The contemporary relevance of the existential anti-heroine - an ode to De Beauvoir
With the annual splashing of slogans across social media platforms, we see the passing of International Women’s Day, a time for Netflix interns to browse their series catalogue for sentiments on girlhood, for our feeds to be saturated in performative empowerment - anything below surface level will simply not do. The gentrification of feminism has simultaneously tarnished and ridiculed something that’s meaning and purpose belongs in a realm so entirely separate from mass marketed quips and trending TikTok sounds.
The Woman Destroyed is a fictional analysis of womanhood and its complexities, first published in 1967; a piece of enlightening existentialist literature that centres three womens’ voices through three short stories, all with a beating emotional resonance and all portraying the complexity of the woman’s mind with a stylistic diversity. De Beauvoir’s protagonists grapple, most notably, with the passing of time and the nature of the irreversible; the loss of youth as currency, the acquisition of wisdom and the consequences that entails. In De Beauvoir’s own words, ‘The Woman Destroyed is the shocked victim of a life that she herself chose: a conjugal dependence that leaves her stripped of everything and of her own self when love is denied to her. It would be useless to find morals or propose lessons in these stories, no, my intention has been very different. We do not live more than one single life, but, for sympathy, it is sometimes possible to leave our own skin. I am supportive of women who have taken over their lives and have struggled to achieve their goals; but that does not stop me, on the contrary, of being interested in the ones that, for one reason or another, have failed; and, in general, in that part of failure that can be found in every existence.’
The heroines portrayed are, well, not really heroines at all, with De Beauvoir capturing the unravelling of the psyche in a way only a master of existentialism could; they are bitter, jealous, resentful, pathetic, depressed, hopeful - their flaws are plentiful and they are, at times, unlikeable as they battle these inner and outer conflicts, wading through misery and dilemma and grappling with the temporal endurance. They were at the time of publication, and continue to be in the contemporary literary world, refreshing alternatives to the prototype that springs to mind when discussing heroines in media. It presents a perfect parallel with the modern day obsession with ‘the girlboss’.
Why then, do we read these stories, resonate with these characters, relate them so closely to modern feminism? We are, after all, quick to brand them as ‘pathetic’ and ‘unlikeable’ - what quality is it that allows them to access something central to the female experience? The answer is simple and mundane: their suffering.