A Meditation on Simone de Beauvoir’s Early Gospel of Disobedience
Some books are like sermons and others like confessions; Beauvoir’s When Things of the Spirit Come First manages to be both at once. It’s a book that bows at the altar of virtue only to blow out the candles as it kneels. Before she became the philosopher of woman’s freedom, she was a young Parisian intellectual still half-chained to the catechism, still half-enchanted by its perfume. These early stories tremble with that contradiction: the ghost of piety wrestling with the body that dares to breathe.
It’s the 1930s, and Beauvoir is already conducting an autopsy on the soul. Not the soul as theologians imagine it — haloed and hovering — but the one that sweats, envies, and dreams beneath a starched collar. Her writing glows like candlelight filtered through a wine glass: pious and intoxicated, tender yet dangerous. She writes of women who have been taught to polish their halos until their hearts disappear beneath the glare, and one senses her whispering, somewhere behind the prose: I, too, once believed.
Beauvoir’s style here is that peculiar French sorcery — lucid as water, but always about to drown you. She dissects idealism with the delicacy of a surgeon and the appetite of a sinner. Her heroines, caught in the moral embroidery of their upbringing, resemble saints on the verge of revolt — women who have prayed too long, loved too purely, and discovered that the heavens are deaf. Beauvoir doesn’t mock them; she listens to their despair as one might listen to an old hymn, still half-moved by its melody though no longer believing in its promise.
The title itself is a sly paradox: When Things of the Spirit Come First. It sounds like a pious instruction, but Beauvoir turns it inside out. What happens when the ‘spirit’ is everything and the living world nothing? When duty starves delight, when purity becomes paralysis? The answer hums beneath every page, though she leaves it to the reader to hear the note of rebellion rising.
One could say these tales form the secret prelude to The Second Sex, but that’s like saying dawn is the prelude to the sun. Here the light is dim, fragile, uncertain — yet it’s already breaking through the stained glass of received morality. The women who populate her pages aren’t yet free, but they’re beginning to suspect that freedom exists. And suspicion, Beauvoir knew, is the first crack in any tyranny.
There’s something daringly intimate in the tone, as if she were writing to her own reflection: ‘You have been dutiful long enough. Now disobey beautifully.’ The prose flutters between the prayer book and the boudoir, never choosing which to burn. In this tension lies its charm — the collision of grace and grit, of cloistered virtue and existential thirst.
To read When Things of the Spirit Come First today is to watch a mind stepping out of the confessional and into the café, shaking the holy dust from its shoes. It’s Beauvoir before the applause, before the manifesto — a young woman writing herself out of the pious labyrinth, candle in one hand, cigarette in the other.
And though she writes of the spirit, it’s the body of thought — the living, erring, yearning body — that ultimately triumphs. For in the quiet subtext of every line one hears her whisper that most heretical of commandments:
Thou shalt think for thyself.
Wording 