Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée: The Beauvoir’s emancipation story

Simone de Beauvoir in her autobiography Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée describes her own way of getting to know herself, her abilities and limitations and her search for identity. Considering the past, she ruminates over how certain episodes from her life influenced her later choices, especially the writer’s sensitivity and personality. The autobiographical perspective allows Beauvoir to present evolution of young Simone’s behaviour and worldview, her dreams, traumas and obsessions. In this way the author sketches convincing portrait of a maturing woman, distinguished by brilliant intelligence, opposing traditional values of bourgeois environment, its morality and all authorities, a woman who could experience a kind of “conversion” and also fulfil her ideal of emancipation, and at the same time her idée fixe, which was to become a writer.

Simone de Beauvoir in her autobiography Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée describes her own way of getting to know herself, her abilities and limitations and her search for identity. Considering the past, she ruminates over how certain episodes from her life influenced her later choices, especially the writer’s sensitivity and personality. The autobiographical perspective allows Beauvoir to present evolution of young Simone’s behaviour and worldview, her dreams, traumas and obsessions. In this way the author sketches convincing portrait of a maturing woman, distinguished by brilliant intelligence, opposing traditional values of bourgeois environment, its morality and all authorities, a woman who could experience a kind of “conversion” and also fulfil her ideal of emancipation, and at the same time her idée fixe, which was to become a writer.