Reviewed by Alex Lanz
The Image of Her: a Novel
by Simone de Bouvoir
Translated from the French by Lauren Elkin
Yale University Press
October 2026 [1966], Paperback, 196 pp
The roads outside the town of Joigny in central France are hilly and winding, and though they run by medieval towers and squat white buildings with earth-toned roof tiles, these sights are easily obscured by the morning fog. Simone de Beauvoir drove these roads on the second day of a solo trip heading west, from Milan to Paris, in October 1965. Around noon, just after the morning fog had cleared, her car drifted into the other lane on a narrow turn and struck an oncoming semi-truck.
It had already been a rough year for Beauvoir: Jean-Paul Sartre announced in January that he was adopting his ex-lover Arlette Elkaïm as his daughter, and Beauvoir had to cope with the brunt of the fallout within this intellectual power couple’s social circle, even though Sartre had never told Beauvoir about his intentions. Moreover, she felt numb to literature: the experimental work by the Oulipians and the New Novelists left her cold, and she had composed no fiction of her own for over a decade. Now, lying in a hospital bed with three broken ribs, she had time to take up the pen again, and the result, though slammed by critics, was ultimately the most commercially successful novel by the author of The Second Sex and The Mandarins. The contemporary reviewers were perplexed by this story of the psychological breakdown of a moneyed professional married woman, without a particle of Marxist or feminist rhetoric in the text. But readers of the new English translation by Lauren Elkin will likely encounter a lean, deftly handled narrative, where every observation and detail adds up to a familiar atmosphere of distress that characterizes life in an advanced capitalist society. Beauvoir’s novel has received a deserved rehabilitation over the decades, but reading it today, in light of overlapping and sharpening crises, domestically and in the international situation, invites us to extend that reappraisal to Beauvoir’s — and Sartre’s — whole approach to a “committed” literature, one that could do justice to substantial social issues while remaining artistically fulfilling.
Les Belles Images was first translated into English by Patrick O’Brien in an out-of-print edition that retained the French title. Beautiful images are the life and livelihood of Beauvoir’s protagonist Laurence, a successful graphic designer for an advertising firm, married to an industrial capitalist riding a postwar business boom: a lifestyle of garden parties in the summer villa, holidays with the daughters and grandparents to Greece and Italy — a jet-setting “planetary” existence like the one lived by bourgeois intellectuals like Beauvoir and Sartre. The new translation furnished by Lauren Elkin is called The Image of Her (published in the US by Yale UP), which points to the mirror image of Laurence’s mother Dominique, “the very picture of a woman who is ageing well.” Such a picture is as transfixing as the images of professional glamour, both for Dominique, who needs constant assurance that age and poverty won’t be her fate, and for Laurence who is enmeshed with Dominique in relation to the rest of their family (“I’ve never taken Maman’s side”).
Elkin’s translation reads exceptionally well as English prose. It conveys the frazzled state of Beauvoir’s hero, a young wife and mother, barely in her thirties, as well as Beauvoir’s attitude toward narrative literature, opposed to the experimental forms of the 50s and 60s, and in favor of fiction that was socially motivated, shamelessly didactic, and set clarity of social vision as its practical task. But that does not entail a retread of mimetic naturalism. A short passage from early in the novel indicates a daring fictive voice, making pointed choices in phrasing and perspective. Watching her husband read in bed, Laurence ruminates on how she’s fallen out of the habit (relatable to many adults today):
That she should have regressed in the early years of her marriage is unsurprising. Classic. Love, motherhood, it’s a violent emotional shock, when you marry quite young, and she could never find a balance between intelligence and affection. It seemed as if I no longer had a future. Jean-Charles did, and the girls, but not me. So what was the point of cultivating my mind? It was a vicious circle: I neglected myself, I was bored and I felt more and more dispossessed of myself. (And, of course, her depression had deeper causes, but she didn’t need a psychoanalyst to get out of it; she found a career which interested her, and she got better.)
The conventional techne of the novel is at work in these lines, yet there is a jarring effect that comes from syntax. The third-person sentences that open and close this passage run along to their main ideas at the end, while the first-person sentences are short, clipped, and pointed in the thoughts they represent. Mainstream fiction employs a comfy “limited third” perspective, holding the conscience of the protagonist and the narrator intimately close, so that the narrator can almost imperceptibly speak the protagonist’s thoughts. This is a subtle relationship that can be pushed to a radical extent, as in Faulkner, where characters at times vocalize the narrator’s literary consciousness. But here, the third and first person are demarcated, and the narrative texture feels polarized. Rather than sharing Laurence’s thoughts through the narrator’s words, the narrator and protagonist snatch control of the narrative with each period. As we immerse ourselves into Laurence’s world and lifestyle, third person and first person will take over long stretches of text by themselves, while the narrative’s chronology itself gets cut up into elliptical moments. It’s a deft work of experimental realism.
Laurence isn’t at home in this discretely tasteful Fifth Republic society. Amidst her family’s prosperity she ruminates on the profound indistinctness of her person and her lifestyle. “At exactly this moment, in another garden, completely different, but exactly the same, someone is pronouncing these same words and the same smile appears on someone else’s face.” Nor is she attuned to her family’s values or interests. Her husband Jean-Charles likes to pontificate on the objective and inevitable progress granted by technology: “Everything is better than it was before and everything will be better in the future,” he says on several occasions. “Some countries are off to a bad start; Sub-Saharan Africa, for instance; …however, thanks to synthetic proteins, contraception, automation and nuclear energy, we can assume that by 1990 we’ll be seeing a civilization marked by abundance and leisure.” Jean-Charles is a speakerbox for a technocratic worldview that took center stage in the postwar Western intellectual scene. Unfortunately this story has no leftwing thinkers, like in Beauvoir’s previous novel The Mandarins (1954), to set him straight.
Laurence has a lover named Lucien, a coworker in the advertising firm, but the relationship has grown stultifying. The affair doesn’t resolve her domestic ennui, and fails to take the edge off of her oppressive sense of indistinctness: “it doesn’t bother her to go from one bed to another; they’re so very much the same.” They go out to dinner, but it’s not an enjoyable evening. She checks her mirror image in the restaurant and sees “A pretty woman, discreetly happy, somewhat mysterious and given to whims, … efficient, loyal, lucid.” But the image is her projection of how Lucien sees her. “He’s wrong.” The relationship becomes all the more dissatisfying as Lucien begins reproaching her like her husband is already doing. (“Love feels tedious if you’re no longer in it.”) Lucien feels neglected: Laurence is at full capacity with her other relations and issues. She’s no longer sure what she saw in Lucien. It’s not even that Jean-Charles is a neglectful husband, but Lucien made her feel needed, at least for a time.
Despite these frictions, Laurence desires a closeness with her family, especially her separated parents. Her feelings are warmest toward her father Gilbert (the least business-minded member of the cast), but when he reveals that he’s dating a nineteen year old girl, she reflexively feels betrayed for her mother’s sake. It’s as if she now has permission to hate her father: “It’s a relief to suddenly be able to say I have always loathed Gilbert.” But Laurence’s views on love and hate don’t have an accord with her mother’s: Dominique’s fear of abandonment in old age drives her to war against the new couple, via a poison-pen letter, and Laurence is mortified by this childlike scheme. On top of it all, Beauvoir’s hero even experiences a car accident, with Jean-Charles in the passenger seat. The husband ends up more distraught over the condition of his personal property than his wife: “Two hundred thousand francs out of nowhere!” By the closing pages these mounting tensions and pressures escalate within Laurence to the point of anorexia and bulimia.
The Image of Her has been pitched in the press as Mad Men meets la condition feminine, and the comparison to its credit reaches further than high-end advertising and paramours, to include the political angle of these narratives. The series Mad Men evokes the Korean War directly in a first season twist. The United States may be haunted by the Vietnam War, culturally speaking, but the Korean War has been buried. Beauvoir’s novel, on the other hand, doesn’t have any soldiers or politically-minded characters — to the dismay of the book reviewers — but it is psychologically tormented by the violence of the recent past that France had experienced, but also, as we’ll see, perpetrated. This issue comes forth early on as the novel’s main “plot” launches itself.
When Laurence tucks in her eldest daughter Catherine at bedtime, the girl “assails” her with a simple question: “Maman, why do we exist?” Which leads quickly to Why do unhappy and unfortunate people exist? Nothing about their wealthy neighborhood could directly prompt this inquiry, Laurence is sure: “…what encounter could have put Catherine in such a state”? Laurence lived through World War Two as a pre-teen. “The gas chambers, Hiroshima—there were many reasons why, in 1945 a child of eleven would feel completely stupefied.” She’s disturbed that her children in the Cold War years must confront the same ugly realities. “If my ten-year-old daughter is crying, it’s my fault, Dominique and Jean-Charles will blame me.” But no parent can hope to keep the world from slipping into their child’s consciousness. “We are forced to get used to the horrors of the world, there are simply far too many of them: force-feeding geese, genital mutilation, lynching, abortions, suicides, child martyrs, the death camps, the massacre of hostages, crackdowns, you see it at the cinema, on the television, you move on.”
Laurence turns to her family for counsel, but usually ends up quietly rebuffed. Jean-Charles is only worried about Catherine’s grades. He exacerbates the situation when he ignorantly pins the blame on Catherine’s precocious friend Brigette: “Everyone knows Jewish children are worryingly mature for their age….” When Laurence resists the idea, Jean-Charles deploys the worst barb in his back pocket: “Please, don’t throw another of your temper tantrums like you did in ‘62.” She feels these words like a slap to the face. It’s a dramatic beat that recontextualizes everything the novel has presented thus far. Laurence doesn’t need more money: she is working in advertising as a way to recover after a mental health crisis in 1962, the year Algeria was nationally liberated from French colonialism. She had had a nervous fit after reading about “the woman who was tortured to death,” — that is literally all the text says on the matter. Now, with this fresh wound dealt by her husband, she realizes that such emblems of the brutality of French colonial policy had never affected her husband the same way. Her recoil at such brutality is discarded by her husband as an infantilizing “temper tantrum” (recall this is a society in which Jean-Charles would feel perfectly within his rights to bar his wife from reading The Second Sex). To him and the rest of this family and social setting, a brief news story of a woman tortured to death is just another “image of horror,” one of the innumerable shards of mass media injected into our minds day in and day out, as easily digested as they are forgotten. Throughout the novel Laurence strives for intellectual answers. She reads the books her husband reads, and half-heartedly psychoanalyzes her relations with her husband and father. (“I articulated the conflict between my feelings for Jean-Charles and those I have for my father, it no longer torments me. I have squared it up with myself.”) But no one in this text can give an authentic response to young Catherine’s question of Why do we exist, except for the lame suggestion that she try not to notice that fact. In these pages Laurence’s life feels too overwhelming one moment, too hollow and inert the next. Ultimately, it’s a life “too full of empty things.”
Respite comes at last in the form of a trip to Greece with her father Gilbert, unfolding in beautiful prose in which the first person largely takes over. These passages reflect not only on Laurence’s personal relationships taken as a whole, but also touch upon Beauvoir’s relationship to the western literary and artistic tradition. After all, the ruins that Laurence looks upon have fascinated multiple generations of European artists and thinkers, each one striving for a supposed “authenticity” that could bring forth renewal for a civilization on the brink of decline. But while the Romantics found enchantment from dwelling in the ruins like hermits, and the Modernists, in their most chauvinist moment, claimed the ruins for their own so as to appoint themselves custodians of high culture, Laurence’s own reflections in the middle of the twentieth century are quite different.
I followed the Royal Road, I saw the terraces, the murals, and the very countryside which Clytemnestra saw when she scanned the horizon for Agamemnon’s return. It felt like being torn from myself. Where was I? I didn’t belong to the century when people came and went, slept and ate in this still undamaged palace. And my own life had nothing to do with these ruins. What is a ruin, anyway? It’s neither the present nor the past; and it’s not eternity either; one day it will disappear, no doubt.
Whatever authority, aura, or connection is being enjoyed by Gilbert or the other European tourists, it does not inform Laurence, who does not feel any tangible relationship to these ruins that don’t belong to the present, and whose retention of the dead past within their broken forms serves no real purpose. Her father makes fun of the tourists who distract themselves with snapping photos so they can avoid acknowledging where they are at this moment. But for Laurence, who has spent this narrative locked up with incurious petty-bourgeois busybodies in a sleepy family life, and the family just another nucleus in a massified society, whose confidence in their mastery of the forces at work in the modern world is completely unearned—for Laurence, her father is really no better than those middle class tourists chasing after vacation pictures to place on the knickknack shelf. For he too, like the tourists, like the complacent Western European intelligentsia, and like the modern artists of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, is “trying to open his life to the traces of a time that was not his own.” He is also collecting meretricious keepsakes, if only on a conceptual level: he files away beautiful images just the same. And this realization leads Laurence to confront the true source of her bitterness: that there’s nothing obvious for her to do with the beauty of these ruins for herself.
Greece is also the locus for a brief encounter with politics that had been absent in Paris. Gilbert exchanges some friendly words with a Greek man outside a cafe on a cold market day morning. They speak, in French, of the political repression in Greece, still recovering from its civil war, and the state of the labor movement in Western Europe. Laurence leaves the men to explore the market on her own. Afterward, it seems this aspect of Greece is mainly an occasion to reflect back on the metropolis, where life is divorced from authenticity:
[Giles:] — He was nice, that man. And you played your part to perfection. He was convinced that we were communists.
[Laurence:] — I have a lot of respect for the communists here, because they risk going to prison, or even losing their lives.
— Did you know there were so many political prisoners in Greece?
— Of course. I have a colleague who bombarded us with petitions to sign against the Greek camps.
Laurence could be chided for a limited class perspective, and its patronizing gaze on the impoverished Greek citizens who actually live and work amongst these tourist sites. But the “didacticism” I mentioned above in Beauvoir’s fiction isn’t about morals, but more about imparting a sense of history, and how that historicity informs how and why we think and write the way we do. The Image of Her is a rich novel for its short length and brisk pace, and it doesn’t condescend to offer an easy conclusion for Laurence’s personal or political problems by the end.
In that sense, Laurence is reminiscent of Sartre’s hero Roquentin, from his book Nausea (1938). While the crude social conditions of that pathbreaking novel have been transposed into crude ideological conditions for The Image of Her, Laurence agonizes over the same loss of meaning, of an agonizing detachment of language from an image-saturated world and of the self from others, that haunted Roquentin. Additionally, Beauvoir in the 60s was carrying the banner for commitment in literature as Sartre had formulated it in the late 40s, a commitment that had not been taken up by the likes of Raymond Queneau and the Oulipians, who brought a ludic whimsy to the depersonalizing imperatives of formalism, or the New Novelists like Alain Robbe-Grillet who were ruthlessly purging their fiction of all remaining humanist solutes. She had no interest in applying hip trends like Structuralism to fiction, when the novel’s mission all along has been to stake out a fresh and clear way to think about social life.
While over seventy years have elapsed since Sartre formulated the idea of committed writing, and while one can take or leave the details of its philosophical and existential underpinnings (writing as action against the absence of meaning, and so on), there’s something to be said for writing (literature, poetry, philosophy, journalism) that acknowledges the “situatedness” of the writers, and the disclosure to the audience of the situation by the expressed intention of changing it. The writer’s situation was specifically in language, according to Sartre’s philosophy, but for the Sartre who wrote radical political drama in wartime, edited Resistance journals with Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty, and handed out copies of his Maoist paper on the Left Bank in the 60s — for this political Sartre, the situation was also historically concrete. Writers and readers are always-already in the world, and in this environment our silences and equivocations can reverberate at least as much as our considered statements. With the aggression from the US and its military extensions sowing chaos in the region and global trade, we genuinely find ourselves at the cusp of a transformed world order. It’s not hard to see a likeness between the burning questions confronted by writers today and the “modern times” in which Sartre and Beauvoir, as intellectuals artists, took concern with social responsibility in their creative endeavors. But as The Image of Her shows, that concern is not a matter of tendentiousness or becoming a publicity expert, but rather exploring a different kind of fiction from the types that dominated the midcentury, a fiction that neither refuses referentiality from beginning to end, nor focuses exclusively on whatever comes in front of the first-person narrator’s nose. This fiction is committed to confronting what actually exists.