The primary quantity of her autobiography, Mémoirs d’une Jeune Fille Rangée (Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, 1958), traces Beauvoir’s childhood, her relationship with her mother and father, her profound friendship with Zaza and her education up by means of her years at the Sorbonne. Just as with The Second Sex, this later work is divided into two books, the first which offers with “Old Age as Seen from Without” and the second with, “Being-in-the-World.” Beauvoir explains the motivation for this division in her Introduction the place she writes, “Every human state of affairs may be considered from with out-seen from the perspective of an outsider-or from within, in as far as the subject assumes and at the identical time transcends it.” Continuing to uphold her belief in the basic ambiguity of existence which at all times sits atop the contradiction of immanence and transcendence, objectivity and subjectivity, Beauvoir treats the topic of age each as an object of cultural-historical data and as the first-hand, lived experience of aged individuals. This masterful work takes the worry of age as a cultural phenomenon and seeks to offer voice to a silenced and detested class of human beings. It additionally presents a picture of a woman who was essential of her class and its expectations of girls from an early age.
However, this does not demand that the aged merely resign themselves to ready for demise or for younger members of society to treat them as the invisible class. The Second Sex had been received with appreciable hostility from many teams who didn’t want to be confronted with an unpleasant critique of their sexist and oppressive attitudes in direction of ladies; The approaching of Age nevertheless, was typically welcomed although it too critiques society’s prejudices in direction of one other oppressed group: the elderly. What she concludes from her investigation into the expertise, fear and stigma of old age is that though the means of aging and the decline into dying is an inescapable, existential phenomenon for these human beings who stay lengthy enough to experience it, there is no necessity to our loathing the aged members of society. There’s a certain acceptance of the worry of age felt by most people as a result of it ironically stands as more of the other to life than does dying.
However the video performed her more damage than good. The quantity specializing in the decade between 1952-1962 (Hard Times), exhibits a way more subdued and somewhat cynical Beauvoir who is coming to terms with fame, age and the political atrocities waged by France in its battle with Algeria (taken up in her work with Gisèle Halimi and the case of Djamila Boupacha). The final installment within the chronicling of her life charts the years from 1962-1972. Tout Compte Fait, (All Said and Done, 1972) reveals an older and wiser philosopher and feminist who seems back over her life, her relationships, and her accomplishments and recognizes that it was all for the best. I was fairly hopeless earlier than I met him that I would discover someone I could maintain a relationship with who didn’t let these items get below their skin. Flavorwire: It Follows speaks to teenage anxiety about intercourse and surrendering a part of yourself to someone else in the act, but in addition the strange realization that these fears will not be unique.
In lots of factors, she explores the motivations for many of her works, such because the Second Sex and The Mandarins. In addition, she explores the question of age from the angle of the residing, elderly human being in relation to his or her physique, time and the external world. Each of those works supplies us with another perspective into the life of one of the crucial highly effective philosophers of the 20th century and some of the influential female intellectuals on the historical past of Western considering. Additionally, she returns to previous works such because the Second Sex, to reevaluate her motivations and her conclusions about literature, philosophy, and the act of remembering. The first consists of her works on the lives and deaths of beloved ones. In her autobiography, Beauvoir tells us that in wanting to write down about herself she had to first explain what it meant to be a girl and that this realization was the genesis of The Second Sex. Edited by Simone de Beauvoir and Gisèle Halimi.