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A Very Easy Death
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BetaPages 8-51Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Pages 8-51 Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide and the source material refer to terminal illness and death, bereavement, addiction, and suicide.
In Rome on October 24th, 1963, Simone de Beauvoir learns that her 77-year-old mother, Françoise de Beauvoir, has fallen and broken her femur. Alone in her apartment in Paris, Françoise crawled for hours to reach the phone to call for help. Simone returns to Paris where her mother has been transferred from the public hospital, where she spent a night, to a private geriatric clinic with a top orthopedist.
Françoise’s appearance disturbs Simone: Confused, inarticulate, and slack-faced, Françoise appears to have suffered a minor stroke despite the doctor’s assurance otherwise. Unbeknownst to Simone, Françoise had been in poor health for weeks, suffering from bouts of sharp stomach pain. Françoise’s regular doctor has diagnosed these pains as constipation: While the broken femur is not in itself life threatening, the bed rest required to mend it has potentially fatal complications for Françoise’s compromised gastrointestinal health. The clinic promises to avert these complications and the doctor, Professor B., assures Simone that her mother will walk normally again.
After a few days, Françoise emerges from her stupor and returns to her normal appearance. She’s in high spirits. She has an inflated sense of the clinic’s excellence and relishes that, thanks to prescribed tranquilizers, she’s sleeping well for the first time in years. To Simone’s relief and admiration Françoise finally accepts that she is old, after years of denial. She resolves to start a new chapter of her life.
Françoise started a new life chapter once before at 54, following the death of her husband, Georges. Left a widow with no money, she trained to become a librarian for the Red Cross, finding a sense of independence she’d lacked as a housewife. She moved into a new apartment on the rue Blomet that she decorated in the modern style, something she’d long dreamed of. She also found newfound freedom in pursuits forbidden by her surly, selfish husband: travel, foreign language, bicycle riding, volunteering, and friendships.
Over the following 20 years, Françoise’s worsening arthritis confined her more and more to the gloomy second floor of her apartment. Now, after her fall, Françoise vows never to return there. Simone promises to find her a nice retirement home.
Simone has always had conflicted and hostile feelings toward her mother but sees her differently now that Françoise is in the clinic. Françoise’s presence no longer evokes the same resentful emotions and her body no longer has its former significance of power and control. Simone is shocked to see her mother, who can no longer take care of herself, unashamedly let the nurses wash her and help her use a bedpan. Despite this change, the bourgeois Françoise still makes her typical derogatory remarks about the working-class nurses. This dismays Simone, who admires them for their compassionate care of her mother. On the other hand, Simone dislikes the bourgeois doctors—whom Françoise esteems—because of their self-importance and condescension to Françoise.
As Françoise’s femur slowly heals, her stomach pain returns. The doctors order abdominal X-rays. They botch the first set and have to do another. The preparation is painful and taxing: Françoise has to receive a barium enema and cannot drink anything for 24 hours. Simone is shocked by how much the preparation ages and emaciates her mother. After equivocating about the results, the doctors tell Simone that Françoise has terminal intestinal cancer. Afraid of the psychological toll the diagnosis might have on Françoise, the doctors advise that they should withhold the diagnosis from her and Simone and her sister Hélène consent to this.
A few days later, it appears Françoise is on her deathbed. Beauvoir and Hélène go to the clinic. A resuscitation expert, Dr. N., has intubated Françoise to pump pus out of her stomach. Simone and Hélène ask Dr. N. why he’s chosen to cause such discomfort when their mother is close to death. He is dismissive and hostile, bragging that he has revived Françoise with the procedure. Simone wonders what the purpose of his intervention is.
Early the following morning, Françoise calls Simone: the doctors want to operate on her. The doctors have told Françoise this is for peritonitis, a curable condition, not cancer. Although recalling the nurse’s plea the previous night to forbid the doctors from operating, Simone agrees with her mother that they should operate. The procedure ruptures Françoise’s peritoneum and reveals a massive malignant tumor. Nevertheless, with cutting-edge techniques the doctors are able to keep Françoise’s body functioning, and she survives the surgery.
At home that night, Simone weeps for her mother. She talks to her partner, Jean-Paul Sartre, about the swirling emotions that her mother’s dying face —particularly her mouth—evokes: “greediness refused, an almost servile humility, hope, distress, loneliness—the loneliness of her death and of her life—that did not want to admit its existence” (36). Sartre tells Simone that in the past days her mouth has started to look like her mother’s.
Beauvoir reflects on the strictures and rancor that defined her mother’s life. As a child Françoise wanted for love: Her father only loved her younger sister, Lili, and her mother loved only her husband. Françoise carries her childhood resentment into her relationship with her own daughters, favoring Simone over her younger sister Hélène.
Françoise attended a convent school where the mother superior gave her the affection her parents denied her. While Françoise found some degree of solace in this Catholic institution, it also imposed the rigid morality that circumscribed the rest of her life.
At 20, Françoise suffered a disappointment that she carried for the rest of her life: The cousin she was in love with chose to marry another cousin over her. Soon after, Françoise married Beauvoir’s father, Georges Bertrand de Beauvoir. Georges gratified Françoise for 10 years: Beauvoir recalls at the age of seven seeing her mother emerge from her bedroom beatific from sex—a stark contrast to her usual propriety.
Nevertheless, Georges’s wants always trumped Françoise’s. She stopped seeing her friends because Georges disliked their husbands and, in the Parisian circles Georges preferred, the provincial Françoise was condescended to. She was humiliated by having to socialize with Georges’s mistresses. Then, Françoise’s father, a wealthy banker, went bankrupt and could no longer pay the promised dowry. Georges didn’t blame Françoise, but she nonetheless felt indebted to him for the rest of her life.
After World War I, Georges lost his fortune and could no longer afford servants. Françoise took over responsibility for the house. Housework isolated her and stifled her desires. Simultaneously, Françoise struggled to reconcile herself to Georges’s waning affection and increasingly overt infidelities. She grew noticeably bitter but couldn’t completely resign herself to misery: “Cut off from the pleasures of the body, deprived of the satisfactions of vanity, tied down to wearisome tasks that bored and humiliated her, this proud and obstinate woman did not possess the gift of resignation” (44).
With no life of her own, Françoise lived through her daughters. She gave them no privacy, allowed them no hobbies, and inserted herself into every part of their lives, often to the point of tyranny. Jealous of their relationship, Françoise tried to drive Simone and Hélène apart. Even as adults, Simone and Hélène have largely hidden their sisterly relationship from her.
Beauvoir notes that occasionally Françoise treated her daughters selflessly. When Georges blamed the 17-year-old Hélène for a rift between him and his best friend and refused to talk to her for months, Françoise vociferously defended her daughter. Later, when Georges refused to support Hélène in her pursuit of painting, Françoise did everything she could to help her. Beauvoir includes only one example of her mother’s selflessness toward herself: After Georges died, Françoise encouraged Simone to still go on a trip she had planned.
Françoise has been unable to admit her misery to anyone, most of all herself. After Georges’s death, Françoise’s sister Germaine remarked that he was a bad husband, Françoise retorted that he made her very happy (44). Beauvoir reflects that her mother lived a life at odds with herself, estranged from her true nature: “A full-blooded, spirited woman lived on inside her, but a stranger to herself, deformed and mutilated” (51).
Pages 8-51 Analysis
In this opening section, Beauvoir’s account of Françoise’s life provides background to their fraught mother-daughter relationship. The structure of the memoir first introduces the reader to the catalyzing circumstance in the present of her mother’s hospitalization, interspersed with Beauvoir’s own feelings and, increasingly, an exploration of the lives of both women and their relationship. This intertwining of past and present, memoir and philosophical theory, enables the gradual development of the theme which characterizes the first part, The Pain of an Inauthentic Existence.
Beauvoir’s tone is compassionate but often detached, as if she seeks to be impartial as an author. She isn’t concerned with judging her mother’s faults but with identifying their origins and, in some cases, tracing them through generations of her mother’s family. Beauvoir’s exploration of her mother’s character is an exemplification of her existentialist theory in application. Françoise is a woman who lives at odds with herself. Part of this self-defeating nature originates in her early years and plagues her for the rest of her life, (unbeknownst to her). Desperate for the affection her parents deny her, Françoise takes refuge in the mother superior at her Catholic convent school. This is formative: Françoise learns that she must attach herself to authority figures to complete herself. This dependence begins what elsewhere Beauvoir calls an attitude of inauthenticity: the denial of your freedom to transcend the readymade (established) values of the world in the creation of your own unique life. Françoise doesn’t learn to develop a sense of self through the pursuit of her desires because first her parents, then her husband deny the validity of her desires. Beauvoir reflects that her mother lacked self-confidence and never developed a mind of her own: “She had not been taught to see her own motives plainly nor to use her own judgment” (49). This quote is an example of how Beauvoir avoids judgement from her assessment, instead emphasizing the importance of cause and effect in creating her mother’s difficulties.
Simone de Beauvoir notes that Françoise subordinates herself to authorities, leaving her vulnerable to their whims. This suppression of herself as a unique person (inauthenticity) defines Françoise’s life and exemplifies the pain of an inauthentic existence. Because her mother’s chosen authorities—the mother superior, her husband Georges, and even Beauvoir herself after she gains renown (49)—have little in common, Françoise finds herself bouncing between conflicting opinions. Just as adult Françoise suppresses her singular complexity in her strict adherence to bourgeois values and patriarchal expectations of women, as a convent schoolgirl she had her individuality pressed out of her by a rigid institution: “In her childhood her body, her heart and her mind had been squeezed into an armour of principles and prohibitions” (51). Beauvoir here uses an image which highlights the sense of human confinement and control.
Beauvoir is more critical of her father than her mother and this forms part of her feminist principles and her belief that freedoms confer responsibility. She highlights that another part of Françoise self-defeating nature originates in her subjection and conflicted acquiescence to patriarchal expectations, through compliance to a poor husband. Her marriage is the locus of this oppression and self-suppression. Although Georges makes Françoise happy for a time, this is only incidental to his own pleasure. Georges is the stereotypical patriarch in Beauvoir’s narrative of female oppression, treating Françoise with no regard to her feelings, like his property. Nonetheless, she is devoted to him for a few reasons: He gratifies her sexually for 10 years, he doesn’t blame her for her father’s loss of her dowry, and, above all, he is her husband. She subordinates her desires to his own—in most cases sacrificing them completely—because this is what is expected of her as a woman in early-20th-century France. Françoise only comes to resent this patriarchal oppression (which she doesn’t recognize as such) after Georges loses his money, the mark of his patriarchal authority, and she takes on responsibility for the housework which servants previously did. Françoise still feels a duty to embody the ideal of the self-sacrificing housewife, however, and subordinates her needs to the needs of her family. This self-abnegation is a hallmark of an inauthentic existence, as is the pain of this self-denial. In her discussion of marriage in her feminist treatise The Second Sex, Beauvoir remarks on the Sisyphean torture of housework: day after day the housewife has to perform the same tasks, only to see them undone. Like Sisyphus, the housewife is condemned to a life of isolation and frustration in the eternal performance of futile tasks. Beauvoir uses her mother as an example this suffering: Out of devotion to her family, Françoise endures this fate, becoming resentful in the process. The past suffering of Françoise in this way mirrors the present suffering of her illness, highlighting Beauvoir’s analysis of what a life means, and what her mother’s life in particular has meant.
All of this provides background for Beauvoir’s relationship with Françoise. Françoise inflicts her resentment on her daughters but spares Georges, illustrating how patriarchy can turn women against themselves to protect itself. Deprived of her own life, Françoise lives vicariously through her daughters. More than this, Françoise tries to take over her daughters’ lives. just as her own life has been taken over. Beauvoir shows Françoise inflicting on her daughters the injury she herself suffered because she cannot even think to blame the person (or institution) responsible. This is a sublimation of blame: It’s not socially acceptable to criticize her husband, so Françoise criticizes her daughters, which is acceptable to the social order or power. Powerless in her marriage, Françoise asserts herself where she can: “I certainly have the right” she repeatedly declares whenever she inserts herself into her daughters’ lives (45, 46). As a child and adolescent, Simone resents her mother’s tyranny and rebels against everything she stands for; as an adult and memoirist, she harbors some lingering resentment but seeks to understand why her mother treated her in the way she did.
This presentation of Simone de Beauvoir as two entities—the author who seeks to be impartial and the daughter who feels pain and resentment—is a self-consciously examined by the narrative. In the geriatric clinic, Françoise’s deteriorating body evokes in Beauvoir a conflict between her image of Françoise as her mother and a new perception of her as someone unfamiliar, suffering; this illustrates the idea in Beauvoir’s philosophy that both humans and the world are constantly in flux. Long indifferent to her mother, Beauvoir is suddenly affected by strong, unfamiliar feelings for her. When she breaks down for the first time after her mother’s fall, she writes that “someone other than myself was weeping in me” (36). Because humans aren’t born with an inherent, fixed nature, they are (if living authentically) always in a state of becoming themselves. This process is never complete; people live in the continuous creation of themselves. Françoise’s illness dislodges Beauvoir’s fixed image of her mother—“the set of images in which I had imprisoned her” (23)—and prompts the reevaluation of their relationship which forms the narrative and emotional arc of the memoir.
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