Simone de Beauvoir, stream of consciousness and philosophical fiction: Becoming a self in the first draft of She Came to Stay

Abstract

AbstractThis article locates Simone de Beauvoir in the stream of consciousness, metaphysical novel, and Bildungsroman writing traditions. Its focus is the two opening chapters from the 1938 draft of Beauvoir's first novel, She Came to Stay—first published in French in 1943 as L’Invitée—and deleted at the insistence of her publishers. Although Beauvoir's own philosophical fictions are, in general, linked to Hegel's phenomenology and to Sartre's existentialism, in the discarded text, it is Schopenhauer and Nietzsche who are key to Beauvoir's account of the developing female self. Beauvoir's narrative and philosophical strategies are compared to those adopted by May Sinclair in Mary Olivier (1919). The influence of other stream of consciousness novelists is also registered. Beauvoir's recently published teenage diaries, which record a “passion” for Schopenhauer, are discussed, together with his mysticism and his misogyny. The article ends by considering Beauvoir's reasons for abandoning stream of consciousness narrative techniques.