Feminine Complicity and Women's ‘Destiny’1

Abstract This essay argues that the depiction of two female characters’ situations, friendship, and self-understandings in The Mandarins ( Les mandarins , 1954) develops Beauvoir's theorization of feminine complicity in The Second Sex ( Le deuxième sexe , 1949). Through its prolonged focus on the concrete situations of two female characters, the novel enables Beauvoir to explore the (hetero)sexual and metaphysical sources of feminine complicity in depth. The result is that The Mandarins illustrates why women who are, to greater or lesser degrees, complicit with the structures of their own oppression can be understood neither as agents of gender-based oppression nor as passive victims of it, but only as human beings forced to invent means to survive the mutilation of their transcendence.