Between rejection and redemption: Representations of the father in Sartre, Beauvoir, Genet, and Camus, 1939--1949.

Abstract

In the decade from 1939 to 1949, French society underwent extreme social and political upheaval. My project looks at this particular decade in which questions pertaining to fathers and fatherhood arose as a product of the war and the occupation, and argues that national anxiety about the place and importance of the father is echoed in the work of four of her most important writers from this period: Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Genet, and Albert Camus. My dissertation analyzes the dissonance between the existentialist accounts of interpersonality in the works of Sartre and Beauvoir, and the representation of the father in their literary writing from this period. It highlights a fundamental discrepancy between the apparently uncomplicated rejection of the father as a perpetrator of patriarchal domination and a multivalent redemption of the father in the works studied, in which fathers further, rather than obstruct, freedom. Despite the apparent antipatriarchalism of their philosophical and political thought, both Sartre and Beauvoir depict the repeated reinstatement of the father in their literary works. My analysis of texts by Genet and Camus highlights a relationship between sacrifice and fatherhood and shows this connection to be fundamental to the construction of their narratives; Genet's pursuit of sainthood and preoccupation with origins cannot be read without acknowledging the place of the father in his personal mythology. Similarly, Camus's insistent use of the figure of the guillotine is not only bound to the absent father but is also the catalyst for a movement to reinscribe him into the narrative body. My dissertation demonstrates that rethinking the father's position both in society and in its literature at this crucial moment of French history allows us to pursue a more complex reading of his association with the fundamental topoi of freedom, sacrifice, and promise.