SOURCE: Fallaize, Elizabeth. “Resisting Romance: Simone de Beauvoir, ‘The Woman Destroyed’ and the Romance Script.” In Contemporary French Fiction by Women: Feminist Perspectives, edited by Margaret Atack and Phil Powrie, pp. 15-25. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1990.

In the following essay, Fallaize examines de Beauvoir's ideology of romance in the context of The Woman Destroyed.

The feminist credentials of Simone de Beauvoir's fictional texts are sometimes assumed to be guaranteed by the fact that their author also produced The Second Sex, and indeed Beauvoir's fiction is most usually read against her essays (or Sartre's). However, more recently, there has been a tendency to judge the fiction—and to find it wanting in some respects—against the conventions of the romance plot.¹ It is indeed difficult to deny that elements of the romance plot are easily discernible in Beauvoir's early fiction: heterosexual couple formation plays a large part in...