Natasha and Sonya’s friendship

Natasha and Sonya’s friendship is an example of the intimate bonds girls form through confidences, shared secrets, and expressive gestures. In Simone de Beauvoir’s account, Sonya’s act of burning her arm with a red-hot ruler is a proof of love for Natasha; the friendship matters not only as personal attachment but as a way for girls to recognize and affirm one another beyond the roles imposed on them.

Friendship and confidences

Simone de Beauvoir describes girls’ friendships as a form of escape from the maternal circle and an opening toward the wider world, including the sexual world. As girls grow older, a friend can become both someone who draws the self toward new experience and a witness who helps restore a sense of self. These bonds may involve private confidences and shared secrets, creating a close space apart from adult authority and everyday expectations.

The friendship between Natasha and Sonya exemplifies the intensity such attachments can acquire. Sonya’s gesture with the heated ruler is not presented as an ordinary exchange of affection: she uses it to demonstrate the depth of her love for Natasha. The physical act makes an otherwise inward feeling legible between the two friends, giving their attachment a visible sign.

The wider pattern of girls’ bonds

Simone de Beauvoir places the example within a broader account of “special friendships” among girls in schools, lycées, boarding schools, and workshops. Some are chiefly spiritual, centered on opening one’s heart and exchanging confidences; others may be more physically intimate. The account also describes affectionate names, ardent letters, and physical tokens as ways of expressing attachment. Natasha and Sonya’s friendship belongs to this spectrum of bonds through which girls seek intimacy and mutual recognition.

These friendships also respond to a larger social condition. Simone de Beauvoir argues that girls are constrained by rules of propriety, clothing, and domestic tasks, and that many resent not being boys because boys appear freer and less restricted. In that setting, the friendship offers a private counterspace: girls can share what they learn, speak about their lives, and treat one another’s feelings as worthy of attention.

Literary and thematic significance

The example of Natasha and Sonya is drawn from War and Peace and serves as a compact illustration within Simone de Beauvoir’s discussion of adolescent attachment. Sonya’s dramatic gesture gives the friendship a memorable form, but the point is not simply the extremity of the proof. The scene shows how a girl may seek confirmation of her importance in another consciousness, and how friendship can provide that recognition when wider social arrangements limit her independence.

Simone de Beauvoir also connects such bonds to the uncertain boundary between narcissistic self-regard and affection for another girl: the friend may reflect the self, while also becoming a distinct person to whom loyalty and tenderness are directed. Natasha and Sonya’s friendship therefore carries a double significance in the account—as an intimate relation in its own right and as evidence of girls’ efforts to create recognition and emotional space within a restrictive social order.