Heroine-worship
Anthony Storr Shnone de Beauvoir: A Life of Freedom , "'aro' Ascher (Harvester, pp. 254, £9.95)
intone de Beauvoir has written about
herself so well and at such length that to attempt a book about her might well seem daunting. Carol Ascher, however, is 11,,°t easily deterred. For her, Simone de liberation; is a heroine, a pioneer of women's `lbertion; and, although she is not entirely uncritical, this book is an act of heroine worship, IA/Miss Ascher, we are told, 'lectured on n,°11ten and the Family and Co-ordinated i'c'trien's Studies at Sarah Lawrence Col- lege, before becoming a free-lance writer.' t'lle affirms that 'This book is my own mix- pure and invention: part biography, part nerarY criticism, part political and personal e,°tnmentary, it is not exactly any of these.' What it is is largely an exercise in self- Indulgence. In an afterword, Carol Ascher writes: 'Now that the book is done it occurs tome that my choice to write about Simone ‘Ie Beauvoir, though not conscious at the Pie, may well have been motivated by a tesire to work through problems in myself that she seemed to share with me.' Ascher 8?es on to tell us that 'one of the greatest 84ts Simone de Beauvoir has given me i; • • . is her conviction that it is all right to e an intellectual.' In 1981, it seems ex- traordinary that a woman holding a Ph.D
from Columbia should need such reassurance, but Carol Ascher is notably old-fashioned. She informs us that her parents sent her to Vassar in the hopes that this 'would turn me into a dignified and socially prominent young woman.' She disappointed their hopes by transferring herself to Barnard College in New York.
On and on she goes about herself. Her marriage ended in 'the rough-housing revolutionary optimism of 1968! She joins a `women's consciousness-raising group: She reads The Second Sex for the second time and tells us all about its 'snappy white cover'. She addresses Simone de Beauvoir in the second person. 'You% must know that women my age and younger look to women of your generation as models.' She dreams that she is having an .affair with a woman and that the resulting pregnancy is this book. It is difficult to be fair; to discount this irritating welter of narcissism and discover whether Carol Ascher actually has anything interesting to say about Simone de Beauvoir. She recounts the plots of the novels; takes us through parts of the autobiography, and devotes a chapter to de Beauvoir's obsession with death. A good deal of space is devoted to The Second Sex, which, probably rightly, Carol Ascher thinks to be 'the most important work for American feminism, as well as for feminism in most West European countries'.
Miss Ascher's most interesting comments concern a conflict which she detects in Simone de Beauvoir and which, I surmise, she shares with her. How can one be really close to another person and yet retain one's autonomy? Feminist writers always assume that this is particularly a female problem because past convention has enjoined female identification with the male. 'He for God only, she for God in him.' In fact, it can be a problem for either sex. In very close associations, either partner can be swamped by the other, and marriages not infrequently break up because the more compliant partner eventually feels compell- ed to re-assert his or her lost, separate iden- tity. Sartre and de Beauvoir attempted a pact in which no formal marriage was entered upon, in which either was free to take other lovers (and both did so), and in which total honesty was demanded on both sides. In spite of this, de Beauvoir wrote: `Little by little, he wore away my resistance, I liquidated my ethical idealism and ended up adopting Sartre's point of view for my own.'
What emerges from this book is that the heroine of woman's liberation was far more dominated by the male of her choice than her admirers would like to admit. Sartre, admittedly, was probably an intellectual bully, and it might have been impossible for anyone to live with him without going a long way towards agreeing with him. I doubt if complete honesty between two human beings is possible without destruc- tive consequences. Carol Ascher's book is more about herself than about her subject. However, it has one virtue. It makes one turn again to Simone de Beauvoir.
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