Abstract Composed at the end of the German Occupation of France during World War II, Simone de Beauvoir’s first and only play, The Useless Mouths (Les bouches inutiles), empathetically imagines the emotional turmoil of besieged noncombatants in the Middle Ages, who were frequently labeled “useless mouths” and forced to undergo atrocious suffering. Both a stunning instance of “feeling for the premodern” and an allegory for the political circumstances in which Beauvoir wrote, the play anticipates the antideterministic historiography that Beauvoir would later employ in The Second Sex. This article examines the emotional dynamics of The Useless Mouths, arguing that the play stages a theory of emotional ethics that is simultaneously existentialist and attentive to the vicissitudes of identity politics. Although some of the play’s initial critics, and Beauvoir herself, repudiated The Useless Mouths as excessively didactic, its central lesson — that the vital and endless task of producing and maintaining a truly egalitarian society is necessarily rife with anguish, shame, fear, and love — remains as crucial today as it was in either Beauvoir’s time or the Middle Ages.

中文翻译：

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西蒙娜·德·波伏娃《无用的嘴巴》中的存在主义中世纪主义与情感认同政治

摘要西蒙娜·德·波伏娃的第二部也是唯一一部剧作《无用的嘴》（Les bouches inutiles）是在第二次世界大战的德国占领法国末期创作的。 “无用的嘴巴”并被迫遭受残酷的痛苦。这部剧作既令人震惊地表达了“对现代人的感觉”，又对波伏瓦所写的政治环境进行了寓言，预示着波伏瓦后来将在《第二性》中采用的反确定性史学。本文考察了《无用的嘴》的情感动态，认为该剧演绎了一种情感伦理学理论，该理论同时存在主义并关注身份政治的变迁。尽管该剧最初有一些评论家，