Boredom in marriage reduces a brilliant woman to a life of small things

Evidence

On rare occasions—a visit, for example—the flame of life awakened. But “the years passed aridly. Ageing side by side lived M. and Mme de Charrière, a whole universe apart; and often a visitor would turn from the house with relief, and hearing the gate clang behind him, would feel that he was leaving a shut tomb … The clock ticked; M. de Charrière sat below, alone, poring over his mathematics. Rhythmically, from the barn outside, came the sound of the threshers. It throbbed, and it ceased. Life went on, though it was threshed out … A life of small things, desperately compelled to fill every crevice of the day: to this Zélide, who hated littleness, had come.” — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1356

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The image of married life as a ‘shut tomb’ and ‘littleness’ forced to fill every crevice of the day is a dense, devastating encapsulation of immanence - worth sitting with.
• STORYSTEM: The trajectory of Zélide - a brilliant woman who marries for freedom and ends up choosing her own prison, playing god to peasants and teaching Locke to a favorite student - is itself a novel’s worth of character arc.
• QUESTION: The phrase ‘life of small things, desperately compelled to fill every crevice of the day’ is a piercing description of domestic tedium - does Beauvoir elsewhere offer any escape from this except refusing marriage itself?
• XREF: connects to: A married woman without transcendent work loses the capacity to aspire at all. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1268; Newly married women suffer depression, boredom, and disgust at marital intimacy; Sharing trivial daily intimacies can crowd the weighty substance out of a marriage — Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 3806 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Sharing trivial daily intimacies can crowd the weighty substance out of a marriage #expands (0.85) — Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 3806
• Marriages can misplace emphasis on trivial shared intimacy and lose substance #expands (0.80)
• Total dependence reduces a wife’s freedom to abstract interiority that cannot save her #expands (0.75) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1355
• Traditional marriage confines woman to immanence and denies her transcendence #complicates (0.75) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1196
• Marital boredom can trigger fantasies of prostitution in young brides #expands (0.70) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1274