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Simone de Beauvoir's third novel Tous les hommes sont mortels, published in 1946, destroys the eternal feminine with its reworking of a variety of well-known literary figures, myths, and fairy tales, but to date no critics have commented on her use of these characters. This is all the more surprising since Beauvoir's diaries, correspondence, autobiography, and essays indicate that she read widely and reflected on what she read. In a letter to Nelson Algren she claims that Soren Kierkegaard and Hans Christian Andersen are the only great men that Denmark ever had (August 3, 1947). Kierkegaard, in particular, could be viewed as a role model for Beauvoir, who argued in "Litterature et metaphysique" that the metaphysical novel is the perfect expression of real, lived experience (96-99), because he was the first existentialist to use fictional characters to convey philosophical views (Barnes, 15). From 1939 onward, Beauvoir's letters to Sartre frequently mention that she is reading a variety of works by Kierkegaard (Lettres a Sartre, 1: 310, 361; 2: 143-5, 2: 213) and Shakespeare (1: 204, 316, 347, 361; 2: 240). In Memoires d'une jeune fille rangee, she not only attributes her first childhood experience with nothingness and fear to her reading of Andersen's "The Little Mermaid," but she also links her anguish to gender roles; the mermaid gives up her immortal soul and turns into seafoam for the love of a prince (68). Beauvoir devotes 171 pages of Le Deuxieme Sexe to defining and debunking the myths surrounding females (237-408): these pages highlight her close attention to intertextuality for she analyses the religious, literary, philosophical, and folk mythology that informs the works of Montherlant, Lawrence, Claudel, Breton, and Stendhal. References that appear repeatedly in the analysis provided in Le Deuxieme Sexe include Kierkegaard, Andersen, Shakespeare, Dante, Petrarch, and Christian theologians.
In light of Beauvoir's comments on her reading and her insistence upon the novel's metaphysical role and the importance of myth and intertextuality in the works of others, one could read Tous les hommes as a rewriting of malecreated feminine types that shows how these representations currently harm women and corrects the images so as to help females.1 As Le Deuxieme Sexe explains, Occidental society has perpetuated homosocial myths that depict woman as man's possession...