Volume 4, 2011
Selected Essays from Northern Europe
Silvia Stoller
Pages 304-314
The Sleep of the Beloved
Beauvoir on Patriarchal Love
What does love have to do with sleep? In her philosophical essay The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir reflects upon the sleep from the perspective of existentialist feminism, focusing on the French writer Violette Leduc and her novel Je hais les dormeurs from 1948 in which she describes how a woman unloads her hate for a man while he sleeps. These few passages remained widely unexplored within the phenomenological and feminist research. In this article, I explore Beauvoir’s existentialist reading of Leduc and suggest some alternative conclusions.