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INTERVIEWER
None of your female characters are immune from love. You like the romantic element.
DE BEAUVOIR
Love is a great privilege. Real love, which is very rare, enriches the lives of the men and women who experience it.
INTERVIEWER
In your novels, it seems to be the women—I'm thinking of Francoise in She Came to Stay and Anne in The Mandarins—who experience it most.
DE BEAUVOIR
The reason is that, despite everything, women give more of themselves in love because most of them don't have much else to absorb them. Perhaps they're also more capable of deep sympathy, which is the basis of love. Perhaps it's also because I can project myself more easily into women than into men. My female characters are much richer than my male characters.
INTERVIEWER
You've never created an independent and really free female character who illustrates in one way or other the thesis of The Second Sex. Why?
DE BEAUVOIR
I've shown women as they are, as divided human beings, and not as they ought to be.
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| Authors Mentioned |
| Jean Genet, Ernest Hemingway, Rosamond Lehmann, J. M. Barrie, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Lewis Carroll, Colette, George Eliot, Immanuel Kant, Violette Leduc, Stéphane Mallarmé, François Mauriac, Raymond Radiguet, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jean-Paul Sartre, Stendhal, Leo Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf |
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