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In “The Inseparables” there is a scene in which a young girl, Andrée, is about to be forced by her family to break up with her boyfriend. She is heartbroken and tells her best friend Sylvie how this boy’s love changed everything for her – that his love made her realize that she was worth caring for. She says that he was “the only person who loved me for myself, exactly as I was and because I was myself.” Her friend, listening unhappily and struck by the unfairness of it all, asks, “What about me?…Didn’t I appreciate you for who you were?”
This friend, Sylvie, is the French feminist, novelist and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, who tells the fictional story of her first love and best friend, Zaza. Andrée/Zaza and Sylvie/Simone became best friends at school and were called “the inseparables”. Simone had “real conversations” with Zaza for the first time, impressed by her new friend’s personality, the depth of her reading and the joy of her company. After the above conversation, in which Sylvie confesses her feelings for Andrée, the two become even closer, share their lives together, defy the oppressive norms of French bourgeois society together and write long letters to each other after their separation.
“A life without her would be death”… Élisabeth Lacoin/Zaza (left) with Simone de Beauvoir. Photo: Éditions de l’Herne/Association Élisabeth Lacoin (http://zazalacoin.fr)
Unfortunately, Andrée/Zaza’s story ends tragically: after being denied permission to marry the man she loves, she becomes very ill and dies at the age of 22 – from viral meningitis, but also from the systematic oppression of her family and society’s expectations, what Simone de Beauvoir would later call a “spiritual crime”. She compulsively remembered Zaza to try to understand her death, not only in her memoirs but also in fictionalized form such as Andrée in The Inseparables, Anne in When Things of the Spirit Come First, etc.
Sylvie’s intense longing for Andrée runs through the story like a dagger. One of the earliest moments of tension comes from Sylvie’s realization that her life without Andrée would be death: “Without Andrée, I wouldn’t be alive anymore…if she died?…I decided that I…would die too.” Just a few pages later: “What could I have dreamed of? I loved Andrée more than anything, and she was right next to me.” Young Sylvie realizes that she cares much more about Andrée than Andrée cares about her. What saddens Sylvie, however, is the realization that the object of her affection is simply unaware of her intensity. No matter how hard she tries (and she does! with the gift of a red handmade handbag), it is difficult for her to express her feelings – also because this love is different, foreign and out of place, as Andrée’s mother quickly realizes and tries to thwart her. Bitter hopelessness and helplessness are always present on the horizon of this relationship, and the unrelenting seriousness of this experience is one of the reasons why this novel is almost unbearable.
Élisabeth Lacoin (Zaza), left, with Simone de Beauvoir in Gagnepan, September 1928. Photo credit: Association Élisabeth Lacoin
When I first read The Inseparables, I read Sylvie as a queer girl who falls unrequitedly in love with her best friend (often a painfully familiar situation for Sapphikers). And I wasn’t the only one. When the novel was published in 2020 (despite being written in 1954), its publication created a discursive split between those who interpreted it as a novel about female friendship and others who read it as a lesbian love story. Paul Preciado controversially reviewed it for Libération, calling it a tragic lesbian love affair that forced Simone de Beauvoir to realize that homosexuality was “a second sexuality, a marginal and risky position in relation to the heterosexual norm” (just as she would later realize that women were the “Second genderThis position was also heavily criticized by other Beauvoir scholars, in part because it was “obscene” and superimposed sexuality on a novel in which there was none. Instead, they presented it as a story of female friendship and intellectual camaraderie.
I would like to shed light on the allonormative assumptions underlying these logics. When Preciado views certain elements of erotic intensity in the story as “obviously” sexual, this position implies that such a close and intense relationship cannot be “just” a friendship. Our allonormative conditioning encourages us to place romance on a higher pedestal – relationships that are not fraternal and above a certain intimacy threshold must be romantic and/or sexual. On the other hand, the assumption that the Sapphic interpretation is illegitimate due to the lack of sexual contact in Sylvie and Andrée’s bond is also a claim underpinned by compulsory sexuality – particularly the dangerous myth that the romantic is/must always be sexual, which must be firmly rejected in order to make room for asexual and non-sexual romantic experiences.
The first page of Simone de Beauvoir’s manuscript The Inseparables. Photo credit: Simone de Beauvoir archive
In Asexual Erotics: Intimate Readings of Compulsory Sexuality, Ella Pryzbylo takes up Audre Lorde’s revolutionary conceptualization of eroticism as a creative life force with “profound and everyday” modes to propose a methodology of reading for asexual resonances by disentangling the erotic from the purely sexual. Instead, eroticism proves to be a source of energy and emotional and intellectual power that makes solidarity and affective connections with oneself and others possible and productive, and asexual eroticism enables us to imagine “language that does not yet exist” and “forms of erotic expression that cannot even be realized as identities or even named as properties”.
When Simone/Sylvie declares that she loves Andrée/Zaza with an “intensity that cannot be explained by any established rules and conventions,” she confronts this affection with the raw violence of the social morality of French bourgeois society and at least allows her to imagine joyful resistance, rebellion, and love. When Simone de Beauvoir says at the end of her first memoir about Zaza’s death that “for a long time I felt that I paid for my freedom with her life,” in a queer reading, she feels obligated to live a certain kind of life because her first love—her first friend (in the most apt, queer sense of the word)—did not have the “extraordinary” life that she wanted.
As Hazel Rowley has said, it is impossible to read about the life of Simone de Beauvoir without thinking about your own life, and this is doubly true when it comes to her fiction. For me, on my second reading, The Inseparables becomes fertile ground for searching for resonances of ambiguity and ambivalence between queer friendships, lesbian and/or asexual romances, and platonic love relationships. I look forward to queer returnees at further readings.
Simran is a teacher and author from Pune. You write about feminist issues from a philosophical perspective. You are committed to working on the topic of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV). They love reading and learning languages (they are fluent in French and are now trying Spanish and German). Simran holds a BA in Philosophy from Fergusson College and a Masters in Cognitive Science from IIT Gandhinagar. They can be found on Instagram at @willtophilosophy, where they post about philosophy, literature and feminism.