In my thesis, I examine two French authors: the philosopher and writer Simone de Beauvoir, and the contemporary writer Annie Ernaux, whose work evolved under Beauvoir’s influence – most notably through The Second Sex, which shaped her conceptualization of gender and “femininity” in a non-essentialist framework. The comparative analysis is structured around the notion of sexual difference, investigated through the marital and extramarital relationships of the protagonists in Beauvoir’s novel The Woman Destroyed and Ernaux’s shorter texts Simple Passion and The Possession, both of which may be situated within Ernaux’s own category of auto-socio-biography. I argue that passion, as represented in Simple Passion and The Possession, is inscribed by sexual difference, a dynamic I analyze through Beauvoir’s theorization of the woman in love and the opposition between immanence and transcendence.
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