Simone de Beauvoir: The Prime of Life

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 Word Count: 578

From The Prime of Life by Simone de Beauvoir

“We had no external limitations, no overriding authority, no imposed pattern of existence. We created our own links with the world, and freedom was the very essence of our existence” (59).

“Our indifference to money was a luxury we could afford only because we had enough of it to avoid real poverty and the need for hard or unpleasant work. Our open-mindedness was bound up with a cultural background and the sort of activities accessible only to people of our social class. It was our conditioning as young petit bourgeois intellectuals that led us to believe ourselves free of all conditioning whatsoever” (62).


Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Prime of Life” discusses the discovery of freedom in her life. It is an exploration of what freedom looks like and how it was limited previously. De Beauvoir seems to convey freedom as a lack of limitations, expectations or impositions from others. Simone grew up in the 1910s and 20s which was a time where women were beginning to look for extensive freedom in their behavior, however, there were still huge limitations on these freedoms especially as young girls. Simone expresses that she had felt watched her whole life and longed to be free of this attention to simply do what she desired without being watched and without judgment (54). She was expected to live a certain way and do certain things as a child but did not desire to fulfill those expectations. Once she left the house of her parents and began to work, she said that this freedom she felt, was like a game, where she had pranked her employer into paying her. 

The process of gaining this freedom is not a short one. Even while she lived away from her family, she still felt their expectations weighing on her. She recounted one instance where she spent the day in the park with Sartre and was approached by her father and told that Sartre needed to leave the district because Simone’s cousin was getting married and she would sully her cousin’s reputation with her scandalous behavior (56). Even though she did not listen to him, those expectations still in many ways haunted her. 

The most interesting trend in her discovery of freedom in her life is when she discusses the paradox of conditioning. As a child, Simone experienced the pressure of both societal and parental expectations that were placed on her and decided what she didn't like about it or what she did and in turn, when she grew, she sought freedom from those negative aspects. Once she no longer conformed to the way she was raised, she believed herself to be free of conditioning, but in reality it was that conditioning from a young age that made her who she was. Attempting to be free from this conditioning was in fact her acting on this conditioning, she was simply rejecting what it taught, but not rejecting the conditioning itself. Therefore even if she adopted the opposite of her conditioning, she is still acting upon it, and therefore she can never claim to have true freedom from it. But this conditioning exists everywhere, not simply from her parents, it can also be through society, through her social status, or her economic status. These things, because they were a part of this conditioning, limit that freedom that she claimed to have. I believe that she recognized that limitation to her freedom when looking back on that time of her life.


Comments

  1. Rachel AntonJanuary 20, 2023 at 6:52 AM

    It is a little bit of a culture shock to think that just one hundred years ago women would consider things that seem mandatory to us – like having a job – to be a privilege or a freedom. It was also interesting to hear about the authors experience being “conditioned” by her parents and by society to act or behave a certain way, and that it was breaking free from these conditioned behaviors that led her to a sense of freedom.

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