ABSTRACT
In interviews dealing with her life and work, Simone de Beauvoir tended to be brief and unequivocal when asked about motherhood or mother–daughter relationships. There exists a complex network of connections between Beauvoir's non-fictional and fictional texts with regard to the representation of motherhood and the mother–daughter relationship. Beauvoir's constructions of the mother in her novels and in her theoretical and autobiographical writings are informed by an intermeshing of various areas of influence. Critics such as Toril Moi, Alex Hughes and Alice Jardine have produced a number of important psychoanalytic readings of Beauvoir's opus. Beauvoir's conclusions about motherhood in Le Deuxieme Sexe are grounded in two discourses that both, questioned the assumptions of dominant pronatalist motherhood discourses. First, Beauvoir appropriates the discourse of Existentialism. Secondly, she exploits the rhetoric of the left-wing 'equal rights' discourses that were prominent after the Liberation.
