On a Beau Voir Beauvoir

“Naughty boy,” the woman murmurs at the unexpected click of the camera. Buttocks, bare back, graceful arms: the whole is captured by the unseen photographer through the open bathroom door. The year is 1952, and Simone de Beauvoir is visiting her American lover in Chicago. She never saw the photograph—the film was lost for 50 years—but last week Frenchmen saw her naked figure on newsstands across the country.

The debate rages over whether Nouvel Observateur, a popular weekly, should have put this photo on its cover to commemorate the centenary of Beauvoir’s birth. After all, Beauvoir is an icon for feminism, a fiery philosopher who decried the guilt associated with her gender and female subjection to men. Today’s feminists are up in arms over the scandalous picture, saying that it objectifies one of chauvinism’s greatest adversaries. Of course, the paper’s editors love it, arguing it’s the quintessential illustration for an article describing her “scandalous” life.

Neither side has it quite right. The photograph does show Simone de Beauvoir as she was, but because of its complexity, not its impropriety. Beauvoir was a walking paradox: liberated but still dissatisfied, independent but jealous, sexual but romantic, and, above all, the kind of woman who could laugh about a nude picture.

By the standards of her bourgeois upbringing, Beauvoir did live an unorthodox life. She earned a living with her mind, having aced France’s most hallowed philosophy exam to come second only to Jean-Paul Sartre, with whom she founded the existentialist school of thought. The two became an odd and inseparable pair, loving each other with an explicit allowance for outside dalliances. Under that agreement, she fell passionately in love, twice, and had a lifelong affair with crying and alcohol. A haphazard dresser and global traveler, Beauvoir also had no reservations about fictionalizing her liaisons with female philosophy students, whom she passed on to Sartre.

We would be mistaken, however, to reduce her eccentricities to a life of temerity and scandal. Beauvoir inspired millions of women through conferences on her magnum opus, The Second Sex. Her encyclopedic letters to Sartre shaped his thought on existentialism, while her fiction earned global acclaim. And away from the public eye, headstrong Simone hid a surprisingly tender woman. To her beloved in Chicago, the anti-chauvinist crusader sent adoring letters that sometimes smacked of anti-feminist submission. And Beauvoir always kept her body to herself: she hid her hair under a turban, her legs in flowing mismatched skirts, her aging chest in collared blouses.

Should we respect that face of modesty and keep her covered up? Or should we instead portray an independent, unapologetic woman who (mostly) practiced what she preached? Beauvoir can no longer defend herself, but I’m tempted to think that she, rather than taking offense at the picture, would have thought it a fitting portrait. After all, she wasn’t so much scandalous as she was mysterious, and what could be more cryptic than turning your back to a curious French public? A feminist who had also mastered the fun of “naughty boy,” Beauvoir may well appreciate this cheeky reminder of her complexity. In it as ever before, much is left unseen, and unsaid.



Alice J. M. Gissinger ‘11 is an editorial editor in Weld Hall.