Solange

Solange is a young woman in Henry de Montherlant’s fiction, discussed by Simone de Beauvoir chiefly through her relationship with the writer Costals. She is placed within a pattern in which a man claims authority over women while casting them as inferior and dependent. Costals’s promises, sexual entitlement, and encouragement of a potentially grave decision expose the difference between apparent generosity and power exercised for his own gratification.

Identity and Introduction

Solange appears in Beauvoir’s examination of Costals as one of the women through whom he enacts his theory of male superiority. The narrative does not provide an independent biography for her; instead, it presents her primarily as Costals sees and treats her. Beauvoir identifies her as a young woman whom he promises to marry and whose life he tries to shape, but the account’s emphasis is not on a courtship leading to marriage. It is on how his attention keeps her within a relation defined by his wishes.

Costals’s assessment of Solange is openly demeaning. He sometimes finds her unpleasant and describes her in language that reduces her to an object rather than a reciprocal person. Beauvoir places this disgust alongside his continued pursuit of women: contempt does not cancel desire, but allows Costals to claim superiority while remaining invested in the women he disparages. Solange’s place in the account therefore reveals less about an independent character arc than about the unequal terms on which Costals approaches her.

Costals’s Control and Promises

Costals imagines making Solange resemble himself, treating her as someone to be fashioned to his image rather than as a separate person with her own purposes. Beauvoir connects this impulse to his broader posture as a giver: he enjoys believing that he dispenses pleasure and benefit, while denying that women’s involvement creates any reciprocal obligation. In that arrangement, his claimed generosity does not establish equality; it strengthens his sense that he alone sets the terms.

His practical conduct reinforces that imbalance. Costals promises Solange that he will marry her, just as he promises to help Andrée Hacquebaut, but Beauvoir says these commitments die when his pity recedes. He regards changing his mind as his right. A promise thus offers Solange no reliable security: its force depends on Costals’s shifting feelings, and he treats himself as the sole judge of whether it remains binding. Beauvoir’s account presents this not as an isolated lapse but as part of a self-serving game whose rules Costals makes for himself.

Infanticide and the Limits of Pity

The sharpest instance of Costals’s influence occurs when he encourages Solange to consider infanticide. According to Beauvoir, Solange welcomes the possibility, and Costals responds with heightened desire. The episode makes his contempt active: he does not merely judge or disappoint her but encourages a possibility with severe consequences, then takes pleasure in the position it gives him. The available account does not describe the outcome as a completed act; it describes encouragement, Solange’s reception of the possibility, and Costals’s reaction.

This episode also complicates the pity that Costals sometimes performs. He can promise marriage or help when moved by sympathy, but those gestures offer no stable protection because his commitments are subordinate to his own pleasure. Beauvoir’s analysis places the episode within a pattern of alternating tenderness and cruelty in which the woman’s vulnerability becomes a setting for male sovereignty. Solange’s treatment shows how easily an apparent offer of care can coexist with conduct that makes her circumstances more precarious.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

Solange’s significance lies in the contrast between Costals’s self-image as generous and his refusal of reciprocity. His promises suggest concern, yet he withdraws them at will; his interest in shaping her denies her independence; and his response to the prospect of infanticide makes her vulnerability a source of gratification. Beauvoir uses these contradictions to argue that contempt can serve as an alibi for domination: Costals casts women as beneath him, then treats their dependence as confirmation of his own importance.

The wider argument situates such relations within social structures that make women’s independence difficult to secure. Beauvoir notes that women may be divided by class and race, and that women workers can be set against male workers when employers benefit from their lower wages. Her account also describes how anxiety about women’s bodies can be intensified by the social perspective through which those bodies are judged. These broader claims do not supply additional biographical facts about Solange, but they clarify the conditions that make Costals’s personal power legible: his conduct is an intimate instance of a larger system that defines women through men’s judgments and leaves their security dependent on men’s choices.