Before we said 'we' (and after): Bad sex and personal politics in doris lessing and simone de beauvoir

Critical Quarterly

Volumn 38, Issue 3, 1996, Pages 14-29

  Altman, Meryl ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 18444397525     PISSN: 00111562     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8705.1996.tb02244.x     Document Type: Article

References (23)

1. Simone de Beauvoir, Les Mandarins (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1954), vol. 2, 343.
2. 'You can't draw a straight line in a curved space,' Dubreuilh said. 'You can't lead a proper life in a society which isn't proper' (The Mandarins, translated by Leonard Friedman, Flamingo, London, 1993, 625). Unless noted, all further references will be to these editions.
3. Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (New York: Bantam, 1962), 458. All further references will be to this edition.
4. Michèle Le Doeuff, Hipparchia's Choice: An Essay Concerning Women, Philosophy, etc (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991).
5. Sally Munt, Introduction, New Lesbian Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. xv.
6. Jenny Taylor (ed.), Notebooks/memoirs/archives: reading and rereading Doris Lessing (Routledge, 1982).
7. In Taylor, 57, 71.
8. Conditions, April 1977, part 1, p. 60.
9. Reprinted in Claire Sprague and Virginia Tiger (eds), Critical Essays on Doris Lessing (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986), 181-2.
10. Adrienne Rich, 'Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence', Signs (Summer 1980), 631-57.
11. Carolyn Heilbrun, Reinventing Womanhood (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 72-3. Heilbrun says 'Anna' instead of 'Anne' throughout - coincidence?
12. The Prime of Life, translated by Peter Green (Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1962), 69.
13. The Prime of Life, 269.
14. See Toril Moi's excellent discussion of this topic in Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).
15. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice (London: Routledge, 1990), 10.
16. The Mandarins, 33. Having worked from the original French, I was rather surprised to discover quite late in the game that many of the passages most central to my argument were silently omitted from the recent and rather classy-looking British Flamingo edition. I have supplied them from an American edition with a rather lurid cover, which is otherwise the same Leonard Friedman translation.
17. So, beginning with 'He could find no pretext', the above comes from The Mandarins (New York: Popular Library Eagle Books, 1956), 22. I'll leave it to my British readers to explain this anomaly.
18. American edition, 23. Translation further altered by me.
19. American edition, 71, slightly altered.
20. American edition, 72, slightly altered.
21. My translation.
22. American edition, 73.
23. Le Doeuff, 3, 128.