Engendering Literary History: Jean-Paul Sartre’s What Is Literature?

Abstract

Immediately after the Second World War, Jean-Paul Sartre offered a history of literature as part of his project to launch a new era of literary activity guided by his concept of littérature engagée or committed literature. This article examines Sartre’s approach to the construction of literary history, highlighting his use of periodisation, a thematics of shifting relationships between writers and readers, and frequent deployment of gendered rhetoric to support his arguments. It shows that Sartre repeatedly used gendered tropes that worked to associate women, females and/or femininity with characteristics generally devalued in European and other Western societies, such as passivity, ignorance and indecision. It is argued that the touchstone to which Sartre continually referred in formulating his literary history was Julien Benda’s La Trahison des Clercs (Treason of the Intellectuals). The argument to be developed takes broad inspiration from the work of Hayden White on the analysis of historical texts, and follows his injunction that historians and readers of history need to become more conscious of how histories are made.

1. Introduction

This article explores the way in which Jean-Paul Sartre made use of a particular schema of the history of literature (actually French literary history or perhaps Western European literary history) in setting out his intellectual program for the years following the Second World War. It examines Sartre’s adoption of historical periodisation as a structuring device and organisational principle; his employment of a thematics of the changing relationships between writers and readers based on economic and related ideological shifts; and his frequent deployment of gendered rhetoric, most notably as an extended metaphor for the relations between writers and the reading public. This introductory section provides a brief background on Sartre and his cultural significance; an overview of existing literature on Sartre and sexism; a brief assessment of the contributions of Julien Benda, which Sartre used constantly as a touchstone for his history; and recognition of the influence of Hayden White on the approach adopted in this analysis of Sartre’s work.

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) was among the most influential intellectuals of the quarter century after the Second World War. Perhaps the most outstanding feature of his contributions as an intellectual was their multidisciplinary nature. Sartre was a prolific literary author, creating novels, plays and screenplays, his output in the field of literature was recognised as the highest level of achievement. In 1964, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, despite his attempts to decline the offer, explaining that in his view a writer should not be institutionalised. Sartre also produced outstanding work in the fields of philosophy, literary theory, literary criticism and biography, in addition to a voluminous output of political commentary, covering virtually all the major issues of his time. His work spanned the categories of fiction and non-fiction. The writing of history is one field of intellectual activity not usually associated with his name, perhaps because existentialism as a philosophy is mainly projected towards the future. Nevertheless, as will be shown in this article, he was certainly able to formulate and present an impressive historical narrative in order to achieve his literary and political aims.

The aftermath of the Second World War found Sartre agonised, but ever optimistic. Like many other European thinkers at the time, he was convinced that “peace is a new beginning”, an opportunity to chart a new course for individuals and for society (Sartre 2008, p. 67). Together with his partner, Simone de Beauvoir, and other friends, Sartre set up a new journal, Les Temps Modernes (Modern Times), a monthly literary and political review. Published by Gallimard in Paris, the inaugural issue appeared in October 1945, and the journal continued to operate for 74 years until 2019. In the first issue, Sartre proclaimed its manifesto: “We don’t want to miss out on anything of our time…We are convinced, on the contrary, that one cannot remove one’s stakes from the board…The writer is situated in his time; every word he utters has reverberations” (Sartre 1988, p. 252, emphasis in original). These ideas were the hallmarks of Sartre’s concept of littérature engagée (engaged literature, in the sense of committed literature).

Over the period from February to July 1947, Sartre contributed to Les Temps Modernes a series of papers in six instalments under the title “What is Literature?”. This article focuses especially on one of the sub-sections in this series entitled “For Whom Does One Write?”. In this paper, Sartre’s attention was directed to the historical development of a reading public and how that impacted the role of the writer and the characteristics of literature. This historical discourse would set the stage for, and at the same time help to explain, Sartre’s concept of a new approach to literary work which would promote littérature engagée. Sartre’s construction of this sweeping literary history was a significant element in his plan to set out a program of work to be pursued by him and his literary fellow travellers, especially under the auspices of Les Temps Modernes.

A constant reference point in Sartre’s presentation was the work of Julien Benda (1867–1956), a French litterateur, philosopher and critic, in particular, his renowned treatise La Trahison des Clercs (1927; translated as The Treason of the Intellectuals for the American edition, and The Great Betrayal in the British translation). In the assessment of Davide Cadeddu, whenever “the problem of the relationship between culture and politics is addressed, Julien Benda undoubtedly remains the most frequently mentioned author at the international level” (Cadeddu 2023, p. 708). Sometimes Sartre’s use of Benda as a point of reference is made explicit in his text; more often it remains implicit. In La Trahison, Benda contended that during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and most notably in the 1920s, European intellectuals had compromised their previous commitment to the exercise of dispassionate reason and the fostering of moral values; and had descended instead into the debased realm of political advocacy as apologists for certain narrow political causes. It is worth noting that in arguing his case, Benda, like Sartre, made use of a particular, highly stylised and sweeping rendition of European intellectual history. Benda railed particularly against intellectuals elevating in their works the politics of nationalism, racism and war. As Benda saw it, a writer failed to perform their “proper functions” when they entered the public arena “with a view to the triumph of some realist passion, whether of class, race, or nation” (Benda 2021, p. 31).

Benda’s position has often been mistaken to imply that intellectuals should never become involved in public or political issues. In La Trahison, Benda made it clear that he was not opposed to writers joining in public debates if they did so for moral reasons and for the improvement of humanity; in his subsequent publications such as the Discours à la nation européenne (1933), he went so far as to urge intellectuals to engage in public advocacy and even the production of propaganda, as Davide Cadeddu has shown (Cadeddu 2023). In some ways Sartre’s views aligned with those of Benda. For instance, he advised that one “must win an inner victory over one’s passions, one’s race, one’s class, and one’s nation and must conquer other men along with oneself” (Sartre 1988, p. 70). On other points, as will be shown below, Sartre diverged from Benda’s position.

This article highlights Sartre’s use of gendered tropes in the composition of his history. There is a significant literature available dealing with the question of how sexist Sartre was. Margery Collins and Christine Pierce argued convincingly that, most notably in Being and Nothingness (1943), Sartre’s magisterial essay on phenomenological ontology, he consistently represented women in association with his concept of being-in-itself, the mode of being inert, unself-conscious objects; whereas men tended to be shown as in alignment with the being-for-itself, the dynamic, purposive being of conscious subjects, the locus of agency. Especially in his nauseated comments regarding holes and slime, Collins and Pierce saw Sartre as creating links between the qualities of the in-itself and characteristics that are generally associated, in anatomy and behaviour, with the female (Collins and Pierce 1976, p. 119). Michèle Le Doeuff provided a cogent analysis of Sartre’s treatment of women, especially in Being and Nothingness and also in his private correspondence. She showed that his approach to women was virtually exclusively in terms of their gender and, even more specifically, their sexuality. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre gave examples to illustrate his concept of “bad faith” (mauvaise foi), or inauthenticity, within his philosophical system of existentialism. Le Doeuff argued that most of these examples, which attracted moral censure from Sartre, depicted people who were subject to oppression: notably women, or members of the working class, as in Sartre’s famous image of the cafe waiter (Le Doeuff 1991, p. 64). Sartre’s two examples of female “bad faith” were highly sexualised, and as Le Doeuff pointed out, what they had in common was that in “both cases the fault comes down to this: the woman portrayed does not acquiesce sufficiently to what her husband or the man who flirts with her wants from her” (Le Doeuff 1991, p. 64). In other words, these examples can be interpreted as illustrations of male entitlement rather than a lack of authenticity on the part of the women. Le Doeuff also observed that in Being and Nothingness Sartre did not depict women when the topic under discussion was work, occupation or career, nor did he show them participating in broader historical events such as war or the French resistance; they only appeared in relation to sexuality. Le Doeuff began writing critically about Sartre, and about his relationship with Simone de Beauvoir, in the 1970s, while they were both still alive (Le Doeuff 1977). In Hipparchia’s Choice (Le Doeuff 1991), she dealt with the topic in depth. Other scholars have come to similar conclusions (Barnes 1990, p. 341; Burstow 1992, p. 32). On the other hand, there have certainly been scholarly studies that defend Sartre against the charge of sexism, mainly by showing that his works, particularly his literary productions, contained an implicit critique of patriarchy (Webber 2024); or by arguing that his later philosophical texts showed greater awareness of feminist issues, perhaps under the influence of his long-time partner, Beauvoir, the author of the landmark feminist text, The Second Sex (Edwards 2021).

Thus the combined available scholarship addressing Sartre and sexism has covered his philosophical texts, works of fiction and his personal correspondence. In this article, the focus will be on his contributions to literary theory in the immediate post-war years, his most creative period. These were, without doubt, more widely read than more forbidding texts such as Being and Nothingness; though probably less popular than his plays and novels, they were more influential in the international academic milieu and contributed greatly to his growing international acclaim.

In its inquiry into Sartre’s deployment of a particular version of European history, principally French history, this article has been influenced by the insights developed by Hayden White (1928–2018), especially as set out in Metahistory: The Historical Imagination of Nineteenth-Century Europe (White 1973), his best-known work, and The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (White 1987). In his extensive oeuvre, White exhorted historians to become more self-aware about the narrative techniques they employed in producing their histories. White’s approach to analysing historiography called attention to features of historians’ work such as the structuring of historical texts, the ways historical narratives are emplotted, modes of explanation and argumentation, and the use of metaphors and other literary tropes. In the introduction to Metahistory, for instance, White laid out a challenge to conventional history writing, calling on historians to become more self-conscious and attentive regarding the effects and impacts of the methods of narration they adopted. White insisted that a value-free history was impossible (White 1973, pp. 279–80), and that histories are “verbal fictions, the contents of which are as much invented as found and the forms of which have more in common with their counterparts in literature than they have with those in the sciences” (White 1978, p. 82, emphasis in original). Given White’s affirmation of the need to transcend disciplinary boundaries, his insights seem especially relevant to analysing Sartre’s work. This article is not a direct application of White’s categories and arguments, but it owes much to his general approach to the analysis of historiography.

2. Sartre’s Literary History

This section gives a brief outline of Sartre’s treatment of literary history in What is Literature?. It emphasises his use of historical periodisation as an organisational device, and his frequent resort to gendered tropes. The recurrent motif is the changing relationship between writers and readers, based on economic and related ideological shifts, an approach clearly influenced by Hegel, Feuerbach and Marx. I am not a Nobel Prize-winning author and the summary outline below cannot compete with the brilliance, eloquence and verve of Sartre’s exposition, to which I recommend the interested reader.

(a) 

The Middle Ages

The first major period that Sartre delineated was that of “medieval society”. The exact dating of this period in history was left rather vague. Sartre alluded at one point to “Europe in about the twelfth century”; at another point in the discussion, he talked of “the first centuries of our era” (Sartre 1988, p. 82). For this period, Sartre identified the writer as a clerk, meaning a specialised member of the Catholic church whose job entailed reading and writing Christian works. To meet the spiritual needs of medieval society, a group of literary specialists was recruited, who were defined by their literary skills, an expertise which was reserved exclusively for them. “To be able to read was to have the necessary tool for acquiring knowledge of the sacred texts and their innumerable commentaries; to be able to write was to be able to comment” (Sartre 1988, p. 83). These scribes produced chronicles, philosophical works, religious commentaries and poetry.

At this time in history, virtually the entire population, including the overwhelming majority of the nobility, was illiterate. Since only the clerks exercised the skills of reading and writing, “the clerk wrote exclusively for clerks” (Sartre 1988, p. 82). Yet the clerk could maintain a “good conscience” (Sartre 1988, p. 82) or a “happy conscience” (Sartre 1988, p. 85) because in the ruling ideology, there was a strict divorce between the realms of the spiritual and the temporal. In this period, the Christian church was the “spirit made object” (Sartre 1988, p. 83), or as Sartre put it a little more aggressively, “the spiritual was a captive of Christianity” (Sartre 1988, p. 82). According to Sartre, it was “evident that instead of appearing as the common and forever renewed experience of all men, [spirituality] manifested itself at first as the specialty of a few” (Sartre 1988, p. 83). There was a strict division of labour within the society, and the elite relied on the clerks to “produce and watch over spirituality” (Sartre 1988, p. 83). The upper class did not exert direct control over writers, and could not themselves decide on issues within the spiritual realm. The realm of the spirit was the only concern of the clerk. Literacy was used solely as the means of “preserving and transmitting Christian ideology” (Sartre 1988, p. 83).

In many ways, Benda’s La Trahison was Sartre’s touchstone in this representation of the roles of the writer and of literature in the Middle Ages. Sartre commented that in a sense the writer in this period realised the ideal of Benda (Sartre 1988, p. 84). However, Sartre pointed out that this was possible only because certain restrictive, and on the whole undesirable, conditions were met: the alienation of literature and spirituality from the broader population; a single dominating ideology; a feudal division of labour to support the scribes; a mostly illiterate population; and a self-referential clique of writers and readers (Sartre 1988, p. 84). Like La Trahison, Sartre’s depiction of this chronologically ill-defined period, and also the subsequent period of the seventeenth century, referenced the notion of the organic society. In its standard form, as adopted by Benda, this was the myth of an integrated, harmonious and fairly static society, which often served as a status quo ante in intellectuals’ polemics that portrayed historical change as degeneration from this idealised baseline. In addition to Benda’s lament on the deterioration of intellectuals’ performance over the centuries, this myth of an originary paradisal state, a paradise lost, had already been utilised to striking effect in the field of literary history by Georg Lukács in The Theory of the Novel; A Historico-philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature (Lukács [1920] 1971). In contrast, Sartre offered a far more critical approach to this mythical idea. As Raymond Williams later warned, the “concept of a wholly organic and satisfying past, to be set against a disintegrated and dissatisfying present, tends in its neglect of history to a denial of real social experience” (Williams 1960, p. 281).

(b) 

The Seventeenth Century in France

One of the major hallmarks of this period was the beginning of the process of secularisation of both writers and their readers. This was associated with the gradual expansion of education, the weakening power of the Catholic church, and the development of new ideologies centred on temporal life. However, the reading public remained extremely limited, confined to what was designated “society”, which comprised a segment of the royal court, the clergy, the magistracy and the wealthy bourgeoisie. Despite the beginnings of secularisation, in the seventeenth century, “religious ideology went hand in hand with a political ideology” and “no one publicly questioned the existence of God or the divine right of kings” (Sartre 1988, p. 86). Since seventeenth-century writers accepted without criticism the ideology of the dominant elite, they made themselves accomplices of their audience. Their function was to reflect back to themselves the lifestyle and beliefs of their upper-class readers. Writers enjoyed as good, “or almost as good” (Sartre 1988, p. 87), a conscience as the medieval clerks, since they did not need to question themselves about their role in society.

Whereas Sartre’s portrait of medieval society completely omitted the existence of women, there were some gendered elements in his characterisation of the seventeenth century. He identified “the reader” as a “gentleman”, in French a honnête homme, or an honest, decent man of the world, and according to Sartre this gentleman himself was able to write well and therefore was in a position to judge the work of the author. However, having named the reader as a gentleman, Sartre went on to list three women as examples: Madame de Sévigné (Marie de Rabutin-Chantal), Madame de Grignan (Françoise-Marguerite de Sévigné) and Madame de Rambouillet (Catherine de Vivonne). The first was known for her voluminous correspondence—which has now been published—with the second, her daughter; while the third was an influential society and literary hostess. By contrast, the two men whom Sartre listed, Chevalier de Mere (Antoine Gombaud) and Saint-vremonde (Charles de Saint-vremond), were published authors at this time. Those listed were among the accomplished reading public, according to Sartre, of the literary “lions” of the period: Corneille, Pascal and Descartes. Writing personal letters was one of the few outlets for literary talent available to women in this period; organising a literary salon was a way in which a small number of elite women could be involved in the literary world. Neither of these roles conferred the prestige of authorship. Sartre did not draw attention to the differences in the situations facing the women and men whom he named, nor recognise the differential constraints under which they were able to participate in literary activity.

(c) 

The Eighteenth Century

According to Sartre, the eighteenth century was “the palmy time, unique in history, and the soon-to-be-lost paradise, of French writers” (Sartre 1988, p. 93). The reason why this was such a salubrious era for writers, as Sartre saw it, was that there emerged a bifurcation in the reading public between two rival segments of society: the old elite of court and church in decline, who even themselves no longer had faith in their own ideology; and the bourgeoisie, which in this period was the “rising class”, who wanted to construct an ideology that would better suit their aspirations. Writers found themselves in the fortunate position of being solicited by both groups and thus, as Sartre put it, “collecting at both ends” (1988, p. 96). Meanwhile, the size of the reading public itself had expanded because of the education of the middle class, creating an enlarged market for literary works.

Writers no longer relied for their sustenance on a unified ruling class. The elite might provide pensions for approved authors, but it was the bourgeoisie who were buying most of the books. The positioning of the writer between these two classes in a state of tension and growing conflict changed intellectuals’ notions of literature itself. Whereas literature “up to then had been only a conservative and purifying function of an integrated society” (Sartre 1988, p. 97), in the eighteenth-century literati began to assert the autonomy and independence of literature. Writers of this period constantly intervened in public life; they had decided that “the spiritual was in the street, at the fair, in the marketplace, at the tribunal” (Sartre 1988, p. 102). Hence, as Sartre pointed out, these writers did not meet the criteria of Benda’s “clerk” (Sartre 1988, p. 102). This was an implicit criticism of Benda’s chronology since in Benda’s historical arc the degeneration of purist intellectual standards and demise of the “clerk” occurred later, in the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, Sartre explained how conditions prevailing in the eighteenth century led to writers developing, and identifying themselves with, the concept of the “universal man”, who supposedly was capable of transcending circumstances of race, class and nationality (Sartre 1988, p. 99). Benda’s concept of the “clerk” showed many similarities to that of the “universal man”. Note that Sartre never included gender or sex when he listed such aspects of differentiation among intellectuals or writers, and neither did Benda. This omission reinforced the idea that women were never included in the concepts of “writer” or “intellectual”, an example of “gender-blind sexism” as theorised by Stoll et al. (2016).

At the conclusion of his outline of literary developments in the eighteenth century, Sartre had recourse to gender-based rhetoric in giving an account of the mental outlook of writers of that period. He reported that “below him he caught a glimpse of an unformed and passionate waiting, a more feminine, more undifferentiated kind of desire” (Sartre 1988, p. 103). The “feminine” was thus bracketed with the “unformed” and “undifferentiated”, and with “waiting” in a passive, receptive position. The imagery was also sexualised, as in references to “passionate” and “desire”; and it was hierarchical, with those positioned as “below” coupled to that which is “feminine”. The writer in this imaginary sexual encounter was implicitly, but emphatically, male.

(d) 

The Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

The victory of the bourgeoisie in the French Revolution led to a sharp downturn in the situation of writers and intellectuals, in Sartre’s account of this history. After the revolution, the bourgeoisie and the nobility fused, so that writers could no longer take advantage of their split and again had to deal with a unified reading public. There was no other choice but to work in the interests of the new dominant class, which conceived literary work not as “disinterested creation but as a paid service” (Sartre 1988, p. 104). Sartre presented a dazzling analysis of the mentalité of the nineteenth-century bourgeois (pp. 104–8). Writers were expected to be useful in helping the bourgeoisie create and entrench its own ideology. The best of them refused, and entered into a long struggle against their own readers: this “fundamental conflict between the writer and his public was an unprecedented phenomenon in literary history” (Sartre 1988, p. 109). According to Sartre, romanticism was “a vain attempt to avoid open conflict” by “depending upon the aristocracy against the liberal bourgeoisie” (Sartre 1988, p. 109). However, “after 1850 there was no longer any means of covering up the profound contradiction which opposed bourgeois ideology to the requirements of literature” (Sartre 1988, p. 109).

Unable to address their work to, or take up the interests of the lower classes, who remained largely uneducated, writers lived in “a state of contradiction and dishonesty” because they “both knew and did not want to know for whom” they were writing (Sartre 1988, p. 113, emphasis in original). As part of this self-deception, and to veil the intolerable reality, they “made of writing a metaphysical occupation, a prayer, an examination of conscience, everything but a communication” (Sartre 1988, p. 109). In literary circles a sort of priesthood emerged, where art was worshipped as “sacred to the extent that it turned aside from life” (Sartre 1988, p. 115). Sartre saw common features in the various approaches to literature, and to art in general, developed by the major schools of the nineteenth century: “From ‘art for art’s sake’ to symbolism, including realism and the Parnassians, all schools agreed that art was the highest form of pure consumption. It taught nothing, it reflected no ideology, and above all, it refrained from moralizing” (Sartre 1988, p. 117). Benda had noted some of the same characteristics, above all the avoidance of moral stances, which became the basis of his critique in La Trahison. At the end of the century, the basic contradiction remained unresolved between how writers conceived of literature and their role in society, and the uses the bourgeoisie wished to make of them.

In terms of Sartre’s literary history, the early twentieth century was very much a continuation of the nineteenth, only more so, with the bourgeois class still dominant, and the literati struggling to find a satisfactory place for themselves and for literature under the bourgeois social order. By the twentieth century, as Sartre saw it, literature had become Anti-literature and the spirit of Negation reigned. The central precept of writers and intellectuals was irresponsibility. Sartre characterised the writers of this period as revelling in destructiveness, gratuitousness and scandal. They wrote “in order to consume literature: one squandered literary traditions, hashed together words, threw them against each other to make them shatter” (Sartre 1988, p. 120). In a significant phrase, Sartre described the writer of this period as “a rebel, not a revolutionary” (Sartre 1988, p. 122), an idea that was taken up and developed by Raymond Williams in The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (Williams 1989). Sartre took the surrealist movement as emblematic of twentieth-century degradation of literature, and launched a merciless attack upon them as an artistic school.

Having reached the conclusion of his literary history, Sartre admitted its obvious limitations: “Will anyone doubt that I am aware how incomplete and debatable these analyses are? Exceptions abound, and I know them, but it would take a big book to go into them. I have touched only the high spots” (Sartre 1988, p. 132). Sartre believed that the historical experiences he had outlined and “the preceding analyses” could provide a basis for setting out “the essential traits of a concrete and liberated literature” (Sartre 1988, p. 135). This he proceeded to do, although he conceded that his speculations about the future of literature were somewhat dependent on the advent of a classless society, “a society without cleavages” (pp. 137–38) which, as he had previously admitted, “does not for the moment exist, and it may be doubted whether it is possible” (Sartre 1988, p. 82). As Raymond Williams declared in reference to the mythical idea of the organic society, if “there is one thing certain about ‘the organic community’, it is that it has always gone” (Williams 1960, p. 277); or perhaps will never arrive. Nevertheless, Sartre believed that movement towards more ideal social arrangements was possible, which in turn would allow for the emergence of unalienated, liberated literature: “I say that the literature of a given age is alienated when it has not arrived at the explicit consciousness of its autonomy and when it submits to temporal powers or to an ideology, in short, when it considers itself as a means and not as an unconditioned end” (Sartre 1988, p. 134). In the end, this was a view of literature that in many ways was consonant with that advocated by Benda in La Trahison.

(e) 

Gender in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Sartre’s discourse on the nineteenth, and especially the twentieth centuries, repeatedly made use of gendered imagery and tropes, particularly in the form of gender-based binaries between men and women, masculinity and femininity. Reinforcing the notion of female passivity, Sartre compared the generalised state of mind of the contemporary, post-war reading public to the waiting receptivity, but lack of creativity, of women: “Today the public, in relation to the writer, is in a state of passiveness: it waits for ideas or a new art form to be imposed upon it” (Sartre 1988, p. 85). In a vast generalisation, Sartre described the reading public as an “inert mass”. He explicitly drew a comparison with gender relations: “the relationship between author and reader is analogous to that of male and female” (Sartre 1988, p. 85). The contemporary reading public was said to display “a tremendous feminine questioning, the waiting of a whole society which the writer would have to seduce and satisfy” (Sartre 1988, p. 137).

Going further with the sexualised metaphors, links were drawn between the role of the writer and sexual assault. Sartre wrote, using the language of rape and compulsory pregnancy, of the reading public as “an indecisive mass, which one surprises, overwhelms, and suddenly animates by revealing to it ideas or feelings of which it was ignorant, and which, lacking firm convictions, constantly requires being ravished and fecundated” (Sartre 1988, p. 86). In this disturbing image of sexual aggression, the reading public is pictured and positioned as female, with correlations to passivity, ignorance and indecisiveness.

In the context of his scathing attack on the surrealists as the representative school of the twentieth century, Sartre designated women as their “victims” (Sartre 1988, p. 120) and suggested a revenge mentality on the part of surrealist artists in their attitudes towards them: women “would make him suffer and he would pay them back with interest” (Sartre 1988, p. 121). The category of women surrealist artists (Allmer 2016) entered nowhere into Sartre’s discussion; this way of presenting his critique reinforced the notion that women were never surrealist artists, or indeed artists in general. There were also examples of casual dismissal of women as a group. For instance, discussing the improvident lifestyles adopted by many writers in the nineteenth century, Sartre outlined three kinds of unproductive activity (“love”, travel and war), the first being “love, because it is a useless passion and because women, as Nietzsche said, are the most dangerous game” (Sartre 1988, p. 116).

Aside from his putative literary history, in other sections of What is Literature? Sartre repeatedly employed similar tropes linking women, females and/or femininity to qualities that were widely disparaged in the broader culture. Writing in a vein of faux sympathy for the pathetic figure of the literary critic, Sartre referred to his “nagging wife” (Sartre 1988, p. 42) who “does not appreciate him as she ought to” (Sartre 1988, p. 41). For the purposes of his argument, Sartre wished to diminish the status of the critic, so he painted an invented image of him being treated poorly by a woman, that is, not being admired sufficiently by a woman. Sartre went on to question the common idea that “the unhappily married man who writes about marriage with talent has made a good book with his conjugal woes” (Sartre 1988, p. 239, emphasis in original). Sartre pointed out, reasonably, that books are made out of words, not problems; furthermore, writing does not fix personal problems. To fix a wife who causes problems for an author, Sartre offered other advice. If the writer “wants to keep his wife from being disagreeable, it is a mistake to write about her; he would do better to beat her” (Sartre 1988, p. 240). Sartre’s seemingly casual endorsement of domestic violence is shocking, at least to this reader; yet it seems to have gone unnoticed in decades of mainstream commentary on Sartre’s writings, including his literary theory and philosophy. The casualness of such a gesture in favour of violence against women has the effect of naturalising such attacks, even if the comment was intended to be jocular; indeed, even more so then.

It is difficult if not impossible to speculate about what Sartre might have been thinking in choosing to insert such an approbation of domestic violence in his presentation. Whatever his motives may have been, its inclusion shows that he considered such an endorsement to be acceptable in the literary and academic forum in which he participated, and that he probably thought it would be acceptable to most of his readers. It would be easy to focus attention on the most grievous sexist remarks made by Sartre in this text, such as those referring to sexual aggression and domestic violence. What is important to recognise is that these comments were not aberrations or outliers, but were consistent with the import of Sartre’s continual recourse to gender-based language and ideology, as documented above There is no question of previous feminist analysts having been remiss in not addressing these unambiguous examples of Sartre’s sexism in What is Literature?, since they worked on other parts of his extensive oeuvre. As outlined in the Introduction, their contributions have demonstrated the sexist elements in texts such as his philosophical works, correspondence and literary output, and in the case of Michèle Le Doeuff, offered a close investigation of misogyny in Sartre’s relationship with Beauvoir using his correspondence and her fictional works as sources.

In “Situation of the Writer in 1947”, which appeared as part of the series “What is Literature?”, Sartre referred again to “a passive and female waiting” (Sartre 1988, p. 205). Sartre appeared to have been deeply affected, understandably, by his awareness of tortures committed by the German occupation forces in Paris during the war, especially the torture of his friends involved in the resistance movement, or close neighbours (pp. 178–81). When he later described, imaginatively, the experience of succumbing to torture, he invoked gendered imagery, picturing a “groaning, sweating, filthy creature who begs for mercy and abandons himself in a swooning consent with the moanings of an amorous woman” (Sartre 1988, p. 179). The link forged between torture and a woman giving consent to sex was dubious, to say the least. Sartre’s gendered metaphor had the effect of associating women’s sexuality with yielding to force, acquiescence, submission, self-abandonment and self-subjugation.

To add an element of irony, or for some, of poignancy, Sartre was making such ample use of this gendered rhetoric at the same time as his partner, Simone de Beauvoir, was beginning her pathbreaking work on the oppression of women, The Second Sex. Beauvoir researched and wrote this pioneering work of feminist philosophy in about fourteen months between 1946 and 1949, when it was published by Gallimard. In later life, Beauvoir was willing to reflect publicly on Sartre’s sexism. In an interview in 1975, in Sartre’s presence, she commented that he showed “des traces de machisme, et même de phallocratie” (some traces of machismo and even phallocracy) (Sartre 1976, p. 119). It is perhaps also relevant to note that French women were only allowed to vote in national elections for the first time in 1945.

Sartre himself was clearly conscious of the prevalence in literature of appeals to the assumptions and prejudices of readers. In his sketch of the history of literature in seventeenth-century France, he portrayed writers as giving shape to the commonplaces of the period, so that reading became a ceremony of recognition analogous to the bow of salutation, that is, the ceremonious affirmation that the author and reader are of the same world and have the same opinions about everything…. the reader, for his part, never tires of finding the same thoughts in the most diverse of books because these thoughts are his own and he does not ask to acquire others but only to be offered with magnificence those which he already has. Hence, it is in a spirit of complicity that the author presents and the reader accepts (Sartre 1988, p. 89, emphasis in original).

In the same way, Sartre’s casually thrown-off derisive comments regarding women could be casual because they did not need to be argued for or explained, since they reflected the taken-for-granted, generally accepted mutual assumptions of both writers and many readers in the mid-twentieth century, and beyond.

3. Conclusions

This article has examined Jean-Paul Sartre’s figuration of European literary history in his influential post-war work of literary theory and philosophy, What is Literature?. It has foregrounded his use of historical periodisation as a structuring device and organisational framework; his employment of a thematics of the changing relationships between writers and readers based on economic and associated ideological shifts; and his deployment of gendered binaries and gendered rhetorical devices. It has been argued that in composing his history of literature, Sartre was in a constant, and complex, dialogue with Julien Benda, especially La Trahison des Clercs; Sartre endorsed many of Benda’s views but questioned others. A significant literature exists addressing the question of how sexist Sartre was, and the analysis presented here confirms and extends many of the criticisms previously put forward. To portray relationships between writers and readers, the central theme of his literary history, Sartre made use of an extended metaphor picturing the reading public as female. Indeed, he explicitly stated the analogy: “the relationship between author and reader is analogous to that of male and female” (Sartre 1988, p. 85). In order to emphasise the debased condition of the reading public in modern society, he repeatedly compared it to a woman. He employed derogatory and dismissive remarks, stereotypes and tropes about women, females and the feminine as part of his mode of argumentation, and sometimes on a more adventitious basis, probably reflecting personal prejudices and unconscious biases. The approach taken in this article was broadly inspired by the work of Hayden White on history and historiography. As White emphasised, “if historians were to recognize the fictive element in their narratives, this would not mean the degradation of historiography to the status of ideology or propaganda. In fact, this recognition would serve as a potent antidote to the tendency of historians to become captive of ideological preconceptions which they do not recognize as such…We are always able to see the fictive element in those historians with whose interpretations of a given set of events we disagree; we seldom perceive that element in our own prose” (White 1978, p. 99). This analysis of Sartre’s imaginative construction of literary history has revealed the pervasiveness of gendered presuppositions, the marks of machismo, in the thinking of a prodigious author of the twentieth century who believed, mistakenly, that everything he wrote was in the service of human freedom.