The View from Pȏle Nord: Sartre, Beauvoir, and Girard on Mimesis, Embodiment, and Desire

Simone Beauvoir's novel She Came to Stay immerses readers in a 1930s Parisian social scene, thanks in part to the character Françoise. Eavesdropping with Françoise on a man and woman seated at a table in the Pȏle Nord café, readers of the novel hear the woman confide, “I've never been able to follow the rules of flirting. I have a morbid horror of being touched.”¹ As Françoise invites us to turn our gaze toward another couple seated nearby, we observe a possible instance of the very discomfort to which the first woman has attested. A hapless female looks “uncertainly at a man's huge (grosse) hand that has just pounced on hers (s'abattre sur).”² Of these two scenes from She Came to Stay, Jean-Paul Sartre memorializes only the second.³ As described by Sartre in Being and Nothingness, a man and a woman...