A Very Easy Death

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1964

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Pages 8-51

Pages 52-109

Pages 110-132

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Themes

The Affirmation of Life

Part of what reconciles Beauvoir to her mother in her final days is her tenacity in the face of sickness and death. Françoise refuses to slip into the comfort of resignation, either by relinquishing her passion for living or taking consolation in the afterlife—two attitudes that deny the irreplaceable preciousness of every moment of life. In this refusal, Françoise embodies the life-affirming ethos of Beauvoir’s existential philosophy; in the first and last lines of the memoir Beauvoir asserts that every chapter of life, even the final one, has a (potential) meaning worth fighting for.

Beauvoir bookends A Very Easy Death with two assertions that death is an affront to life that should be fought until the end. For the epigraph she quotes the first stanza of Dylan Thomas’s famous poem “Do not go gentle into that good night:” “Do not go gentle into that good night. / Old age should burn and rave at close of day; / Rage, rage against the dying of the light” (3). Thomas’s poem is a call to resist death even in old age, and here Beauvoir quotes it to establish the existential importance of fighting the resigned attitude toward life that some adopt in old age. Then, in the final line of the book, Beauvoir writes that death is “an unjustifiable violation” (130), and something that every person living in good faith must rebel against. This doesn’t mean that one should ignore death or find some way to escape it but that to give up on life—even in sickness or old age—is to cheat oneself of something irretrievable.

Soon after Françoise arrives in the geriatric clinic she announces to Beauvoir: “I have lived for others too much. Now I shall become one of those self-centered old women who only live for themselves” (27). In the following weeks, Françoise doesn’t become selfish; rather, she becomes “self-centered” in that she relinquishes her longstanding belief—rooted in her experience as a woman—that the ultimate purpose of her days is to care for others. In becoming “self-centered” Françoise frees herself from the rending dissonance between her belief in the “nobility of devotion” (41)—self-abnegation—and the urgent reality of her own desires. Almost completely immobilized by illness, Françoise is much more limited in what she can pursue than at 54 when she began a new chapter following the death of her husband, but she still seizes the freedoms available to her. She relishes everyday pleasures like the scent of eau de Cologne and the sight of roses (60); Beauvoir writes it’s as if her mother “were waking afresh to the miracle of living” (60). More than just relieved to see her mother happy, Beauvoir finally finds in Françoise’s reclamation of her life a commonality: Both mother and daughter live knowing that life is too precious to waste any part of it—even sickness and old age—turned away from it in bitterness or resignation. This affirmation of life is the ethos of Beauvoir’s existential philosophy.

The Pain of an Inauthentic Existence

Françoise illustrates the truth of one Beauvoir’s philosophical ideas: An inauthentic life causes not only misery but confusion about why one is miserable. Inauthenticity is a type of cognitive dissonance, an ignorance of oneself and one’s circumstances. Françoise suffers this confused misery for most of her life, mainly as a result of the subordinate role that she is expected to play as a woman in early 20th century France—a role she plays with distress, despite her adherence to it.

Françoise is unhappy for most of her life because she lives in a world that expects her, as a woman, to devote herself completely to others. Out of a sense of duty to her family, Françoise sacrifices herself—her desires, her time, her happiness—for them. Consequently, she’s thrown into a painful state of inauthenticity, of dissonance, experiencing at once the urgency of her desires and their unimportance to the world. Françoise internalizes the unimportance of her desires in the world, stripping them of their inherent validity. This is what Beauvoir means when she writes that “her [mother’s] desires did not carry their own justification with them” (46). Françoise feels guilty for wanting things, resentful that no one cares, and unsure which of these feelings are justified. Estranged from herself and discontent in the world, Françoise long suffers the existential pain of an inauthentic life.

The main locus of Françoise’s pain and confusion is her marriage. From their honeymoon until his death, her husband Georges ignores her desires and humiliates her with numerous affairs. Georges embodies the patriarchal attitude of French society at the time and for Françoise is its primary instrument of oppression. Despite this mistreatment, Françoise is ignorant of the fact that Georges is the main source of her misery. When after Georges’s death Françoise’s sister Germaine hints that he was a bad husband, Françoise retorts that he made her very happy (44). To Françoise, it’s unthinkable that the husband she devoted herself to could have played such a role in her unhappiness. Beauvoir writes that her mother “could not discuss her difficulties with anyone at all, not even herself. She had not been taught to see her own motives plainly nor to use her own judgment” (49). Since in Françoise’s world it is a given that a woman’s purpose is to sacrifice herself for her family, she can’t fathom that this sacrifice is the source of her misery. Consequently, Françoise suffers in confusion for more than 30 years until Georges’s death liberates her.

The Lie of an Easy Death

The title of the memoir, both in French and in translation, immediately highlights the idea of an “easy” death, suggesting at first that the story will be a description of such a death. The story shows this concept to be fraught with difficulty and to be a lie in the case of Françoise, whose death is not at all easy, despite what the nurse insists. The reader’s realization of this fact mirrors the increasing disillusionment and powerlessness of Simone and Hélène as Françoise’s suffering increases.

Part of this lie rests on the ambiguity of what an “easy death” might mean to different parties. The desire for an “easy” death defines Simone’s, Hélène’s, and, to some extent, the doctors’ treatment of Françoise in her final weeks. For Simone and Hélène, an easy death mainly means that the process of dying causes Françoise as little physical suffering and psychological distress as possible; in stark terms, the quicker Françoise dies, the less pain she’ll have to endure. The other factor behind this desire for an easy death for the dying is fear. In a culture afraid of death, an easy death is a death that is easy to watch.

Because death is something people don’t like to think about, the facilities related to it are designed to conceal death. In the geriatric clinic in which Françoise spends her final weeks, death is common but largely unseen. This is partly accomplished through its decor, which Beauvoir notes resembles that of another liminal space: an airport:

[L]ow tables, modern armchairs, people kissing one another as they say hallo or good-bye, others waiting, suitcases, hold-alls, flowers in the vases, bouquets wrapped in shiny paper as if they were meant for welcoming travellers about to land. (56)

Beauvoir tells readers what it feels like to be in clinic, unmediated by retrospective reflection. Beauvoir goes on to describe how occasionally a stray appearance fractures this innocuous facade: “sometimes a man entirely clothed in white appears in the opening of the door at the far end, and there is blood on his shoes” (56). The spectral appearance of the doctor tips the true purpose of the clinic, the blood on his shoes a discreet symbol of the death—visceral, disturbing, untamable—that lurks behind every door in the clinic.

Beauvoir is generally critical of these futile efforts to hide death, including the endless life-extending treatments they give Françoise. These treatments are portrayed as selfish on the part of the doctors who seek to “experiment” and extend their control. Anguished by her mother’s physical deterioration, Beauvoir herself sometimes tacitly approves of the treatments because they give the illusion that her mother isn’t dying. Françoise’s deathly pallor disturbs Beauvoir, who periodically refers to her mother’s transformation into a living corpse. Blood transfusions and IV infusions of vitamins restore a healthy glow to Françoise’s face: “The poor suffering thing that had been lying on this bed the day before had turned back into a woman” (43). For Beauvoir, Françoise’s physical decline is a process of depersonalization—the deterioration of her mother into a mere thing, an organism, a corpse—that is profoundly distressing. The life-extending treatments temporarily reverse this depersonalization, transforming the unfamiliar dying body back into Beauvoir’s mother. Though the purpose of the treatments is to give Françoise extra days or weeks, they also give Beauvoir a reprieve from witnessing her mother’s irreversible deterioration. The purpose behind these life-prolonging treatments isn’t only to extend Françoise’s life and ease her suffering, it’s to make it as painless as possible to witness.

Beauvoir writes that staying with her father’s body after his death “tamed the transition between presence and the void” (66); this is what Beauvoir wants—but doesn’t get—with her mother’s death. Turning away in anguish from the death of a loved is a natural thing to do, but, as Beauvoir writes, it is also a denial of an unavoidable part of life, a denial that can estrange us both from our own feelings about death and from the person dying.