Beauvoir’s fiction explored emotions through embodied physical sensation

Evidence

Sartre’s work was an epic exploraton of freedom, in which the love affair takes its place among other threads. Beauvoir’s interest was in the power lines of desire, observation, jealousy and control that connect people. She concentrated more on her central characters and excelled at exploring how emotions and experiences find expression through the body, perhaps in illness or in strange physical sensations, as when her protagonist’s head feels unusually heavy as she tries to reason herself into feeling something she doesn’t feel. Beauvoir won praise for these sections from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who specialised in the phenomenology of embodiment and perception. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 357

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gives a concrete example of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment/ perception as practiced in Beauvoir’s fiction.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how embodiment (bad faith, lived experience) manifests in literature — links Beauvoir’s phenomenology-without-theory to Merleau-Ponty’s framework. — connects to: Beauvoir pushes embodied consciousness further than Merleau-Ponty into gendered phenomenology — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 108

Broader Connections

• Beauvoir pushes embodied consciousness further than Merleau-Ponty into gendered phenomenology #expands (0.72) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 108