Tereza Desgourdes tried to poison her husband

Thérèse Desqueyroux’s attempted poisoning of her husband is cited by Simone de Beauvoir as an instance of conjugal violence arising not from financial interest but from hatred and entrapment. Set beside the fictional smiling Mme Beudet and a reported case in which a wife killed her husband with help from her elder son, the attempt illustrates how the restrictions of marriage can turn a search for relief into crime.

Context and Circumstances

Simone de Beauvoir places the episode within a discussion of wives who cannot escape the situation imposed by marriage. She describes several ways of coping with that constraint: some women assert authority within the household, others embrace self-sacrificing victimhood, and still others retreat into fantasies, illness, or private rituals. The examples do not make those responses equivalent; they show how a life without meaningful scope for action can become distorted and increasingly desperate.

The Attempt and Its Interpretation

The text identifies Thérèse Desqueyroux as trying to poison her husband, comparing her case with that of Mme Lafarge. It gives no further circumstances of the attempt or account of its immediate outcome. Its interpretive emphasis falls instead on the motive Simone de Beauvoir assigns to such conjugal crimes: pure hatred rather than material gain, emerging from an intolerable marital situation.

Literary and Social Significance

The reference connects a fictional character to the wider pattern of wives trapped in marriages they cannot leave. Mme Beudet’s compensatory inward life ends in an attempt to kill her husband; Thérèse’s poisoning attempt likewise marks the point at which confinement and hostility cross into criminal action. A separate reported case, involving a forty-year-old woman who had endured an odious husband for twenty years and was acquitted after killing him with her elder son’s help, makes explicit the structural pressure behind these examples. Together, they support Simone de Beauvoir’s argument that a wife’s apparent choices must be understood in relation to the constrained conditions of married life.