Narcissism, Abjection and the Reader(e) of Simone de Beauvoir's Les Belles Images

Discussions of Simone de Beauvoir's last novel, Les Belles Images (1966), tend to be in the mode of apology. The characters are shallow—runs the typical claim—the plot (essentially, Laurence's gradual awakening to her own "belle image" identity of feminine clichés as fulfilled wife, devoted mother, successful professional) flimsy and predictable. Yet, in studying a specular dynamic of narcissism and abjection within the novel, we become aware of the discomforting ways in which our own scorn for Laurence and her world is anticipated by the text. As we attend upon the dismantling of Laurence's "belles images," we are made to witness the undoing of our own narcissism. Along the way, we acquire new understanding of an important aspect of this specular relationship: the novel's slippery use of the pronouns "I" and "she" to refer to Laurence, in an unstable grammar that has confounded critics. These pronouns and their imbrication are only too pertinent, I argue, for the reader's relationship to Laurence, and for the ways in which the reader's "I" sets itself loftily apart from Laurence's "she." Yet, in dismantling the reader's assumptions along with those of Laurence, the text offers each a new way forward, beyond the crippling confines of narcissism and abjection. This article is available in Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol32/iss1/3 Narcissism, Abjection and the Reader(e) of Simone de Beauvoir’s Les Belles Images Margaret E. Gray Indiana University–Bloomington Discussions of Beauvoir’s last novel, Les Belles Images, tend to be in the mode of apology. It is not a great novel, runs the general tone; it may be Beauvoir’s most literary, but it isn’t her best. The characters are shallow, the plot (essentially, Laurence’s gradual awakening to her own “belle image” identity of feminine clichés as fulfilled wife, devoted mother, successful professional) flimsy and predictable. It is hard to love Les Belles Images. It seems that Beauvoir’s own dislike for the technocratic bourgeoisie she depicts has been inherited by her readers, visible in the dismissiveness with which they assume that this portrait of frenzied postwar technocratic and consumer “arrivisme” has nothing to do with them. Yet it must be observed that the image-saturated technoculture castigated in Les Belles Images has only become more extreme in the contemporary West, making the world of Les Belles Images dangerously pertinent. Moreover, I would venture to ask—as many of Beauvoir’s middleclass readers find themselves in circumstances analogous to those of her heroine, Laurence, negotiating webs of personal and professional responsibilities—can we be sure that our own approaches to our lives are any more self-aware, any less anesthetized, than Laurence’s? We would certainly, of course, promptly assert that they are. We ourselves are much more self-reflective about our own conditioning than Laurence is, much more aware of the coercion of familial, social, economic and historic factors that produce our subjectivities. Yet the nagging possibility remains that Laurence functions on some level as an allegory of social conditioning that exceeds one’s aware1 Gray: Narcissism, Abjection and the Reader(e) of Simone de Beauvoir's L Published by New Prairie Press 38 ST&TCL, Volume 32, No. 1 (Winter, 2008) ness of it. As such, Laurence bears the ominous implication that, whatever our level of awareness, it is inadequate to the conditioning from multiple sources that exceeds us in ways we cannot fully grasp. As a fictional character, Laurence is easily dismissed by our readerly narcissism; passive and pitiable, she has nothing to do with our superior selves. As an allegory of social conditioning, however, she becomes dangerously pertinent, making it harder to maintain the barrier between the world of Les Belles Images and our own. An exploration of this syndrome of readerly narcissism—a narcissism consolidated by our “abjectification,” or dismissal, of Laurence—offers a new solution to the stylistic problem that has haunted discussion of this novel: the narration’s slippery and oscillating use of both “I” and “she” to refer to Laurence. Ultimately, a careful reading of narcissism, abjection and the way they inflect the novel’s two principal pronouns, “I” and “she,” offers new possibilities for both Laurence and her readers. Indeed, reread backwards via Judith Butler’s work on the construction of gender, Laurence is no longer a passive victim of her very specific milieu, but instead, an everywoman typifying the plight of middle-class women in postindustrialized cultures. From a Butlerian perspective, Laurence is uncomfortably emblematic of ourselves: condemned to carry out public and personal roles in performances that are socially and politically coerced. Whereas Les Belles Images tends to be read in terms of a sixties, postwar ideology of images that manipulates its characters, a Butlerian reading points to the novel’s ongoing relevance: indeed, a discomforting relevance that diminishes the distance between ourselves and Laurence. In the novel’s slippery and interchangeable “I” and “she” grammar, the boundaries between these pronouns are undone, just as our own narcissistic confidence in the difference between ourselves and Laurence, between our own lofty “I” and her abjectified “she,” evaporates. And it is only appropriate, after all, that Butler be enlisted in revising our reading of Les Belles Images, given Butler’s own debt to Beauvoir. Quoting Beauvoir’s well-known position in Le Deuxième Sexe—that one is not born a woman, rather, one becomes a woman through social conditioning—Butler goes on to make her landmark argument for gender as “a stylized repetition of acts” (GT 179). The illusion of a gendered essence, suggests Butler, becomes perceptible 2 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Vol. 32, Iss. 1 [2008], Art. 3 http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol32/iss1/3 DOI: 10.4148/2334-4415.1666