My family had been in a refugee camp for a year and I was thirty-one years old when the government of Israel arranged through secret channels to fly all the Jews of Yemen to Israel. It was unofficially called Operation Magic Carpet, and officially called Operation On Wings of Eagles. When our people refused to enter the airplanes out of fear—for especially our brethren from the North had no experience with modernity—our rabbis reminded them of divine passages. “This is the fulfillment of ancient prophecy,” they said. “The eagles that fly us to the Promised Land may be made of metal, but their wings are buoyed aloft by the breath of God.” Between June 1949 and September 1950 almost fifty thousand Yemenite Jews boarded transport planes and made some 380 flights from Aden to Israel in this secret operation.” But it's interesting that the same woman who finds freedom in having a week to herself while her husband is away at a business conference, is destroyed when she finds that he's been having an affair: the self-construction is striking - freedom is contingent on an overriding super-structure of being a wife-and-mother: take away that primary identity and Monique is adrift. She envisions her enemies roasting in hell: “You owe me this revenge, God. I insist that you grant it to me.” And, of course, through this screed, she reveals so much of herself to us so that we see why she has been abandoned. The writing device of "The Woman Destroyed" is not as psychologically oppressive to me as that of "The Monologue," because it includes dialogue quoted from various people and therefore is not a completely closed monologue. However, Monique's obsessions don't interest me much, and no advice that I would consider practical emerges until the very end, when Monique visits her younger daughter, Lucienne, in New York City:

Having devoted her whole self to her family, the wife fines herself faced with an utterly abandoned life. she is playing a losing game. Suffused with de Beauvoir’s remarkable insights into women, The Woman Destroyed gives us a legendary writer at her best. Includes “The Age of Discretion,”“The Monologue,” and “The Woman Destroyed.” the meaninglessness of life, the existential crisis, the melancholy that comes with age, are all shown through uniquely female perspective. on the surface level, these three women may all have been called “hysterical”, which is derived from the greek word hystera, or ‘uterus’. this word has been exclusively used to describe women historically (especially freud)—for de beauvoir to write these characters that would have been called ‘hysterical’ and give them emotions and the vulnerability necessary to let readers see through their paradigms.

You saw our life together," I said. "And indeed you were very critical as far as I was concerned. Don't be afraid of hurting me. Try to explain why your father has stopped loving me." Non ipotecare il futuro. Facile a dire. Lo vedevo, il futuro. Si estendeva davanti a me a perdita d’occhio, piatto, nudo. Non un progetto, non un desiderio. Non avrei scritto piú. E allora, che cosa avrei fatto? Che vuoto, dentro di me, attorno a me. Inutile. I greci chiamavano i loro vecchi «mosconi». «Inutile moscone», si dice Ecuba nelle Troiane. Sono io. Sono rimasta folgorata. Mi domandavo come si possa riuscire ancora a vivere quando da se stessi non si spera piú niente.” Puede resultar, por lo tanto, extraña la idea de leer extractos de la vida y de los pensamientos de tres mujeres de 40 y 60 años, llenos de miedos, dudas, fracasos. No obstante, opino que es precisamente con esta clase de vidas con las que nos haremos preguntas, cuestiones que no nos atrevíamos a plantear o que simplemente no habían pasado por nuestras cabezas. La forma è quella del diario dove la protagonista, Monique, annota gli avvenimenti aggiornandoci sul suo declino psicologico. As her marital relationship shifts into a different key, she and her spouse grow father and farther apart. At the end there is a suggestion of a new plateau of understanding, but it’s not convincing because non of the problems have been resolved.

The riddle of men and women and their relationships is an omnipresent topic throughout centuries, and these stories are not even that remote to some of our current societal problems women face:

This story seemed realistic to me, because there are many women like Monique who encounter this situation. The only difference I see is that affairs are more likely to be taken in stride in France than in the U.S. In this instance, Maurice had already had several affairs unbeknownst to Monique, and Monique herself had had one affair. Unfortunately, neither Monique nor Maurice seemed interesting to me, and I had to wait for Lucienne to speak up to find a character who appealed to me. It’s flying in the face of nature that my own brother my own mother should prefer my ex-husband to me.” And: “I wanted decent clean children I didn’t want Francis to become a fairy like Nanard.”

de beauvoir writes these existential narratives in a bleak tone that feels suffocating—there is no real happy ending in sight, and it is clear from the get go. it seemed to siphon from the collective despair that we go through living in society as women, and while this may have been written decades ago, much of women’s default social dependence on men have not changed.The title story, “The Woman Destroyed,” is told in a more modified tone; but the undercurrent of despair builds to uncontrolled proportions. In this monologue, the woman tells of a comfortable life that is being washed away by her husband’s affair with another woman.

In “The Age of Discretion,” the woman is faced with a young married son who suddenly tears himself free from her sphere of influence. She rejects him completely, refusing to see him. At the same time, she observes that she no longer seems to bring her husband any kind of happiness. She and he are not in accord over her treatment of their son. In three “immensely intelligent stories about the decay of passion” (The Sunday Herald Times [London]), Simone de Beauvoir draws us into the lives of three women, all past their first youth, all facing unexpected crises. Enthralling as faction, suffused with de Beauvoir’s remarkable insights into women, The Woman Destroyed gives us a legendary writer at her best. The Woman Destroyed by Simone de Beauvoir – eBook Details Has my watch stopped? No. But its hands do not seem to be going around. Don't look at them. Think of something else - anything else: think of yesterday, a calm, ordinary, easy-flowing day, in spite of the nervous tension of waiting.” The first novella, The Age of Discretion, centers around the aging process and the end of careers of both husband and wife. In addition, there’s the bitter disappointment the woman feels after the son she has ‘groomed’ to follow in her footsteps as a professor turns thirty and changes career and political outlook to go into government service. His mother feels it’s all about his wife and father-in-law pushing him to make more money and get a ‘real’ Job. Amazingly she turns against her son in an incredibly brutal way. She throws her son out of her house and says things like “I cannot love anyone I do not respect.” And to her husband: “Do you think I ought to see him again?” [This is their son!]Each story - spoiler alert - focuses on a woman, each of the three women stands in relationship to the narrator of Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, potential other adult selves maybe, so all three women are not only French, but specifically Parisian, and what I would call from a British point of view, upper middle class - research scientists, university academics, potential government ministers and the like though I suppose a government minister must by definition be upper class even if they are not particularly classy, but still I find myself bridling at that idea, a curious thing one's own prejudices. Each woman is in a crisis - sorry another spoiler - I hope you are keeping count. Several years ago, shortly after finishing “The Mandarins”, Simone De Beauvior's tour de force novel, I came across an article titled: “Are Good Books Bad for You?” I immediately thought of De Beauvior’s fiction. Like nothing else I’ve ever read, her fiction has the ability to influence my emotions and my opinions in a deep and powerful way. It’s nearly dangerous, I think, the depth at which she strikes chords in her readers. Reading “The Woman Destroyed”, I was reminded that all great writing is a warning, or at the very least, veiled advice on how one might attempt to live a meaningful life. From a review by Inna Uhlig of The Woman Destroyed by Simone de Beauvoir in The Baltimore Sun, March 23, 1969: In this English translation of La Femme Rompue, Simone de Beauvoir presents three novellas, or long short stories, that describe women over forty, each delving into her own unhappiness: