Henry de Montaigne

Henry de Montherlant appears in Simone de Beauvoir’s account as a contemporary inheritor of a long literary tradition of hostility toward women. His significance lies less in a detailed portrait of his life or fiction than in the role his writing plays in her argument: it renews an old practice of accusing women in ways that conceal the interests of the men doing the accusing.

Place in the Literary Tradition

Beauvoir groups Montherlant with writers whose indictments of women belong to a familiar French literary tradition. She describes him as taking up that tradition from Jean de Meung, though with less verve. The comparison places his work within a historical pattern rather than treating it as a wholly individual provocation: inherited contempt can be repeated in modern literature even when its force or style changes.

The chapter’s headings also associate Montherlant with the phrase “the Bread of Disgust.” In the argument that follows, Beauvoir’s emphasis is on the function of such hostility. Accusations against women may seem to describe female nature, but they can instead disguise a will to self-justification and male advantage.

Hostility as Self-Justification

Beauvoir argues that writers’ attacks on women must be read with suspicion because the accusers belong to the sex whose authority is at stake. She recalls Montaigne’s observation that it is easier to accuse one sex than to excuse the other, and uses the history of legal and religious arguments about women to show how claims of female weakness have served contingent interests. Montherlant’s literary hostility participates in this broader pattern: denunciation helps defend the authority from which it speaks.

Her discussion of male privilege makes the point concrete. A man may feel heroic in relation to women selected to serve as his audience, while evading the harder test of acting as a man among men. Beauvoir invokes Montherlant in precisely this connection, presenting his posture toward women as a source of masculine self-elevation rather than as evidence of an impartial judgment about them.

The Myth of Woman and Male Advantage

Beauvoir distinguishes explicit claims of inferiority from the quieter benefits men gain by maintaining woman as the Other. The myth of Woman can comfort men who feel insecure, and even men who are not threatened by other men may hesitate to surrender the imagined woman of their dreams. In her analysis, the figure Montherlant helps sustain is not simply a woman judged negatively; it is a woman made into an object against which a man can establish himself as the absolute subject.

That construction also affects how equality is acknowledged. Men may affirm women’s equal dignity in ordinary relations and then appeal to supposed natural differences when conflict arises. Beauvoir’s account of Montherlant belongs to this critique of the gap between abstract equality and the concrete practices that preserve male advantage. His example helps expose how literary judgments can reinforce a social order while presenting themselves as observations about women.