Simone de Beauvoir's The Mandarins

Simone de Beauvoir, in The Mandarins, depicts relationships between men and women in the context of post-World War II political activism in France. As the author writes, "I try to tell the happy revival we felt when the war was over and so many things began again, and the slow disappointment" (Francis and Gontier 264). This study will examine three of the relationships de Beauvoir portrays in the atmosphere of such rising and falling hopes both on the political and the person level. Those relationships are between Anne and her husband Robert, Anne and her lover Lewis, and Henri and Paula.

Although the disappointment de Beauvoir and other French intellectuals of the left experienced with respect to politics is also reflected in her portrayal of the relationships between men and women in this novel, gender relations are far from hopeless in the perspective of the book. Some of the negative criticism heaped upon the author and her book at the time of its publication in 1954 argued that de Beauvoir's depiction of gender relations was revolutionary: "The author considers the institution of marriage to be a farce and takes up the defense of free love. All methods are good, she maintains, as long as they permit the woman to escape from the slavery of motherhood" (Francis and Gontier 266).

However, the novel is hardly a revolutionary work in terms of its portrayal of relations between men and women. In fact, it is a work which honors the marriage of Anne and Robert, whom Anne

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r this character. [Robert] is endowed with almost superhuman patience and an unfailing sense of humor that enable him to weather the political and personal storms besieging his life (Biebert 167). It is not so much that de Beauvoir is showing Henri and Lewis to be selfish men who abuse their women, but rather that they have their own lives separate from their relationships with Paula and Anne, while the two women seem to be far more dependent on them for their identities and happiness than they are on the two women. De Beauvoir does not mean to judge the men, but rather to show that the women must make decisions which liberate themselves from such dependence, both in political and personal terms. Anne certainly does not feel with Robert the kind of passion she feels with Lewis, but Robert feels such a great joy and wonder for life that Anne is inevitably bound to choose her husband over her lover, at least in the terms of the novel as laid out by de Beauvoir: When you were [Robert], a stroll along the quays became as exciting as an expedition to the North Pole; Henri and Anne would often laugh together over this. The thing was that he didn't distinguish between seeing and discovering; no eye before his had ever seen a waterfa

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