ABSTRACT
Les Mandarins, begun around 1949 and published in 1954, is Beauvoir’s longest and, for some, her richest and most complex novel. The aim of this chapter is to examine Beauvoir’s writing practice in Les Mandarins, investigating the nature and extent of textual excess and transgression. Is it possible to locate madness, metaphorically speaking, in the text of Les Mandarins? Can it be argued that madness – defined as excess and transgression – finds a voice in this novel, that, in spite of any repression, it forces its way into her text? I also examine how far what I identified as the Gothic economy of L’Invitée can be seen to persist in Les Mandarins, a text of a quite different tone.
