Identity Crises: Positions of Self in Simone de Beauvoir’s Memoirs

Abstract

Identity Crises: Positions of Self in Simone de Beauvoir's Memoirs Kim Carter-Cram An explosion of interest has occurred recently in the field of literary analysis which is centered on the study of autobiography. Autobiography is a literary genre which unites not-quite-truths with not-quite-fictions in a narrative which explores an event or events in the life of its author through the eyes of an individual of the same name. Well-known autobiographical theorist Philippe Lejeune, in his several volumes of criticism, attempts to define autobiography as a genre and concludes that it is: a retrospective prose narrative written by a real person concerning his own existence, where the focus is his individual life, in particular the story of his personality (4). He further emphasizes that autobiog­ raphy is exceptional in nature precisely because of its retrospective posture and because the author, the narrator, and the protagonist must be identical (5). This concept is based largely on Gerard Genette's theory of autodiogetiquenarrative voices, and establishes autobiography outside the classification of fiction. Aside from the fact that Lejeune's definition of autobiography presupposes within its rhetoric (by using the pronoun he as if it were a genderless universal) that the author of autobiography is and will be a male author, a second problematic is that Lejeune, in defining autobiography as in particular [,] the story of his [that is, of a real person's] personality makes the assumption that an individual's personality and identity are one and the same thing. In order for an author to write the story of her or his personality in the way Lejeune suggests, this identity, or person­ ality has to already exist as an entity, towards which (or, in the case of autobiography as retrospective narrative, back at which) the author can look and analyze its existence in the text. Lejeune's implicit definition of identity implies a telos, or an end, which is ostensibly reached at some point in the life of the individual in question, thereby creating a fixed and consistent personality which is seen as she or he acts and reacts to experiences throughout life. Therefore, for Lejeune, an essential characteristic of one's identity (or personality) is that it is a work in progress which will be