Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (Penguin Modern Classics)

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There were two books in particular that had a lasting impression, 'Little Women' and 'The Mill on the Floss', both featuring female characters that Simone felt so strongly about she was driven to tears.

I was caught by Simone de Beauvoir’s voice and her description of the perfect companion and how Sartre met all her criteria. I place this above 'Speak, Memory' on my list of favorite memoirs, and there isn't any higher praise I offer then that! Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's pageview limit. But that was precisely what adults refused to admit, and whenever they treated me with condescension I at once took offence. Non solo perché sono nata settant’anni dopo, non solo perché sono italiana e non francese ma soprattutto per il contesto famigliare di alta borghesia conservatrice.Still, Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée puts de Beauvoir's feminism in perspective: she may be most famous for The Second Sex, but she's primarily a humanist, interested in the modes of existence experienced by all humans, and by specific humans, regardless of gender. The short of it: From the opening pages I fell head over heels for Memoires d'une jeune fille rangée (translated into English as Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter but more literally "Memoirs of a well-behaved girl"), the first of four volumes in de Beauvoir's autobiography. These meetings will forge her and direct her unceasingly towards discoveries and reflections always in motion. Mom and Grandma probably didn't actually say this, but I got the impression from their conversation that teenagers hate their parents. But their faces, their appearance, and the sound of their voices captivated me; I find it hard now to explain what the particular pleasure was that they gave me; but when my parents decided to move to the fifth-floor flat in the rue de Rennes, I remember the despairing cry I gave: 'But I won't be able to see the people in the street any more!

I was born at four o'clock in the morning on the ninth of January 1908, in a room fitted with white-enameled furniture and overlooking the Boulevard Raspail. She doesn't take herself too seriously, but neither does she dismiss her experiences or manifest a false modesty.Quand j'étais petite je relisais toujours les mêmes livres, je me tannais pas; drôle que ça m'arrive tellement peu maintenant. There comes a period in her teenage years when language, the necessity of interpreting language, becomes her enemy for just this reason: when we express our thoughts, feelings, and intentions, there is always a chasm between the thing itself—our interior landscape—and our expression of it; often this chasm is only widened when our words are interpreted by another person. This would constantly be a problem she just couldn't comprehend, Simone had no plans to fall in love, to wed, to have children, to live a wife's life.

Women, by the exercise of talent or knowledge, had carved out a place for themselves in the universe of men. As with all other aspects of the book, her observations on gender relations are detailed and perceptive, and the roots of her feminism run through this volume, from her examination of the sexual double-standard that allowed her parents to entertain men who kept mistresses but not the mistresses themselves; to the assertion of her otherwise avant-garde philospher friends that they "can't respect an unmarried woman"; to the effects of having her reading censored (it was considered dangerous for unmarried women to read about sex).

It is a book that charts the trajectory of her childhood and youth, and yet does so in a way that doesn’t make it feel removed from these moments. I can't close this post, however, without mentioning the insight that Memoires d'une jeune fille rangée gives into de Beauvoir's feminism. Goodness what a shock, Schama paints a picture of France on the eve of revolution in which you might struggle to find a priest who believes in God, where disrespect for the royal family is near universal, the ideas of Rousseau and the classical world as an ideal were on all minds, here de Beauvoir pere, while an atheist, is a royalist admittedly it is far easier to be a royalist once there are no actual kings or emperors and what not to deal with, the parents censor de Beauvoir's correspondence until she was almost twenty, her loss of faith is a profound blow to de Beauvoir mere.

A superb autobiography by one of the great literary figures of the twentieth century, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter offers an intimate picture of growing up in a bourgeois French family, rebelling as an adolescent against the conventional expectations of her class, and striking out on her own with an intellectual and existential ambition exceedingly rare in a young woman in the 1920s. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. From her young spirited days as a child, to an intricate student life where literature and philosophy would play a pivotal role in shaping the future, to the beginnings of a blossoming friendship with Jean-Paul Sarte, Simone would become a leading figure in the roots of both feminism and existentialism, a true independent voice the the 20th century.The very lucid way she remembers the pangs of puberty, the strange and mysterious agonies of trying to understand oneself and others as you grow up were fascinating and moving.