articles on radio, mass culture, and sexuality and coauthor of four editions of Western Civilizations.
She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Sex, Love, and Letters: Writing Simone de Beauvoir, and reported the following:
This page actually does get to the heart of the book; page 99 is a great test.Follow Judith Coffin on Twitter, and learn more about Sex, Love, and Letters at the Cornell University Press website.
Sex, Love, and Letters is based on a virtually unknown archive of readers’ letters to Simone de Beauvoir. On page 99, as it happens, I cite exactly the passage from Beauvoir’s work that readers most often copied out in their letters to the French philosopher. It comes from her 1960 autobiographical volume, The Prime of Life. “What I wanted,” Beauvoir says, "was to penetrate so deeply into the lives of others that when they heard my voice they would have the impression they were speaking to themselves.” It’s a remarkable phrase, one that captures how much Beauvoir cared about how her writing landed -- and why so many readers responded to her. They felt she had called on them to recount their experience of reading her work, the thrill of books, their appetite for introspection, and the challenges of thinking seriously about their lives and decisions. They wrote to her about an extraordinary range of subjects and in an unusually intimate tone. As I also point out, that dialogue often got out of hand. One reader, also quoted on page 99 responds dramatically: "You speak of 'penetrating into the lives of others.' You have reached this goal, and it gives you responsibilities, and speaking for myself, I can no longer consider you a stranger… [ those] reactions may be unpleasant, and you had not envisioned them. But it is not my fault.” Reaching into the lives of others was bound to foster expectations that would be disappointed and demands that no writer could meet. It also sparked resistance and anger. Some of these dynamics cannot help but remind us of psychoanalysis, and the popularization of Freud is part— though only part -- of the cultural background to the story I am telling. Page 99 is a particularly revealing glimpse of the intense, demanding, and emphatically reciprocal relationship between Simone de Beauvoir and her readers.
I’ve taken this intimate relationship, which lasted for decades and across generations of readers, as an invitation to write a new kind of cultural history of the postwar decades. I follow Beauvoir and her readers as they work through the aftermath of the Second World War and the harrowing memories that kept resurfacing, the equally disconcerting revelations about torture and brutality as the French army tried to repress an anti-colonial revolution in Algeria. It gives us an inside and often dark view of an economic boom that rearranged the economy and family life, often intensifying the burdens of work and the strains of marriage. These weren’t simply French developments; readers from around the world wrote about them in their letters. These were the decades in which sexuality came to the forefront of cultural life, and we see how ordinary people dealt with constantly multiplying theories of sexuality and its psychological dimensions and also how they struggled with categories of sexual identity that did not fit their desires. Men and women wrote to Beauvoir as if she were a marriage counselor. Men and women came out to her. They came on. Their letters show that feeling is part of thinking. They highlight the emotional dimensions of politics –anti-war, anti-colonial, gay liberation, and feminism. They take us inside the inner turmoil of a tumultuous age. Of course they also show the global reach of this French existentialist and feminist and the charisma of her person and ideas. But these readers mattered to Simone de Beauvoir as much as she mattered to them.
--Marshal Zeringue
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