Di Secondo Sesso

Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex enters the novel not merely as a book Claire has written about, but as a public challenge to the social ideals governing marriage and women’s lives. When Claire reads from it at a Jewish school, its criticism of marriage as a structure of repetition and routine provokes a dispute; elsewhere, Adam’s account of religious practice and marital obligation supplies an intimate counterpoint to its argument.

The book in the school

Adam Wizman invites Claire to speak to his French students at the Jewish school where he teaches. Over six months, he writes her several letters persuading her to accept. He knows that the school’s religious character makes her hesitant, and argues that its students should have access to major feminist writing, including Simone de Beauvoir, whose work Claire has studied in her own book.

The students have read The Second Sex the day before Claire’s visit. During the meeting, she reads an extract from her book and then another from Beauvoir’s work, answering the students’ questions. The next day, Adam is summoned by the school’s administration: two students have told their parents that Claire discussed women and marriage in terms contrary to the Torah’s teaching. The dispute turns on Beauvoir’s claim that marriage’s tragedy is not simply that it fails to guarantee happiness, but that it mutilates women by condemning them to repetition and routine.

The controversy and its consequences

The response is not presented as the school community’s unanimous position. Most parents are described as open-minded and enthusiastic about Claire’s visit. A minority, however, pressures the administration and voices fears that she will exert a bad influence on their daughters. In a conservative setting where marriage is treated as a supreme and sanctified act, and religious precepts organize daily life and prescribe sharply differentiated roles, the passage is received as more than an abstract literary argument.

A petition follows the meeting, and Adam receives a warning. The novel describes this as the beginning of Adam and Claire’s relationship, marked from its outset by threat. The book thus functions both as a text being taught and as the immediate occasion for institutional pressure: a feminist challenge to marriage becomes a test of what the school permits its students to read and discuss.

Marriage, religious practice, and desire

The school controversy anticipates the conflict in Adam’s own marriage. After he and his family return to France from Israel, he teaches French at a Jewish school and lives within a largely community-based social world. His wife, Valérie Berdah, becomes increasingly observant, adopts the name Sarah, changes her clothing, covers her hair, and observes dietary restrictions, Shabbat, and the laws of family purity. Under those rules, she avoids physical contact with Adam from the first day of her period until the twelfth day afterward, when she immerses in a ritual bath. During that interval, she sleeps on a mattress on the floor, an arrangement Adam cannot bear to see.

Adam has spent nearly twenty years faithful to a wife who supported his professional projects and cared for their children. At her request, he celebrates her each Friday evening in the traditional song “A Woman of Valor.” Yet at forty-two he feels he is living with a stranger, and his affair with Claire brings a sexual and emotional intensity that makes him question the placid conjugal life he had accepted. The novel places the school’s dispute over Beauvoir’s critique beside this history: the ideals and routines that sanctify marriage can also become, for Adam, signs of estrangement and constraint.

A private life shaped by public pressures

Adam’s reluctance to leave his family is not reducible to religious observance. He fears losing daily contact with his daughters, breaking up a Jewish household, and becoming a pariah in the community. He also understands his identity through a sense of collective duty and survival. After the 2012 attack on a Jewish school in Toulouse, which kills three children and a father, Adam and Valérie take their daughters out of school and decide to leave France. Their attempt to settle in Israel fails: Adam feels unable to integrate without distorting himself, and is troubled by what he sees as the denial of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict among people who left France for safety. The family returns, carrying the insecurity that intensified Adam’s sense of obligation.

For a year after beginning his relationship with Claire, Adam keeps the affair parallel to family life. He and Claire spend days together, then return to the household and its guilt, restraint, and routine. Their largely secret correspondence is erotic, but their relationship has not yet been tested by everyday intimacy. The contrast matters to the book’s place in the novel: its argument about marriage is not offered as a simple verdict from outside the story. It meets the competing claims of desire, parenthood, communal belonging, and fear, each of which makes leaving consequential.

The argument’s continuing resonance

After Adam and Claire separate from their spouses, Adam’s former wife moves with their daughters to Crown Heights in Brooklyn, where Mila finds the religious community’s control of her clothing, conduct, and future intolerable. Mila eventually returns to France to live with her father and Claire. Much later, in testimony about Mila’s life, a psychologist describes her as having once liked her father’s new partner while resenting her for breaking up the family. These consequences complicate any reading of the novel’s marital conflict as a private liberation alone: a decision about marriage rearranges the lives of children as well as adults.

The Second Sex links these plotlines without making their circumstances identical. At the school, Beauvoir’s critique is contested as a threat to religious teaching; in Adam’s life, the tension between prescribed roles and personal desire becomes lived conflict; in the family’s aftermath, separation carries costs beyond the couple. The novel gives the book force through this movement from classroom passage to domestic arrangement and family consequence, showing how an argument about women’s place in marriage becomes inseparable from the social and intimate worlds in which it is heard.