I mostly listened to podcasts and radio shows for research as there naturally isn't too much video footage until later in her life- In Our Time, Great Lives, Radio 4's Book at Bedtime which was conveniently "At the Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails".
Simone de Beauvoir seemed like a very straightforward character for quite a while: a very typical feminist icon, overcoming the pressure to marry and excelling above and beyond in her field in order to eat the crumbs off the men's table. While this isn't untrue, a lot of the media I was looking at had a lot of different and inconclusive views about her relationship with Sartre and other men and women, which I found compelling.
However, I stuck with what I knew for certain during a workshop, where we used singular facts about our chosen subject and illustrated them relatively roughly, to varying degrees of success. I think I did pretty well on these- while they may not be the best drawings, they tend to get the message across effectively:
Beauvoir had the option of marriage closed off to her down to the fact her father couldn't afford the dowry; however this was actually great for her as it meant she could pursue an education; or as they say, "when one door closes..."
This is that she made money writing books.
Beauvoir took the famed Agrégation exam at the ENS in order to achieve a professorship in philosophy. She and Sartre came joint first in the exam, and of course this is always credited to Sartre, even though Beauvoir was not only a few years younger and unlike Sartre hadn't taken the exam before, but also didn't officially attend classes, as the ENS didn't allow women.
This was a somewhat harsh illustration of Beauvoir's most famous quote, that "one becomes rather than is born a woman", about the pressure from society that shapes women into women- a branding of sorts.
This illustration therefore tries to incorperate these ideas into one, inspired by the animations from R4's "A History of Ideas". I'm not sure it's as effective, or makes as much of an impact as some of the previous illustrations.
We also made some weird clay figures illustrating our points. I'm really bad a clay (or anything 3D0 but here they are anyway:
My tutor thought the image of the butt and Beauvoir's hair was strikingly similar so I've also rearranged them here to be together. However, there aren't too many places I could go with that comparison that don't seem dangerously close to the bane of feminist art, which is yonic/vaginal imagery.
I wasn't really sure where to go after the workshop so I did some more research and found out some seedier things about Beauvoir, some harder to establish as truth than others. For example, Beauvoir was definitely fired for relations with a 17 year old student (below the age of consent in France at the time) but it's mistier as to whether some claims are true that she was part of a group aiming to legalise paedophilia by abolishing the age of consent. I got really frustrated with how hard it was to find information- particlarly in English. French language sources seem to take it much more easily as a given that Beauvoir had some seedy goings-on, while English language sources seemed to idolise her much more easily. Given I recently worked on black rights movement related things, I thought of historical revisionism and how much this had to play in rewriting Beauvoir's legacy.
I feel these illustrations definitely made more of the kind of comment I was looking for, but I still wasn't sure where to go with them.
I then did a book workshop. The primer for this was a number of 3 panel comics- sketchy and simple, more about ideas than drawing (not that I entirely took that to heart, as ever). The first one had to carefully consider colour, using colour in the first panel, greyscale in the second and black and white in the third. I used this opportunity to illustrate Beauvoirr's theory about the othering of women, and how as society or philosophy becomes simpler and simpler, women are excluded; eg, the fact that if we talk about "man" as a group, we're talking about all of humankind, but talking about "woman" is just talking about women. Male is the default, the norm, and women is the other.
My second comic was inspired by the work of Jane Mai, and was part of a larger piece I was considering of a sequential, off-the-wall and brightly coloured (like a feminist zine) runthrough of Beauvoir's ideas with some humour and plenty of personal commentary.
Incidentally, that's not Camus' exact words (or at least according to history, but let's face it, Camus would probably say that because he's a dick) but summarises the backlash against "The Second Sex", as well as serving as a parody of things feminists have heard countless times.
The third strip was supposed to be in black and white, which eventually came part of the book I made for the book workshop.It's Simone de Beauvoir's epiphany to the theory of existentialism- that lived existence was more important than what dusty old philosophers said. Whilst reading about Hegel in a Parisian library, she exited the library to find Paris being shelled, and realised that as Hegel could offer her no comfort, what really mattered was what was happening on the streets of Paris. The torn up paper behind the illustrations was supposed to slowly change from black and white to vivid colour, but unfortunately the illustrations cover up the gradient.
I also did a typography workshop, which wasn't what I was expecting and helped me loosen up a little, as well as give me the idea for my final.
We created silhouettes of objects, copied them into different sizes and some negatives, and collaged these, with no extra copying (hence, towards the end it got very hard) into a font.
While other people did much better with this workshop, I was quite pleased with what I'd done because I'd had to see things more abstractly, which I'm normally not very good at. The key idea, which I only initially chose because I had a set of keys in my bag, later lead me to ideas about homes and what these reflect about people.
I then did some more research, not really going anywhere for a while. I discovered an online lecture from an American university that explained very well the ideas of Simone de Beauvoir.
Once I'd had my final idea, I knew enough about her that it came together relatively quickly.
The idea was a book about the life of Simone de Beauvoir as seen through architecture and snapshots of rooms inside. It would fold-out to look like a cityscape,therefore not only telling the story, but being a great ornament too.
I'm not entirely happy with the other side of the book, as it was all quite rushed in the end, and I would have loved to put more detail into it, potentially drawing every room in the house, kind of like those Usbourne books where you have to find the keywords and the duck on every page.
I feel like this was one of my more ambitious final pieces that took me out of my comfort zone- more with making a book than anything. I wish I'd thought through what the rooms would look like as they do seem a little underwhelming compared to the detail of the architecture, which, while important, doesn't tell as much of the story. There are also a few historical inaccuracies which is a little annoying. I also feel like, although a good piece of work, I could have done much, much more, and gotten way more personal with my character.
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