La Femme rompue

Beauvoir’s writing practice in La Femme rompue is similar in many ways to her writing practice in Les Belles Images. In her memoirs, Beauvoir tells us that she made the decision to adopt the same technique, asking her readers to read between the lines.1 Like Laurence, the three women protagonists in La Femme rompue experience a loss of sense of self and are threatened with breakdown and even madness. This chapter explores the ways in which Beauvoir’s writing practice reproduces, metaphorically, this madness in the text. Rather than analysing each story in turn, I adopt a thematic approach. This highlights the differences and similarities between the stories that are marked to differing degrees by textual excess and transgression.