The Many Faces of Beauvoir: Paratranslated Materiality in Le Deuxième Sexe

Abstract

Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxieme Sexe (1949) is recognised as a cornerstone of modern feminist thought, highlighting her position as one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century and the text’s translation into more than forty languages attests to the pertinence of Beauvoirian thought in its ability to transcend both time and space and resonate with women’s lived realities in different socio-cultural moments. Thus far scholarship has focussed on how Beauvoir’s philosophical discourse has been translated, yet little attention has been paid to the translation of the tome’s paratexts, namely, the interpretative frames, in the Genettian sense, that fashion the reader’s encounter with author and text. This study examines the genealogical trajectory of the paratranslated elements of Beauvoir’s original French text and its English translations. Specifically, my analysis focuses on both textual and iconic paratexts to investigate the role they play in the transgenerational reception of Beauvoir’s text. In terms of textual paratexts, non-authorial peritextual items such as introductions, biographical notes, and blurbs are studied comparatively and diachronically across all existing French and English editions. Secondly, iconic paratexts such as front and back cover images, as well as author photographs are studied in order to understand the ways in which both Beauvoir and her text have been reconfigured differently over time to serve different socio-cultural agendas. Throughout the study, I explore the role that gender plays in relation to paratexts, both in terms of how Beauvoir’s own authorial, gendered subjectivity is transmediated and transmogrified via paratextual devices and, how gender as a social construction, inflects the elaboration of paratexts.