Word: beauvoirs
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...professes to prefer Gloria Steinem to Betty Friedan, "because she's so pretty, and doesn't talk too much," and dismisses the Story of O because it's a parody of French literature--besides it's pornography!" Seeing everything as a phase in some historical sequence, she dislikes de Beauvoir's existentialism, because it is always searching for conclusions and final decisions. Hardwick's style is more open-ended and experimental; a sense of intellectual vagueness pervades many of her more casual thoughts because she is constantly seeking for an even deeper answer. (Her deeper answers lie in her writing...
...review of a paradigm of socio-historical research. Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, Hardwick described her responses to that work as "not like reading a book, but like playing a game." And Hardwick, one finds, is all in favor of this approach when it comes to reading a book she respects or setting up a model for a lecture. For her, the writing of fiction requires the inspiration of first-hand experience (an argument she used several years ago in explaining what she viewed as the limitations of women's literature). The reading of the fiction under Hardwick...
...writer has communicated loneliness and despair more graphically than did Leduc. Her astonishing confessional quality, what Simone de Beauvoir called her "unflinching sincerity, as though there were no one listening", made her autobiographies. Le Batarde and Mad in Pursuit, at once fascinating and embarassing, forcing the reader into the stance of a literary voyeur, unable to put down the sordid but compelling story of her psychotic, unrequited passion for Genet, of her lesbianism, and her complete despair. No human being has ever been more lonely than Violette Leduc...
...where Simone de Beauvoir makes grim truce with sexual frustration, she is unwilling to accept the defeat of occupational potency and its concommitant alienation from society. In this respect, her thesis about old age as the index of society is double-edged. For five hundred and seventy pages she bombards the reader with the horrors of old age. Never does she pretend that the resolution of old age is the amelioration of the life-style of the aged. She convinces the reader that old age is the most telling of all the stages of a human being's life...
...answer to old age, says Mile de Beauvoir, is in the psychological resolution of childhood and in the values that a society inculcates in the child and the adolescent. The prescription to her thesis is meagerly developed. She says only that we must "go on pursuing ends that give our esistence meaning.... Devotion to individuals, to groups or causes, social, political, intellectual or creative." Her prescription is meager only because she does not see herself in The Coming of Age as a theoretician of change, but rather as one more marshaller of the facts that indicate that change is imperative...