Dominique

Dominique’s brief elevation as an athlete exposes the narrow terms on which Montherlant’s fiction allows a woman to possess a self: her body may be admired when disciplined into athletic achievement, but her independent existence becomes objectionable as soon as she loves Alban. Beauvoir reads Dominique’s reversal as evidence that the ideal woman in these works is not an autonomous person but a subordinated figure who serves masculine desire.

Identity and Introduction

Dominique appears in Beauvoir’s discussion of Montherlant’s portrayal of women and of the male characters who judge them. She is associated with a thousand-meter victory, an achievement that momentarily raises her above the status assigned to women in these works. The text presents her not through an account of her own reflections, but through the opposing judgments of Alban and Beauvoir’s analysis of his response.

Her athletic accomplishment matters because Montherlant’s fiction makes sport a rare route by which a woman may acquire a spirit and soul. That recognition, however, remains conditional: Dominique’s standing depends on the exercise and discipline of her body, not on the acceptance of a woman as an independent subject in ordinary life.

Athletic Recognition and Reversal

Montherlant initially celebrates a thousand-meter winner in an enthusiastic hymn. He then withdraws from this elevated portrait, in Beauvoir’s account, because he believes he could easily seduce the athlete and wants to spare her that disgrace. Athletic success thus raises a woman only briefly, while the possibility of male access threatens to undo the distinction she has earned.

Alban calls Dominique to the heights associated with athletic spirit and self-discipline. But once she falls in love with him, her body becomes conspicuous in a way the narrative treats as a descent: she sweats, gives off body odor, becomes short of breath, and clears her throat. Alban drives her away, indignant. The sequence turns ordinary bodily signs into grounds for withdrawing esteem, exposing the contradiction in a standard that praises women’s bodily discipline while rejecting a woman whose embodied life accompanies consciousness and desire.

Relationship with Alban and Gendered Judgment

Dominique’s love for Alban changes her position in the story’s hierarchy. As an athlete, she can be praised for seeming to transcend what Montherlant’s writing regards as feminine limitations; as a woman in love, she is recast as bodily and dependent. Alban’s rejection makes the relation unequal: he summons her upward, then dismisses her when love places her within the conventional role he attributes to women.

Beauvoir contrasts this rejection with the narrow role Montherlant approves for women. A woman, in that ideal, may be valued as an object of pleasure when she is compliant and asks little of a man; an autonomous existence shaped through a woman’s own body is instead treated as scandalous. Dominique’s story therefore does not establish that her athletic achievement was false. It shows how quickly male judgment can revoke recognition when the woman it had elevated becomes a person with a life and attachment of her own.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

Dominique’s arc condenses Beauvoir’s critique of a fiction that makes feminine autonomy appear impossible. The athletic victor briefly embodies a woman’s capacity for spirit through the autonomous exercise of her body; the woman who loves Alban is then reduced to bodily signs and rejected. The reversal locates the problem not in a failure of her achievement but in the standard that grants women esteem only while they conform to a male-defined ideal.

Her limited narrative presentation is part of this pattern. Dominique’s significance emerges through the contrast between the hymn to the athlete and Alban’s indignation after she falls in love with him. The contrast reveals how a woman’s subjectivity is acknowledged only conditionally: athletic discipline may win praise, but love and embodied existence bring her back under a judgment that demands submission.