Laforgue, Beauvoir, and the Second Sex

Abstract

Simone de Beauvoir's allusions to Jules Laforgue in her founding text of post-war French feminism, Le Deuxième Sexe (1949), are the starting point in this article for reexamining the poet's writing on women and relations between the sexes. Laforgue's diagnosis of the female condition is coloured by the misogyny at work in Schopenhauer and Hartmann's visions of sexual relations. But he is also at pains to explain how women's circumscribed fate, as lovers and mothers, has been sealed. This article demonstrates the ways in which — across his notes, poetic verse, and prose — Laforgue's attention to woman's condition is already rooted in many of the concerns, and terms, central to Beauvoir's existentialist account. It suggests that Laforgue's reflections on sexual politics are underwritten by more radical ideals than it might appear, not least his call for fraternal relations between the sexes — symbolised by a handshake — which was to capture Beauvoir's imagination.