and encouraging her to put all her focus into the children and home. He is a real rat, but yet you can see that he is truly torn, taht he thinks he is somehow protecting his wife, while he is ultimately destroying her. The most compelling aspect is the wife her self, watching her slow demise.

This is the first book I read from Simone de Beauvoir and I was very impressed. As usual, she is very realistic and thoughtfully describes the feelings of the three women in the stories, any of these women could be you. It is definitely a great book for any women of any age.