Miroir, mouroir: (Dis)figuring the Ageing Woman in Simone de Beauvoir’s La Vieillesse

Abstract

This article looks at Simone de Beauvoir’s pioneering text, La Vieillesse, the most significant female-authored text on ageing published in France in the twentieth century. It examines in particular the text’s quasi-occlusion of a female-centred perspective on the role played by the body and sexual expression in women’s experience of ageing. Often viewed as a(n older) sister text to the feminist treatise Le Deuxième Sexe, La Vieillesse’s relative silence on the specifics of women’s ageing is remarkable, yet has received little critical attention. Acknowledging the radicalness of the work’s clarion call in advocating for improved residential care for France’s ageing population, this article analyses the overwhelmingly pessimistic representations of the perils of ageing that resonate from such a call. It presents the text as espousing a myopic vision of female ageing firmly anchored in the specular, rather than one embracing the many pleasures of ageing bound up with the palimpsestic layering of the experiential or the intellectual. By its predominant focus on literary as well as living accounts of ageing, La Vieillesse foregrounds the informative and transformative role of literature, yet its own reluctance to question many of the commonplaces surrounding ageing undermines its potential as a pedagogical tool to help us all age better.