Abstract

This study compares Simone de Beauvoir's theory of the self developed in her philosophical writings with the self presented in her autobiographical writings. ;The Introduction notes relevant differences in the Anglo-American and Continental philosophic traditions and in French and English and explains the existential-phenomenological analysis of the self. In chapter one I argue that, though Beauvoir began her investigation of the self with this analysis , she interpreted it to include an emphasis on relations with others. In chapter two I claim that Beauvoir developed another notion in The Second Sex, "the gendered self"; this represented a major departure from existential-phenomenology. In chapter three I discuss literary strategies she uses in her autobiographies. In chapter four I show how she presents her child self within an existentialist problematic, and as gendered. In chapter five, I show that she developed a "companionate self" in two love relationships and that her ability to write the "deaths" of these became a way to rediscover her self. In chapter six I assert that in discussions of her writing, she presents both an existential self and a gendered self. Finally, I conclude that Beauvoir preserved a tension between freedom, or the existential self, and determinism, or the gendered self, in her writings