Henry de Montherlant’s Les Jeunes Filles and Simone de Beauvoir’s L’Invitée - Part 1
Part 1 of a three part series of posts on Beauvoir's 1949 attack in The Second Sex on the French writer Henry de Montherlant for his misogynist views
1. Beauvoir’s indictment of Montherlant
In a section entitled “Myths” in Volume I of La Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex) (1949),[1] Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), analyses the attitude of five male writers: Henry de Montherlant (1896-1972), D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930), Paul Claudel (1868-1955), André Breton (1896-1966) and Stendhal (1783-1842). In the second chapter, entitled Montherlant or the Bread of Disgust, Beauvoir directs her most vitriolic attack against Montherlant for his misogynistic views, relying notably on his novel Les Jeunes Filles (The Girls), published in four parts between 1936 and 1939.[2]
De Beauvoir’s principal charges against Montherlant in La Deuxième Sexe were as follows:
1. Women represent chaos: the mother is man’s “first major enemy,” (214) seeking to trap her son under her dominion forever. “For Montherlant, the woman lover is just as harmful as the mother; she prevents man resurrecting the god in himself” (215), a parasite she seeks to diminish his grandeur by dragging him to her inferior level (215-16).
2. His claim to freedom is false, based on a flight from the reality of his birth from a woman and his lack of engagement with the real world (215). Montherlant, through his attachment to solitude and solipsism, “prefers an illusion of autonomy to an authentic freedom engaged in the world” (216). “Montherlant’s liberty is an attitude, not a reality” (226).
3. He seems to believe that “only the Ideas of femininity and virility possessed being; the individual who partakes of neither has only an appearance of existence” (217). By means of his uncomplimentary description of Andrée Hacquebaut in The Girls, Montherlant denigrates the intelligence of women: “Through this clever equivocation, the idiocy of feminine intelligence is proven, and an original fall perverting all the virile qualities to which women aspire is established” (217).
4. For Montherlant: “What is suitable for woman is to be purely flesh” (218). Woman’s only role is to provide sexual pleasure to the male. Docile and stupid, a woman should make no demands on him (218), as exemplified by Rhadidja in The Girls: “a quiet beast of love who docilely accepts pleasure and money” (218).
5. His hero is always on the defensive: “Take without being taken, the only acceptable formula between superior man and woman” (218, quoting from The Girls). He prefers the “haughty solitude of domination” (219). Montherlant is afraid to confront his equal, accepting “as mistresses only those women from whom his fearful pride risks no judgment” (219). “It is not because they are despicable that he disdains women but because he wants to disdain them that they seem abject to him” (222).
6. His hedonism is based solely on the satisfaction of his own pleasures; he lacks any insight into those of others (223). The emptiness of his words, his nihilism, his hatred for humanity mirror the Nazi ideology he admired (223-24).
Beauvoir’s level of vitriol against a contemporary author is unusual,[3] and in particular one of such popularity and high literary reputation.[4] The date of publication of The Second Sex, may in part explain the virulence of her attack. In 1949, the memory of the collaboration of the Vichy government,[5] assisted by a number of intellectuals, with the German occupation of France was still raw.[6] Although Montherlant was absolved by the principal post-war French cultural investigating bodies of collaboration, he was in 1946 censured and subject to a retroactive publishing ban for a year by the comité national d’ épuration for his essay Le Solstice de Juin published in 1941 and deemed pro-German for advocating acquiescence in France’s military defeat (Vezzoso 2, Rosenberg 841).[7] In 1976, Montherlant’s defence against accusations of collaboration entitled Mémoire, which he had originally written in defence to the procedure initiated in September 1944, was published posthumously with his subsequent reflections (Vezzoso 4).
The primary flaw in Beauvoir’s critique is that she takes aim at a strawman she created from characters in his fictional writings, to such an extent that it is often difficult to determine if Beauvoir is criticizing Montherlant or a character in his fiction.[8] Notwithstanding Montherlant having expressly distanced himself from the characters in his fictional works,[9] Beauvoir confounds his opinions with those of his male fictional protagonists, notably Pierre Costals in The Girls and Alban de Bricoule in Le songe (The Dream) (1922) and Bestiares (The Bullfighters) (1926),[10] also attributing to Montherlant statements in his other fictional writings (La Petite Infante de Castille (1929), L’Exil (1933), Les Célibataires (The Bachelors) (1934) La Reine Morte (The Dead Queen) (1942) and Le Mâitre du Santiago (The Master of Santiago)(1947)). She also cites from his non-fictional writings: Les Olympiques (1926), Aux Fontaines du Désir (1927), La Possession de Soi-même (1938), L’Équinoxe de Septembre (1938), Le Solstice du Juin (1941), and Sur les Femmes (1942).[11] While it may be legitimate to attribute statements to an author from their non-fictional writings, it is less so in the case of fictional writings.[12] To contextualise Beauvoir’s critique of Montherlant, I will compare The Girls and L’Invitée (She Came to Stay),[13] Beauvoir’s first published novel.[14] The two novels share a complex and inseparable interweaving of biography and fiction.[15]
[1] All quotations are from The Second Sex translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, Alfred Knopf, 2010. Chapter 2 runs from page 214 to page 228. La Deuxième Sexe was first published by Gallimard in 1949.
[2] Beauvoir was working off an edition of Les Jeunes Filles that pre-dated the 1952 Gallimard paperback version in Livres de Poche, in which Montherlant edited out passages to satisfy what he called “a rather simple-minded public,” including passages relied on by Beauvoir in Le Deuxième Sexe: see, Lillian Bulwa, “‘Simone de Beauvoir on Montherlant, or Misogyny through Myth and Imagery.’” Simone de Beauvoir Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, Brill, 1983, pp. 22–39, at p. 32. JSTOR., www.jstor.org/stable/45173367.
[3] But, for a recent example, see Philip Hensher, “Alice Sebold’s empty apology,” Unherd, 2 December 2021.
[4] For the exalted position occupied by Montherlant in French literature at the outbreak of WWII, see Jean-Louis Garet, “Montherlant sous l’occupation.” Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire, no. 31, Sciences Po University Press, 1991, pp. 65–73, at p. 66. https://doi.org/10.2307/3768639. He was elected to the Académie française in 1960.
[5] For a review of the literature on the Vichy period and its aftermath, see Omer Bartov, “The Proof of Ignominy: Vichy France’s Past and Presence.” Contemporary European History, vol. 7, no. 1, Cambridge UP, 1998, pp. 107–31. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20081654.
[6] Jean-Paul Sartre’s Qu’est-ce qu’un collaborateur?, appeared in La Republique Française in August 1945. The article mentions a number of French intellectual collaborators, notably the writer Drieu La Rochelle (1893-1945), who committed suicide, and Alphonse de Chateaubriânt (1877-1951), who went into hiding in Austria until his death. Notably, Sartre did not mention by name either Montherlant, Ramon Fernandez (1894-1944), or Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894-1961). Céline’s writings were greatly admired by both Beauvoir and Sartre, see Beauvoir, The Prime of Life: 1929-1944, translated by Peter Green, Paragon House, 1992, pp. 112-13.
[7] Rosenberg, Merrill A. “Montherlant and the Critics of the French Resistance.” The French Review, vol. 44, no. 5, American Association of Teachers of French, 1971, pp. 839–51. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/386325. In The Prime of Life Beauvoir sets out the publication rules adopted by writers “on our side of the zonal border” (408). For a critical analysis of Beauvoir’s published recollections of her experiences during WWII, see Obajtek-Kirkwood, Anne-Marie. “D’une Occupation l’autre: Simone De Beauvoir d’un écrit l’autre.” Simone de Beauvoir Studies, vol. 14, Brill, 1997, pp. 102–13. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/45170502.
[8] In particular, Beauvoir switches deceptively between Montherlant and the protagonists in his novels, often referred to as Montherlant’s “hero” (218, 219, 224, 225). See, for example, the passage in The Second Sex where Beauvoir attributes certain characteristics to Montherlant in his acceptance of mistresses, a subject on which Beauvoir presumably had no knowledge, other than that derived from his fictional characters (219).
[9] See the Preface to Les Jeunes Filles in the 1936 edition published by Gallimard (The Girls at p. 17).
[10] Les Garçons (1969) was the third novel in the Alban de Bricoule trilogy.
[11] For a list of Montherlant’s works, see: www.montherlant.be/oeuvres-01-liste.html.
[12] However, Toril Moi has argued: “Yet my work is based on the assumption that there can be no methodological distinction between ‘life’ and ‘text’, … Seemingly ‘general’ theoretical passages in The Second Sex (1949) also turn out to contain scarcely veiled interpretations of the seduction scene in L’Invitée,”: The Making of an Intellectual Woman, 2nd ed., Oxford UP, 2008, pp. 25-26.
[13] Beauvoir originally titled the novel Légitime Défense, but after that title’s rejection decided upon L’Invitée (The Prime of Life 411). The novel was written between October 1938 and late Spring/Summer 1941 (The Prime of Life 295, 428).
[14] After Brice Parain, an editor with Gallimard, suggested Beauvoir cut the first two chapters on Francoise’s childhood, she also cut the section on Pierre and Françoise’s past ten years spent together, starting the novel with the invitation to Xavière (The Prime of Life 269). See also Barbara Klaw, “‘L’invitée’ Castrated: Sex, Simone De Beauvoir, and Getting Published or Why Must a Woman Hide her Sexuality?” Simone de Beauvoir Studies, vol. 12, Brill, 1995, pp. 126–38, at p. 127. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/45186684.
[15] In The Prime of Life, Beauvoir details autobiographical material she drew on in She Came to Stay.