I was particularly grateful for the information about the poor original translation of The Second Sex in the 1950s. I have the text but I don't think I ever got through the whole book. I could simply not understand how such a badly-done book could have had the huge impact that I know it did have!
I'll definitely seek it out. But I always loved the Matisse cut-out on the cover of my 1950s Penguin one: they were synonymous in my mind and now I can't see the Matisse without thinking of De Beauvoir!
I’m currently reading Beauvoir’s novel, Inseparable. The pleasure is multidimensional. One, I’ve not yet read Simone de Beauvoir, so to be introduced to her work not through the head but the heart is a different kind of portal. Two, the story beautifully recalls the intensity of girlhood friendship, when everything turned on the highs and lows of being and growing up together. And three, the opening essay by Margaret Atwood is as rich and rewarding as the novel. Atwood recounts Sartre’s dismissal of Beauvoir’s novel because he judged works by their political significance, failing to realize how being a girl or woman in conservative Catholic France was, itself, political.
Oh, this need to please! Will it ever go away? I do think women are hampered by the desire and need to please. I'm guilty of this. I'm afraid to cross boundaries that offer too much risk, but interestingly, I'm not afraid to approach boundaries that I don't care about as much. A bigger obstacle for me in writing is perfectionism. I suffer from what Ira Glass calls the taste gap. I know what great writing looks like, but I don't feel that I measure up. I'm not the writer I'd hoped I'd be...
I do think women have more opportunities than Beauvior did, but we don't take advantage of them as much as we should. A couple of women writers who resonate with me today are Margaret Atwood (mostly her short stories and essays) and Maria Popova. Popover has a wonderful blog called The Marginalian, and her book Figuring is mind blowing at times. Have you read it?
I was also wondering, have you read Inseparable, a posthumous book by Beauvoir? The intro alone by Margaret Atwood is worth reading.
Great post, as always. Thanks for all the insights!
Hi Nancy--I haven't read Insperables. Good to know about Atwood's intro. I love the Marginalian, but I don't know her book. So thanks for that as well. Perfectionism is such a huge problem. I love Elizabeth Gilbert's thoughts about this from Big Magic. D. W. Winnicott's idea of the "Good Enough Mother" is so applicable-- the Good Enough Author. We do what we can and we get it out there. Otherwise, we're not authors at all.
It seems getting recognition is a quest for each generation of women. Shakespeare's Sisters: How Women Wrote the Renaissance by Ramie Targoff is reviewed in today's New York Times Book Review. Beverly Rude
Super interesting, thanks! Was familiar with Simone de Beauvoir's story, but not the Tin House article and that was an interesting combo. Loved how you pulled different threads together. Claire Vaye Watkins's piece made me think quite a bit. I think that some of that background was why I focused on the scene of an interviewer being awestruck by Yoko Tawada, in an essay here on Substack about Tawada's book about a vanished language. It actually felt unusual, and that was shocking. On the other hand, I don't share Watkins's experience when it comes to fiction. I think I got shocked out of it when I first got to attend literary readings as a teenager and discovered that I didn't like John Updike's writing or how he read it, even though he was in the New Yorker. The same with a couple of other writers. It changed the world on its axis a little.
Oh, nothing more complex than what I said here! It just took away the idea that C. V. Watkins said that she internalized, that real writing was of a certain type and done by a certain kind of person. I was so young, and I just assumed that because someone was regularly in the NYer and generally much praised, that their work was a model of what literary writing ought to be. Then I went to a couple of readings and found the texts actively distasteful, and it upended all of that forever.
It's sort of interesting. That same year or around then I also got to hear Ionesco read, and felt like I had experienced literary genius in person. And he was also of course incredibly lauded (and very old by then). So it's not that the lesson was that praised=distasteful, but rather that one could not trust that praised=good (or even anything that one wanted to be around), or that the arbitors of praise were necessarily going to share one's own standards.
Ah yes. I feel this regularly. But when I was younger I was probably prone to believe that whatever I might write wouldn’t measure up to the powers that be, whether or not I agreed with them that Updike was a genius. Interestingly, though, when I was in college, Amy Tan, Toni Morrison, and Louise Erdrich were all the rage and upending all kinds of things. I didn’t think I could write like them either.
Such an interesting discussion! None of those writers was central yet when I was that age, as I recall. The mild misogyny (as I viewed it) of the texts and atmospheres of some of the readings I went to shook up my understanding of what standards governed the powers-that-be of that era, but it didn't make me particularly focused on the genders of the people I liked reading, or make me think particularly about the genders of the people I wished I could write like.
It just shook my sense of the whole system, on both aesthetic and principled grounds.
I think — this was a very, very long time ago — that the poets I wished I could write like at that age were Pound and Eliot, the genre writers were Mary Stewart and a couple of others, and the literary translators were Dorothy Sayers and Lydia Davis, who wasn't publishing fiction yet (that I knew of, anyway). Like you I didn't think that I could write like any of them, but they were all not part of the leading literary at that point either.
Did you find that, even coming of age in a time of Toni Morrison and the others, that you internalized the kind of ideal reader that Watkins's article describes?
Yes, great discussion. I gave up trying to write myself by the time I left college, but I did internalize the idea that the literary tradition was male. I recall reading one novel by a woman my entire undergraduate career--The Awakening, by Kate Chopin, in which the heroine wants to be a writer but ends up killing herself. This was a great feminist rediscovery. But a devastating one! I was hungry to find more foremothers and a tradition that was mroe empowering, so that is what I set about doing in my career. Then when I read Watkins's piece in 2015 I was astounded to see that she had grown up with the exact same views as Constance Fenimore Woolson and the other women I studied did in the 19th century! Very little had changed, in a way. Yet, there were still these amazing women writers who came out of the 80s and 90s. And of course Toni Morrison winning the Nobel Prize was huge! But still women wrtiers in the 2010s were talking about, as Meg Wolitzer put it, being on the "second shelf."
Great read, thank you for sharing! I have a slightly different take on this question of whether women still need to please, in a way that takes away from their own possibilities. The women that I have known the intellectuals and artist, they do not lack encourage. And I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing that we take other peoples feelings and opinions into account as we find a way to do the things that we need and want to do. Yes a need to please at all costs is not a positive thing. But even with that need and that social pressure, women can, and do amazing things. Beauvoir’s life and works being a great example of this, and ordinary women’s lives that are often also quite extraordinary upon closer inspection. More women were not recognized as writers and artists and intellectuals simply because they were not published or acknowledged in the public realm, but that doesn’t mean that they haven’t been doing these things all along.
Yes, I think Rita’s comment is worth noting. This is a very tangled subject. What does it mean to “need to please”? That need can certainly be harmful to women, removing agency, a sense of self, and meaningful work and recognition. I also find, though, that women berating themselves as people pleasers is also a very effective tool of the systems of social oppression. Those structures make it difficult for us to have freedom of expression, and they cause us further harm when we denigrate ourselves for the results. The need to please can mean codependency, a lack of self, and an abdication of power. It might also be a subtle hint at women’s relational power and its threats to dominant structures. To beat ourselves up about that or to try to eliminate it would be I think a kind of suicide. And the world would continue to lose the unique perspective women and their work bring to it, one it needs a great deal more of. So I am pondering all of this! Thank you Anne, Rita, and the other commenters here for helping me do this (yes, I’m acknowledging the inherently relational, perhaps feminine(?), nature of these exchanges).
Thank you, Emily. This is very interesting. I haven’t thought of people pleasing as potentially an expression of women’s relationality. How does this apply then to women’s authorship? The author stands alone, or is constructed as very individualistic, at least in an artistic context. I’ve wondered sometimes about this and lamented the solitary nature of authorial work. And Simone de Beauvoir seems to say the woman writer needs to be more individualistic not less, in order NOT to imitate men.
Thanks Anne. If people pleasing as we define it (making sure everyone else is happy at the expense of ourselves)is an expression of women’s relationality, it’s a corrupted one. And I guess that’s what I was getting at in my last comment - that a strength, being relational, caring about others, noticing the links between ourselves and how those links might benefit all of us, could be weaponized/twisted into something like “others’ happiness comes before yours.” I do think that individualism, agency, a sense of self is necessary to disentangle us from the unhealthy need to please. Much of my adult life has been about doing just that. However, as you say, the idea of the “solitary” author seems to take this individualism to an extreme (a patriarchal one perhaps, and I guess I’m disagreeing with de Beauvoir here). Authors are deeply imbedded in community, relationships, personal history, humanness. All of that informs what they write. I don’t think they stand apart as much as deeply within. And that brings me back to relationality and the importance of that idea. Yes, we very much need selves and spaces for those selves to be whole, and we also cannot live or write life without a deep sense of our interconnectedness. Does that make sense? It’s like we’ve got two extremes, people pleasing and Individualism (with a capital “I”), neither will do.
Beautifully put! The extremes are always problematic. I think a lot of women writers wrestle with these two extremes. Writing is so solitary, and finding community as an author is difficult (but now we have Substack!).
“In France, if you are a writer, to be a woman is simply to provide a stick for you to be beaten with,” Wow!!! So powerful. And the summary-annotation from you as well, Anne—that women NEED to please, which can keep them from doing radical work. So much the case for the three women at the center of Engaging Italy, as I noted in those pages. Thanks for another insightful piece.
Such an insightful post! I love your writing Anne, it gets me excited to pick up another Simone de Beauvoir book.
Aww, I’m so glad! Thanks, Luka!
I was particularly grateful for the information about the poor original translation of The Second Sex in the 1950s. I have the text but I don't think I ever got through the whole book. I could simply not understand how such a badly-done book could have had the huge impact that I know it did have!
The new translation is so much better!
I'll definitely seek it out. But I always loved the Matisse cut-out on the cover of my 1950s Penguin one: they were synonymous in my mind and now I can't see the Matisse without thinking of De Beauvoir!
I’m currently reading Beauvoir’s novel, Inseparable. The pleasure is multidimensional. One, I’ve not yet read Simone de Beauvoir, so to be introduced to her work not through the head but the heart is a different kind of portal. Two, the story beautifully recalls the intensity of girlhood friendship, when everything turned on the highs and lows of being and growing up together. And three, the opening essay by Margaret Atwood is as rich and rewarding as the novel. Atwood recounts Sartre’s dismissal of Beauvoir’s novel because he judged works by their political significance, failing to realize how being a girl or woman in conservative Catholic France was, itself, political.
Yes, there was a lot Sartre didn’t get! You’re the second person to commend Atwood’s introduction. I need to get a copy!
Oh, this need to please! Will it ever go away? I do think women are hampered by the desire and need to please. I'm guilty of this. I'm afraid to cross boundaries that offer too much risk, but interestingly, I'm not afraid to approach boundaries that I don't care about as much. A bigger obstacle for me in writing is perfectionism. I suffer from what Ira Glass calls the taste gap. I know what great writing looks like, but I don't feel that I measure up. I'm not the writer I'd hoped I'd be...
I do think women have more opportunities than Beauvior did, but we don't take advantage of them as much as we should. A couple of women writers who resonate with me today are Margaret Atwood (mostly her short stories and essays) and Maria Popova. Popover has a wonderful blog called The Marginalian, and her book Figuring is mind blowing at times. Have you read it?
I was also wondering, have you read Inseparable, a posthumous book by Beauvoir? The intro alone by Margaret Atwood is worth reading.
Great post, as always. Thanks for all the insights!
Hi Nancy--I haven't read Insperables. Good to know about Atwood's intro. I love the Marginalian, but I don't know her book. So thanks for that as well. Perfectionism is such a huge problem. I love Elizabeth Gilbert's thoughts about this from Big Magic. D. W. Winnicott's idea of the "Good Enough Mother" is so applicable-- the Good Enough Author. We do what we can and we get it out there. Otherwise, we're not authors at all.
It seems getting recognition is a quest for each generation of women. Shakespeare's Sisters: How Women Wrote the Renaissance by Ramie Targoff is reviewed in today's New York Times Book Review. Beverly Rude
Yes! It's amazing how many "new" women writers are still being rediscovered.
Super interesting, thanks! Was familiar with Simone de Beauvoir's story, but not the Tin House article and that was an interesting combo. Loved how you pulled different threads together. Claire Vaye Watkins's piece made me think quite a bit. I think that some of that background was why I focused on the scene of an interviewer being awestruck by Yoko Tawada, in an essay here on Substack about Tawada's book about a vanished language. It actually felt unusual, and that was shocking. On the other hand, I don't share Watkins's experience when it comes to fiction. I think I got shocked out of it when I first got to attend literary readings as a teenager and discovered that I didn't like John Updike's writing or how he read it, even though he was in the New Yorker. The same with a couple of other writers. It changed the world on its axis a little.
Interesting, Linnesby! I'm curious to know what effect this discovery that you didn't like Updike and others had on you as a reader/writer.
Oh, nothing more complex than what I said here! It just took away the idea that C. V. Watkins said that she internalized, that real writing was of a certain type and done by a certain kind of person. I was so young, and I just assumed that because someone was regularly in the NYer and generally much praised, that their work was a model of what literary writing ought to be. Then I went to a couple of readings and found the texts actively distasteful, and it upended all of that forever.
It's sort of interesting. That same year or around then I also got to hear Ionesco read, and felt like I had experienced literary genius in person. And he was also of course incredibly lauded (and very old by then). So it's not that the lesson was that praised=distasteful, but rather that one could not trust that praised=good (or even anything that one wanted to be around), or that the arbitors of praise were necessarily going to share one's own standards.
Ah yes. I feel this regularly. But when I was younger I was probably prone to believe that whatever I might write wouldn’t measure up to the powers that be, whether or not I agreed with them that Updike was a genius. Interestingly, though, when I was in college, Amy Tan, Toni Morrison, and Louise Erdrich were all the rage and upending all kinds of things. I didn’t think I could write like them either.
Such an interesting discussion! None of those writers was central yet when I was that age, as I recall. The mild misogyny (as I viewed it) of the texts and atmospheres of some of the readings I went to shook up my understanding of what standards governed the powers-that-be of that era, but it didn't make me particularly focused on the genders of the people I liked reading, or make me think particularly about the genders of the people I wished I could write like.
It just shook my sense of the whole system, on both aesthetic and principled grounds.
I think — this was a very, very long time ago — that the poets I wished I could write like at that age were Pound and Eliot, the genre writers were Mary Stewart and a couple of others, and the literary translators were Dorothy Sayers and Lydia Davis, who wasn't publishing fiction yet (that I knew of, anyway). Like you I didn't think that I could write like any of them, but they were all not part of the leading literary at that point either.
Did you find that, even coming of age in a time of Toni Morrison and the others, that you internalized the kind of ideal reader that Watkins's article describes?
Yes, great discussion. I gave up trying to write myself by the time I left college, but I did internalize the idea that the literary tradition was male. I recall reading one novel by a woman my entire undergraduate career--The Awakening, by Kate Chopin, in which the heroine wants to be a writer but ends up killing herself. This was a great feminist rediscovery. But a devastating one! I was hungry to find more foremothers and a tradition that was mroe empowering, so that is what I set about doing in my career. Then when I read Watkins's piece in 2015 I was astounded to see that she had grown up with the exact same views as Constance Fenimore Woolson and the other women I studied did in the 19th century! Very little had changed, in a way. Yet, there were still these amazing women writers who came out of the 80s and 90s. And of course Toni Morrison winning the Nobel Prize was huge! But still women wrtiers in the 2010s were talking about, as Meg Wolitzer put it, being on the "second shelf."
Great read, thank you for sharing! I have a slightly different take on this question of whether women still need to please, in a way that takes away from their own possibilities. The women that I have known the intellectuals and artist, they do not lack encourage. And I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing that we take other peoples feelings and opinions into account as we find a way to do the things that we need and want to do. Yes a need to please at all costs is not a positive thing. But even with that need and that social pressure, women can, and do amazing things. Beauvoir’s life and works being a great example of this, and ordinary women’s lives that are often also quite extraordinary upon closer inspection. More women were not recognized as writers and artists and intellectuals simply because they were not published or acknowledged in the public realm, but that doesn’t mean that they haven’t been doing these things all along.
Love this, especially “But even with that need and that social pressure, women can, and do amazing things.”
Yes, I think Rita’s comment is worth noting. This is a very tangled subject. What does it mean to “need to please”? That need can certainly be harmful to women, removing agency, a sense of self, and meaningful work and recognition. I also find, though, that women berating themselves as people pleasers is also a very effective tool of the systems of social oppression. Those structures make it difficult for us to have freedom of expression, and they cause us further harm when we denigrate ourselves for the results. The need to please can mean codependency, a lack of self, and an abdication of power. It might also be a subtle hint at women’s relational power and its threats to dominant structures. To beat ourselves up about that or to try to eliminate it would be I think a kind of suicide. And the world would continue to lose the unique perspective women and their work bring to it, one it needs a great deal more of. So I am pondering all of this! Thank you Anne, Rita, and the other commenters here for helping me do this (yes, I’m acknowledging the inherently relational, perhaps feminine(?), nature of these exchanges).
Thank you, Emily. This is very interesting. I haven’t thought of people pleasing as potentially an expression of women’s relationality. How does this apply then to women’s authorship? The author stands alone, or is constructed as very individualistic, at least in an artistic context. I’ve wondered sometimes about this and lamented the solitary nature of authorial work. And Simone de Beauvoir seems to say the woman writer needs to be more individualistic not less, in order NOT to imitate men.
Thanks Anne. If people pleasing as we define it (making sure everyone else is happy at the expense of ourselves)is an expression of women’s relationality, it’s a corrupted one. And I guess that’s what I was getting at in my last comment - that a strength, being relational, caring about others, noticing the links between ourselves and how those links might benefit all of us, could be weaponized/twisted into something like “others’ happiness comes before yours.” I do think that individualism, agency, a sense of self is necessary to disentangle us from the unhealthy need to please. Much of my adult life has been about doing just that. However, as you say, the idea of the “solitary” author seems to take this individualism to an extreme (a patriarchal one perhaps, and I guess I’m disagreeing with de Beauvoir here). Authors are deeply imbedded in community, relationships, personal history, humanness. All of that informs what they write. I don’t think they stand apart as much as deeply within. And that brings me back to relationality and the importance of that idea. Yes, we very much need selves and spaces for those selves to be whole, and we also cannot live or write life without a deep sense of our interconnectedness. Does that make sense? It’s like we’ve got two extremes, people pleasing and Individualism (with a capital “I”), neither will do.
Beautifully put! The extremes are always problematic. I think a lot of women writers wrestle with these two extremes. Writing is so solitary, and finding community as an author is difficult (but now we have Substack!).
I agree! Thank you for prompting such a thoughtful discussion, Anne.
“In France, if you are a writer, to be a woman is simply to provide a stick for you to be beaten with,” Wow!!! So powerful. And the summary-annotation from you as well, Anne—that women NEED to please, which can keep them from doing radical work. So much the case for the three women at the center of Engaging Italy, as I noted in those pages. Thanks for another insightful piece.
A lot to think about here. Will come back.