Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

Study Guide

© 2017 eNotes.com, Inc. or its Licensors.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

No part of this work covered by the copyright hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means
graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, Web distribution or information
storage retrieval systems without the written permission of the publisher.

Critical Essays: Literary Essentials: Nonfiction

Masterpieces Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter Analysis
The first book of de Beauvoir’s Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter is the most creative and expressionistic of the
four. Her approach to the earliest part of her life is in the spirit of William Wordsworth’s epigram to his “Ode:
Intimations of Immortality,” here expressed as “The Child is the mother of the Woman.” Since the realm of
childhood is often almost an infinite distance from an adult’s consciousness, and since de Beauvoir always
speaks in the voice of a mature adult, the child who preceded the woman might be especially elusive and
difficult to recapture. To close the distance, de Beauvoir projects her adult voice from the start—serious and
erudite, with no concessions to the limits of a child’s thought patterns or linguistic limitations—but uses it to
convey emotional urgency, a total preoccupation with the self, and a wild willfulness which suggests the
operations of the child’s mind. The motto for this book might be Paul Gaugin’s comment, “There is salvation
only in extremes,” for the young de Beauvoir is characterized by “impetuous vitality and a lack of all
moderation.” In the opening pages, she is presented in terms of her responses to phenomena that initially
developed her senses, all of her reactions framed as versions of an absolute, permitting no alternative visions
or possibilities. If she does not like a certain food, she vomits. If she is forbidden to peel a plum, she runs
howling down the boulevard. If she is denied the gratification of an impulse, she rages and sulks. As
disturbing as they appear, these visceral outbursts are actually the basis for the beginning of the most
important aspect of de Beauvoir’s sense of her self, her discovery of the mind. She locates her earliest sense of
her mental development in the wave of energy produced by frustrations and disappointments. To cope with
these explosive outbursts, she begins to think about them—first in terms of the action itself, then in a
primitive analysis of the nature of the action—and while there is no way for the young child to curb her
instincts, she begins to acquire the means for a transformation that will reduce her discomfort.

This transformation is accomplished through an expansion of awareness. “Suddenly the future existed,” she
says, establishing time as a concept, removing the child from the trap of a perpetual present. She begins to
discriminate among various foods, so that the senses serve rather than rule, an anticipation of the adult’s
prerogative of selection. While enjoying the sensual nature of the countryside, she becomes aware of the
sources of her enjoyment in the landscape, thus adding the analytic to the instinctive. When stories are read to
her, she imagines herself as one of the characters, assuming semilegendary proportions as a result of her
connection with the significance of the printed word. Gradually, while retaining the physical immediacy of the
child’s world, she alters her points of reference so that the mind moves into prominence as a measure of
reality, and events become occasions for thought as well as feeling. The connection between words and things
follows directly, as de Beauvoir learns to read rapidly, driven by a curiosity about the “riches found in books”
as well as an incipient interest in language itself.

1
In this book, de Beauvoir also begins to consider her parents’ lives and character, but at first they are seen
without fault, wrapped in an unquestioning love. Their dominance is accepted, and de Beauvoir traces the
beginning of her intellectual life to her admiration of her father, the beginning of her spiritual life to her
adoration of her mother, accepting the complete separation of those spheres without question. This is the only
area, however, in which she accepts the conventional nature of things without considering alternatives. Even
in her preteen years, she has a tremendous consciousness of shaping her own destiny so that reading leads to
writing, which permits a shaping rather than an accepting of reality; dolls become not merely toys but
“doubles,” which open alternative visions of existence; goals begin to edge into her immediate plans, with
teaching a possible vocation so that she can “form minds and mould character,” a reflection of her desires for
herself at this time.

Book 2 confronts the contradictions that have been gradually developing in her life. To this point,
approximately age ten, she has been the “dutiful daughter” of the title, and while her sense of duty remains,
the focus is shifted from a blind duty to her parents and the life they have prepared for her to a sense of duty to
her self and her own fate. The original French word in the title, rangee, also means “patterned” or “arranged.”
As the innocence of childhood gives way before the intrusion of all the questions a brilliant, precocious, and
highly inquisitive young girl might pose, the entire fabric of the society that her parents uphold begins to
unravel. Although the events of World War I had already begun to change the world irrevocably, the de
Beauvoirs were still living in the smug, self-assured contentment of the last decades of the nineteenth century,
falsely secure in the illusion that their way of life was permanent. Their eldest daughter, however, had already
begun to question some of the sacred assumptions of her parents’ generation. For her, Catholicism provided
no real explanation of the nature of the universe, and most rules of social conduct seemed designed to ratify
hypocrisy—a major sin for one who believed in seeking the absolute truth.

The narrative progression of book 2 is from certainty to doubt as de Beauvoir adds personal experience to the
continual development of her powers of analytic ability. The consequence is a feeling of displacement at
childhood’s end as adults still rule but with their authority no longer quite legitimate. Her questions extended
directly into the world of adult decisions and when she did not receive satisfactory answers, the anxiety of
uncertainty clouded her vision. As a compensation, she had begun to develop an intense friendship with
Elizabeth Mabille (known as “Zaza”) and an increasing dependence on the inspiration of literature. Her plan
to study literature and then teach at the lycee was a disturbing and unconventional choice for a proper girl, and
her confidence in the correctness of her decision was instinctive, not rational.

As subsequent events demonstrated, her decision was correct, but her confidence was immediately shaken by
the circumstances that she faced. Still essentially under the control of her parents, she describes her situation
at the beginning of book 3 as a kind of prison, and through the course of the book, she relates her attempts to
escape into the freedom of her own life. The narrative pattern here is a systematic examination of possibility,
beginning with an inclination toward public service, an idea that develops from an inspiring lecture delivered
by a socialist speaker. Another possibility involves her first feelings of love as she begins to talk earnestly
with her older cousin Jacques Laiguillon, a suave, sensitive young man she recalls as “the hero of my youth.”
Her discussions with Jacques lead her to her first acquaintance with modern art and literature, renewing her
interest in being a writer by underscoring the relevance of literature to modern life. To activate this interest,
she begins the diary which forms the basis for her autobiographical writing—a reflective, analytic, almost
fiercely observant record of her life which enhances the mental skills she has been developing by
concentrating impulsive thought into language. The diary also gives her the opportunity to begin to formulate
the feminist philosophy which she presented in Le Deuxieme Sexe in 1949 (The Second Sex, 1953). “What
went on in one’s body should be one’s own concern” is typical of the entries on this subject. The diary
solidifies her strong sense of individualism by acting as a kind of supportive “friend” prior to her actual
contact with people who would share her ideas and outlook.

2
Another possibility for escape was the Sorbonne, where she began to assemble a cultural context within which
to locate her own ideas. In examining the stance of the artist as outsider, particularly the poems of men such as
Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, and Arthur Rimbaud, her own attempts to break away from the
conventions of her parents’ world gained validity.

None of these possibilities enabled her to move beyond the prison which held her between the “paradise of
childhood” and “the world of men,” however, and she continued to see her life primarily in terms of
potentiality, with no immediate means for activating that energy. Her frustration drove her toward the nihilism
of intellectual despair, but she was always carried back from this state by exultations of pure being in response
to the variety of the world. Her consciousness of existence was shifting from the inner life of the extraordinary
child to the outward inclination of a young woman reaching for direction. Her sense of enclosure is reflected
in a narrative pattern of repetition with small variations within a circumscribed perimeter. In attempting to
break out, she spends nights in bars and saloons, but in a curiously innocent way, still far too much her
parents’ “dutiful daughter” to abandon her ingrained precepts. Finally, near the end of the book, she mentions
some of her fellow students, people destined for international celebrity, such as Simone Weil, Jean-Paul
Sartre, the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, and the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. This is a
foreshadowing of her imminent escape from “the labyrinth of the last three years” into the future.

Book 4 marks the emergence of Simone de Beauvoir, the young woman who is on the threshold of a life of
engagement, emerging from a prison of uncertainty and parental suppression. Her preparation for her exams
provides a focus for the energy that she has been scattering in many directions, and she passes them easily.
Her continuing success in her studies helps her to formulate a self-image of an independent woman who has
rejected the constraints of bourgeois norms. The excitement of living in the fabled Paris of the 1920’s, with all
the arts exploding in new directions, draws her into full participation in the world.

The final pages of the memoir follow de Beauvoir through the conclusion of two old friendships and the
inception of a grand new one, signifying the end of her youth and the beginning of her adult years. Her break
with her cousin Jacques and the tragic story of his decline, and the sudden death of her best friend, Zaza,
which she attributes to a mental collapse brought on by parental demands, are symbolic of the ending of an
era. The promise of a new age is heralded by Sartre’s invitation, “I’m going to take you under my wing,” and
although his attitude seems paternalistic, she never presents herself in a subordinate role in their relationship,
even while expressing her admiration for Sartre’s intellect and character. Instead, she relates her feelings as
she is captured by an absolute sense of love akin to other absolute states of being which she had known at the
beginning of the memoir. As before, her individuality is not diminished by her commitment. The love she
feels for Sartre is a justification for all of her struggles with modes of existence promoted by lesser people. In
the lyric language she reserves for moments of special truth, de Beauvoir calls Sartre:the double in whom I
found all my burning aspiration raised to the pitch of incandescence. I should always be able to share
everything with him. When I left him at the beginning of August, I knew that he would never go out of my
life again.

Critical Essays: Masterpieces of Women's Literature

Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter Analysis
In this first volume of her autobiography, Beauvoir intends to depict the genesis of her vocation as a writer
and to establish, in the re-creation of her childhood and adolescence, a coherent basis for understanding the
woman she will be throughout her life. Critics have objected that such a recovery of the past, from the
standpoint of a fifty-year-old woman, is necessarily flawed, since it is impossible not to interpret the past in
the light of one’s later beliefs and convictions. The problem is an epistemological one that is inherent, to a
certain extent, in all autobiography: how to know, accurately, a past self. Beauvoir solves the problem by
evoking her younger self as the necessary foundation of her older self and by implying the coherent

3
persistence of a unified, indestructible self. She depicts this self as a figure of great strength and
determination. A network of images evoking giantlike appetites and endeavors underlies the autobiographical
narrative. Like a giant, the young Simone wants to conquer and devour the world—in her case, a world of
books, knowledge, and experience. Her vigor and her vitality are impetuous and immoderate, and they explain
her need to escape from the narrow confines of her milieu. A certain ruthlessness is inseparable from her
relentless drive toward freedom and self-expression, and conflicts necessarily arise with the warm, protective
figures of the past: family, teachers, friends. The drive is, however, both motivated and justified by a strong
sense of vocation: Very early on, Beauvoir decides that she wants to be an author—that is, someone who is
endowed with autonomy, authority, and uniqueness. She wants to become a writer because she admires
writers above all and is “convinced of their supremacy.”

The voice adopted by Beauvoir to depict her younger self is sometimes an ironic one; she sees the child
Simone as being influenced by the prejudices and the snobberies of her milieu. More often, however, the
voice is one of sympathy and compassion as Beauvoir paints the insights of the young Simone, her struggles,
efforts, and aspirations, her difficulties and her yearnings, not as the slightly ridiculous antics of an
overambitious child, but as the necessary travails of giving birth to an independent girl and woman. Similarly,
when she speaks of those who surround her, the authorial voice is in turn imbued with a profound irony when
she addresses the pretensions, the pettiness, and the mediocrity of her milieu and with sympathy when she
remembers the innocent joys, occupations, and affections of her protected childhood.

Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter also offers an interesting perspective on Beauvoir’s convictions and theories
concerning women’s roles and destinies as she had expressed and analyzed them in Le Deuxième sexe (1949;
The Second Sex, 1953). While that treatise is informed by the existentialist philosophy proposed by Jean-Paul
Sartre, it also reflects some of the realities of women’s lives that Beauvoir had observed as a child and as a
young woman. Female figures of oppression and suppression are to be found throughout the Memoirs, and,
although Beauvoir never presents herself as a victim, as a conquered being, she makes it clear that she has
suffered from her father’s treatment of her: He appreciates her intelligence and her accomplishments, but he
also wants her to be a conventionally alluring girl, destined for a traditional “good marriage.” His
expectations, as well as those of her mother, who wants her to be a pious person above all, make her believe
that “I was an object, not a woman,” and one may see here the origin in her own experience of what she
theorizes in The Second Sex in existentialist terms as the reification of women in a bourgeois society. Her
hatred for her class, her dislike of the family structure, her mistrust of motherhood, her deep conviction that
women’s economic independence is crucial for their freedom, all repeatedly expressed in The Second Sex,
spring from her own experiences as recalled in the Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter.

Finally, the book offers an instructive view of life in France during the period between the two world wars.
Many of the intellectual, literary, sociopolitical and economic realities of the time are either evoked or
suggested, and they provide the reader with a vivid context for an understanding of the young Beauvoir and
her contemporaries.

Critical Essays: Critical Context

Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter is not only a vivid self-portrait but also a critical evaluation of French society
during a period of transition. In the process of becoming the woman who could work for artistic and social
freedom, de Beauvoir emphasizes her mental maturation, offering not only a very detailed and systematic
description of the development of her mind but also an analytic explanation of her relationship to the basic
propositions of the most brilliant French theoretical savants. Her friends were the precursors of Roland
Barthes, Jacques Lacan, and the like, and her autobiographical writing is crucial to an understanding of the
mind-forged power of the Left Bank activists who set the agenda for philosophical discourse until at least the
1960’s.

4
In addition, Simone de Beauvoir’s memoir places the foundations for the visionary feminist thinking of her
middle years. The Second Sex was not only revolutionary in its examination of women in Western society but
also a book which, as Carole Ascher points out, “made it all right” for a woman “to be an intellectual.” Judith
Okely describes it as a rare example of a female chronicle of apprenticeship that shares common themes of
choice and struggle with such familiar male autobiographical novels as D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers
(1913), James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer
(1934). “If the autobiography is sufficiently probing,” Okely maintains, “it demands that the reader probe her
own past.” For readers of both sexes, the universality of individual experience expressed with singular
eloquence remains as de Beauvoir’s essential literary legacy.

Analysis: Form and Content

From 1956 to 1958, Simone de Beauvoir composed the first of a series of autobiographical volumes that
covered the course of her life. Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter dealt with her childhood and youth to the age of
twenty-one; it was followed by La Force de l’age in 1960 (The Prime of Life, 1962), which dealt with her life
from 1929 to 1944, La Force des choses in 1963 (Force of Circumstance, 1964), which brought her life up to
the date of publication, and a final volume, a summary, Tout compte fait (1972; All Said and Done, 1974),
which differed from the previous three in that it was organized thematically rather than chronologically. These
autobiographical writings are among de Beauvoir’s finest achievements. Her reconstructions of her life, even
after consultations with cautious friends, retain a “disarming candor” that has led some critics to describe her
as a modern Montaigne. Like the sixteenth century philosopher, she is a writer whose ability to combine
introspective analysis with philosophical consideration has enabled her to produce “a truthful account of a life
that could, and should, help others” (as Konrad Bieber claims) to understand themselves as well as some of
the dominant social and political movements of the twentieth century.

Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter reaches as much as fifty years back in time from the moment of its production.
To compose the work, de Beauvoir was directed by a diary which she had begun as a young girl, fortified by a
prodigious memory for detail which she combined with careful historical research, and guided by one of her
most basic principles, the idea that one must be ruthlessly accurate, keenly analytic, and as dispassionate as
possible about the self. In the first volume of her memoirs, she relates how her most esteemed faculty, her
mind, was formed, and how her distinct sensibility developed. The course she charts is from a comfortable,
sheltered Catholic childhood in the early days of the twentieth century, la belle epoque of peace and serenity
(which was actually a continuation of nineteenth century norms and assumptions), toward the emergence of a
young woman who was intellectually self-confident, ready for pioneer political activity, committed to a life of
writing, and disdainful of most social institutions and conventions.

The volume is divided into four books, the first an attempt to recapture the instinctive and impulsive young
child’s responses and reactions to the world, the second devoted to an understanding of the psychology of her
parents and their world, the third tracing the uncertainty and doubt she felt as she began to reject the
protective, pampered life for which her family had prepared her, and the fourth, in which she reaches
adulthood and begins to share the intellectual and artistic life of some of the most influential people of the
twentieth century. The structure of the book is like an ever-widening spiral from the compact realm of the
self-centered child to the amorphous universe of the questioning adult. Through this pattern, an event is often
analyzed and considered for all of its ramifications, then temporarily put aside, and later recollected in a
larger, still-relevant context. The central themes of the work—individual growth and personal freedom, the
responsibility of the artist to her work and of a person to her society, the flow of historical change, the nature
of love and its relationship to a productive life—are all developed from an intensely personal perspective. The
severe tone of de Beauvoir’s voice is never modified in order to charm the reader. The intensity of the writing
matches the intensity of the mind of the author, and the evocative power of de Beauvoir’s prose has an appeal
that derives from directness, honesty, and an uncompromising confidence in the reader’s ability to match the

5
writer’s seriousness. This voice risked the condemnation of antagonist commentators, but succeeded in
drawing responses such as Judith Okely’s avowal, “She was our mother, our sister and something of
ourselves.”

Analysis: Form and Content

Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter is the first and best-known volume of Simone de Beauvoir’s four-volume
autobiography, and as such it covers her life from birth to age twenty-one. The title, in English as in French,
resonates with irony: What the reader will find in the book is the opposite of a portrait of a docile, traditional,
family-oriented girl; instead Beauvoir depicts the story of her childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood as
a gradual rebellion against and finally a total rejection of her conventional family and her conservative milieu,
in favor of a life of autonomy, study, and literary creativity.

Chronologically organized, and interspersed with portraits of the important people at different stages of her
life, the book begins with Beauvoir’s birth and her early upbringing in an upper-middle-class Catholic
Parisian family. Hers is a happy, cosseted childhood, but even as a preadolescent, the girl begins to question
many of the certainties of her familial milieu, as well as the dictates of her class and religion. When she
reaches adolescence, with all of its turmoil and upheavals, she grows increasingly critical of her society, and
she ends up breaking away from its stifling limitations, by shedding her belief in God and by taking refuge in
what will become the enduring components of her existence: study, reading, and writing. She sees the latter as
a way to fulfill herself and to formulate and impose her own vision and values. When she becomes a
philosophy student at the Sorbonne and meets her fellow-student Jean-Paul Sartre, she is living the life she
imagined, while, in sad contrast, her friend Zaza succumbs and dies in the struggle against what Beauvoir
calls “the revolting fate that had lain ahead of us . . .”—that is, the traditional life of a dutiful daughter of the
bourgeoisie.

In the preface to the second volume of her autobiography, Beauvoir justifies her autobiographical project by
saying that readers want to know why and how a particular author comes to writing. By 1958, when the
Memoirs were published, Beauvoir was an established, even a notorious writer, especially since the
publication of The Second Sex in 1949, a book that launched post-World War II feminism onto not only the
French but also the international scene. She had a large readership, especially among women, and it is for
them that she intends her memoirs. She constructs a paradigm of a typically female trajectory and of a
recognizable female experience: the upbringing in an environment perceived to be increasingly alienating; the
yearning for and the eventual discovery of other, more challenging, more enlivening possibilities; the struggle
to escape from intellectual and emotional imprisonment and to gain self-realization and personal freedom. The
issues Beauvoir had to confront when growing up remain of concern to women: issues of independence, of
access to self-fulfillment, and of relationships with others, both hostile and supportive. Women readers may
thus find in these memoirs ways of understanding and interpreting their own lives.

Analysis: Context
The Second Sex, Beauvoir’s pioneering work on the female condition, had been a resounding success in
France and elsewhere, and readers found in the Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter many of the same ideas, now
embodied in women of flesh and blood. What had been abstract issues are here embedded in a lived
experience, told by an urgent and daring voice, the voice of a “real” woman rather than that of an erudite but
distant scholar. The impact of The Second Sex, especially on American feminists, has thus been prolonged and
reinforced in the autobiographical work, since the memoirs seem to offer a case study of female liberation. In
that sense, the memoirs go beyond The Second Sex, which tends to describe women primarily as caught in
states of passivity and inferiority.

6
Women readers have reacted to Beauvoir’s openness about her early years with enthusiasm, interest, and
emulation, since Beauvoir’s book seems to have opened the way for many self-writings by women. Of course,
there exist earlier autobiographies by women authors, but hers is one of the first to demonstrate the possibility
of deliberately seizing control of one’s future and the direction of one’s existence. The Memoirs of a Dutiful
Daughter are an enactment of one woman’s persistent striving toward goals of self-determination and
creativity, and as such they offer an encouraging example to women setting out to attain similar goals.

Although Beauvoir’s autobiographical enterprise has been criticized for remaining within the parameters of
the male autobiographical tradition, going back in France to the eighteenth century Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
scholars have recognized that, by evoking the fears and hopes of her young self, Beauvoir shows that a female
autobiography—and therefore a woman’s life—may be a story not of defeat and submission, but of
accomplishments and triumphs.

The subsequent volumes of Beauvoir’s autobiography, all of which reveal the pervading and dominant
presence and force of Beauvoir’s personality, offer amply documented insights into her adult life and into the
political, social, and intellectual evolution of post-World War II France, but none has quite the same
absorbing urgency, stemming from Beauvoir’s description of her own hard-won genesis as a writer and a free
person, as this first volume.

Bibliography
Bair, Deirdre. Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography. New York: Summit Books, 1990. An informative biography
based on extensive interviews with Simone de Beauvoir and with many of her contemporaries. Carefully
documented, with great attention to detail, the book offers an indispensable background and a comprehensive
context for a reading of Beauvoir’s work. Excellent notes, a useful index, and sixteen pages of photographs.

Brosman, Catharine Savage. Simone de Beauvoir Revisited. Boston: Twayne, 1991. An introduction to
Simone de Beauvoir’s thought and an assessment of her lasting contributions to philosophy and literature. The
book is an update of Konrad Bieber’s Simone de Beauvoir (1979) in the light of more recent work done on
Beauvoir. A selected bibliography concentrates on studies published since 1975.

Cottrell, Robert D. Simone de Beauvoir. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1975. Starting with a chapter on
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, this concise work examines Beauvoir’s philosophical and ethical positions
and their evolution in the context of her writing career. A bibliography of the earlier work done on Beauvoir is
included.

Hewitt, Leah D. Autobiographical Tightropes. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990. This book has a
chapter on Beauvoir’s autobiography as a problematic female autobiography, and juxtaposes it with the
autobiographical writings of Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Duras, Monique Wittig, and Maryse Condé.

Marks, Elaine. Critical Essays on Simone de Beauvoir. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987. Twenty-seven essays on
Beauvoir, some by French authors (translated into English) and others by well-known American writers and
scholars such as Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Hardwick, Kate Millett, Gerda Lerner, and Alice Jardin, discuss
various aspects of Beauvoir’s life, work, and influence.

Patterson, Yolanda Astarita. Simone de Beauvoir and the Demystification of Motherhood. Ann Arbor, Mich.:
UMI Research Press, 1989. In her introduction, Patterson considers American and French views of
motherhood and then goes on to explore the treatment of the theme in Beauvoir’s works as well as Beauvoir’s
presentation of her own mother. Includes interviews with Beauvoir and her sister Hélène. Has a good
bibliography and a useful index.