Simone de Beauvoir was an existential phenomenologist who was centrally concerned with problems of oppression and embodiment. Her philosophy, novels, and autobiography remain popular, especially The Second Sex, which continues to influence feminist thought. Beauvoir lived her life as an intellectual. She considered her life's work to be social commentary. Her tools for social analysis were philosophical.

Beauvoir was born in Paris in 1908 and died there in 1986. She went to school with Simone Weil, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Claude Levi-Strauss, and Jean-Paul Sartre. She and Sartre became lovers and companions, and although their relationship was not exclusive, it continued throughout most of their lives. Beauvoir had many friendships and love affairs with women and men. Some are revealed in her autobiography, others in posthumously published letters. Beauvoir traveled widely and wrote about her experiences and views in fiction, plays, journalistic articles, autobiography, and philosophy.

Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex is well known for its negative descriptions of the female body. Several interpreters claim that Beauvoir presents the female body as a mere obstacle: being dominated by the cycles of menstruation, pregnancies, and nursing, the female body severely limits the free choice and self-fulfillment of the woman. Critics argue further that such a view of the female body is partial, and worse, biased by a male - Sartrean or Cartesian - point of view. According to the critics, Beauvoir ends up describing the female body as a burden (DS 11 511; SS 630) because she accepts Sartre's voluntarist notion of subjectivity.

This common reading of The Second Sex is mistaken. Beauvoir’s negative comments regarding the female body do not disclose her fundamental concept of feminine embodiment. They constitute only a provisional step in a more far-reaching argument. Beauvoir’s discussion of femaleness can be understood only if its philosophical starting points are understood and appreciated. The aim of this chapter is to clarify and make explicit these starting points.

For Simone de Beauvoir, both men's and women's lives are fundamentally marked by historical events. In reference to her own life she said: “the Resistance, the Liberation, the war in Algeria . . . these are the things that marked eras, at least for me . . . That's what marked the big epochs in our lives, it's the historical events, the historical involvements one has in these larger events. It's much more important than any other kind of difference.”

From her first writings published during World War Two, Beauvoir’s work is marked by an awareness of these historical crises and the dilemmas that they pose. What is one to do with the knowledge of the Nazi death camps? Is forgetting a betrayal of the dead, or is surrendering to the pain of remembering a betrayal of the living? What action is necessary in the face of the Nazi occupation of France? How can one reconcile the need for terrorist actions with the implacable knowledge that no calculation of means and ends can erase the loss of a human life? Could the Soviet labor camps be compared with the Nazi concentration camps, or did they have some positive meaning or justification? How can one live in an occupied city when the occupiers are one’s own countrymen, as during the Algerian war?

“MUST WE BURN SADE?”

There are many surprising aspects to Beauvoir's consideration of the Marquis de Sade. Beauvoir is a feminist, and Sade is one whose name gave rise to the phenomenon of sexual sadism. Beauvoir has written copiously on the empowerment of women; Sade sought, through sexual means, to punish and control women and then to write, in the form of fiction and essays, a detailed account of his form of libertinism. In asking why Beauvoir reads Sade, and why it is a question whether or not he must be burned, we are asking what, if any, encounter there might be between a philosophy of feminism that grounds itself in freedom, as Beauvoir's clearly does, and a philosophy – and practice – of sexual libertinism that for the most part assumes the pleasurable aspects of the domination of women within heterosexual practice?

There are many tricky questions here, and it will serve us well to consider some of them. When Beauvoir asks whether we should burn Sade, she is referring to Sade the author. Should we burn his books? This is an incendiary title in more ways than one. To ask the question is to recall the burning of heretics and saints, including Joan of Arc. It is also to recall the burning of books, mainly Jewish and heretical, that took place during the Inquisition in Spain in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in Spain.

Ambiguity is arguably the most important idea in Beauvoir's philosophy. This chapter argues that Beauvoir's idea of ambiguity has much more in common with Merleau-Ponty's idea of ambiguity than with Sartre's. Beauvoir's philosophy of ambiguity and Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of ambiguity complement each other.

Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty were friends and knew each other’s work. In a 1945 commentary on Beauvoir’s L’Invitée (She Came to Stay), Merleau-Ponty says this novel portrays a genuine morality that does not seek to dispel our fundamental ambiguity. In a later prospectus of his own work, Merleau-Ponty declares that establishing a “good ambiguity” “would . . . give us the principle of an ethics,” but he never developed that ethics. Shortly after his review of L’Invitée, Beauvoir wrote a review of Merleau-Ponty’s Phénoménologie de la Perception (Phenomenology of Perception) in Les Temps modernes, a journal that both had helped to found and on whose editorial board both served. There Beauvoir praises phenomenology for “abolishing the subject-object opposition” that education erects in wrenching the living, meaningful world away from children and substituting a universe of frozen, independent objects. Ethics teaches children to renounce their subjectivity in favor of universal laws, yet they retain a sense of personal uniqueness and intimacy with the world in the spontaneous movement of their life. Beauvoir says phenomenology addresses and abolishes this split.

A life is such a strange object, at one moment translucent, at another utterly opaque, an object I make with my own hands, an object imposed on me, an object for which the world provides the raw material and then steals it from me again, pulverized by events, scattered, broken, scored yet retaining its unity; how heavy it is and how inconsistent: this contradiction breeds many misunderstandings.

THE MAKING OF A LIFE-STORY

In the Interlude that comes between parts I and II of Force of Circumstance, Simone de Beauvoir's third autobiographical volume, she reflects on what a peculiar object a life is. The peculiarity accrues when it is viewed not so much as a thing lived, but rather as an object of ongoing written representation – an object amenable to that double publicity entailed by the telling of one's own life-story in a published memoir. For the author, some of this peculiarity must inevitably be reflected back onto the life lived, because as the project of writing a memoir gets under way and life infuses the page, so will the prospect of the written record begin to infuse the experience of living. Certain experiences will take on the aspect of a theme, certain events the significance of an aberration, a confirmation of a pattern, a turning point, a nemesis, and so on, even while they are being spontaneously lived. We know that even as a little girl, if out of sheer romanticism, Beauvoir thought of her life as a “lovely story” in the making.

The best way into the time-twisting, identity-scrambling otherworld of Blake's Milton: A Poem (c. 1804-18) is to set aside guidebooks, including this one, take a deep breath, and follow the hero as he breaks through the surface of the title page - alone, without a “companion” - parting the syllables of his own name (and the poem's title) with one hand, sweeping back publishing details with the other, to brave the swirling abyss of the unknown (Fig. 31). The reader-resistant text billowing around Milton's nude figure scans vertically, bottom to top on the left, top to bottom on the right - a hint of the head-spinning reorientations to come. At the foot of the page, in much smaller lettering, a single upright line appears reassuringly straightforward: “To Justify the Ways of God to Men” (Paradise Lost 1:26). But is Blake reaffirming - or co-opting - Milton's magisterial summation of epic purpose? Or is Milton, in flexing his left foot to take a second step into Blake's poem, leaving the secure foundation of his theodicy behind him? Should both poets - and their audiences - be interrogating, not justifying, God's ways? As the poem proceeds, readers find themselves clueless in medias res, thrown back on their own resources, as if subjected to a wilderness-survival test. But the neural overload helps cleanse the doors of perception, and the solo ordeal can be character-building. This chapter is meant to be put aside now and taken up again on the far side of “Finis” (Milton 43 [50]:2, E 144), after pulse and respiration have returned to normal.

From Unnam’d forms to the forms of books

Is “Blake's language” and “poetic form” an un-Blakean conjunction? In the wake of eighteenth-century political revolutions, Blake broadcast a revolutionary poetics, seemingly anti-formalist in its determination:

As these inspired lines from Milton (pl. 41 [48], E 142) demonstrate, the sneer at poetic finishing includes not just rhymes but even blank-verse harmonies, the measure Milton advertised in his note on “The Verse” to Paradise Lost as “ancient liberty” recovered from the “modern bondage” of having to rhyme heroic verse. But if Milton tropes blank verse as political liberation, Blake saw him still constrained by the “uniform systems of execution owned by the culture, or by poetic tradition.”

For a number of years in the long middle of the twentieth century the term Romanticism conjured up for students of English literature two dates and half a dozen names. The dates became so self-evident that no one remarked on their oddness. Neither 1789 nor 1832, the standard limits of the period, were chosen for literary-historical reasons. The first commemorates the French Revolution, the second the Great Reform Bill that extended the vote to many affluent males who had not had it before. George Crabbe, Jeremy Bentham, and Sir Walter Scott all died in 1832, but their passing has not been used as the measure of the end of an era. 1789 happened to be the year of William Blake's Songs of Innocence, but its appearance has not usually been regarded as foundational for Romanticism: that honor has much more commonly been bestowed upon Wordsworth and Coleridge's jointly authored first edition of Lyrical Ballads (1798). This has had the effect of distancing the literary from the political revolution, leading to lively arguments about what the politics of Lyrical Ballads (and Romanticism generally) might be given its appearance during the British counter-revolution, after the widespread loss of faith in French republicanism and following the government's repressive measures against British radicals. Blake has nonetheless mostly counted as one of the names that the mention of Romanticism has been supposed to invoke, along with Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, and Byron. All poets, all men. Jane Austen was usually left out of any efforts at categorizing Romanticism, along with all the other novelists of the period: she has tended to appear in literary history as an isolated genius in the story of the nineteenth-century novel. The drama was even further distanced: the common consensus was that there was not much of it and that what was there was not very interesting.

In the originality, comprehensiveness, and sheer energy of his analysis of the religious dimension of human experience, William Blake's artistic achievement is matched in Western literature only by that of Dante and Milton. Religion was, arguably, the primary theme and motive of all his art, poetic and pictorial. But to compare Blake's art with the work of other poets and painters soon makes clear that his own artistic program and vision differed strikingly from what is commonly understood to be the purpose of religious art. His poetry, and the illuminations that enrich it, only rarely are expressions of devotion. Although one catches glimpses of personal piety in his letters, and senses it in his more conventional pictorial art, Blake's illuminated verse is primarily social in its concerns, focusing on the historic and psychic origins of religious faith and on religion's influence on human behavior. Blake was convinced that religion profoundly affects every aspect of human life - political, economic, psychological, and cultural - and that its influence has generally not been a positive one. He detected flawed religious thinking at the root of most of the social disorders afflicting England in his time, and found that even the highest virtues associated with religion - “Mercy Pity Peace and Love” (E 12) - were routinely misconceived or manipulated for destructive ends.

I recently heard one poet praise another for achieving “balance between restraint and revelation.” Few would think to offer that praise to Blake. James Joyce's characterization would be more applicable: “Armed with this two-edged sword, the art of Michelangelo and the revelations of Swedenborg, Blake killed the dragon of experience and natural wisdom, and, by minimizing space and time and denying the existence of memory and the senses, he tried to paint his works on the void of the divine bosom.” Though wrong in some details, Joyce's characterization conveys well the extravagance, even the impossibility, of Blake's ambitions, which has played a major part in the attraction-repulsion response that has always dogged him. His poetry risks every kind of excess to achieve revelation. It brushes aside elements that might restrain it, including formal poetic conventions that help to shape and contain the drive to revelation. Enveloping the stressful, straining poems are the handsome, odd, bizarre, grotesque, weird, lovely images, which supply no balancing force.

The life of William Blake became a legend even before he died, and in discussing his life the two must be disentangled as far as possible. This presents several problems. First of all, the essential materials for his biography - letters, journals, memoirs, official records, comments of friends and others - are meager, while the uncertain dates of many of his works complicate the task of a chronology. Only ninety-two of his letters survive, the first a short note from 1791, when he was thirty-four, and most of the others are concentrated in a single decade, 1799-1808, like the few remaining letters written to him. For the most part his letters are concerned either with prosaic business matters or with what Keats called “the life of allegory,” only remotely connected to outward events and relationships. There was little external incident in Blake's life, and he lived in obscurity for most of it; except by a small group of admirers his name was largely forgotten within a decade of his death in 1827, as the subtitle of the first full-length biography, Alexander Gilchrist's 1863 Life of William Blake, “Pictor Ignotus,” suggests. So sparse a record as this is a temptation to biographers to fill out with more or less fictional detail.

On 12 April 1827, shortly before he died, Blake wrote to George Cumberland thanking him for trying to sell copies of Blake's illuminated books and his recently published engraved illustrations to the Book of Job. Blake had first executed the Job illustrations as watercolor drawings for Thomas Butts around 1805, followed by a duplicate set for John Linnell, who commissioned him to engrave the series in 1823.

Three years later, Blake had twenty-two line engravings that looked very different from the tonal prints then popular. Indeed, they even looked different from engravings, his own included, for they were not executed in the standard “mixed method” technique, in which designs were first etched and then finished as engravings. In this technique, which Blake mastered as an apprentice, the design’s outline was traced with a needle through an acidresistant “ground” covering the copper plate and then etched with acid. The engraver went over these slightly incised lines with burins (metal tools with square or lozenge-shaped tips used to cut lines into the plate) and engraved the plate’s entire surface, uniting all parts in a web of crosshatched lines.