Healing her mother wound freed Beauvoir for relationships beyond the necessary-contingent dichotomy.
Evidence
From the epilogue of Une Mort très Douce, we realize the great importance for Beauvoir of this renewed self-abandon to her mother. For she mentions there that her mother had always played a major role in her dreams, blending with Sartre, and the three of them being happy together, until her mother attempted renewed control and the dream turned into a nightmare. Th e renewed selfabandon thus enabled Beauvoir to heal the wound caused by her mother’s excessive control in her childhood and to have more open, truthful, uncontrolled relationships, which were outside the necessary/ contingent category, such as the one she developed shortly aft er her mother’s death with Sylvie Le Bon, a young philosophy student. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 146
Categorization
- XREF: Directly engages the necessary/contingent love distinction Beauvoir and Sartre used for each other — her relationship with Sylvie Le Bon is framed as transcending that category. — connects to: Beauvoir’s interdependence thesis is compatible with her irrepressible freedom — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 182; Recovery from romantic catastrophe requires an autonomous existence beyond the lover. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1882
- QUESTION: What is the exact biographical chronology — was the Sylvie Le Bon relationship indeed formed in the immediate aftermath of Françoise de Beauvoir’s 1963 death, and does this affect how we date the shift in Beauvoir’s later work?
Broader Connections
- Beauvoir’s interdependence thesis is compatible with her irrepressible freedom
#corroborates(0.82) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 182 - Recovery from romantic catastrophe requires an autonomous existence beyond the lover.
#exemplifies(0.75) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1882