Madame Curie Essay | Critical Essay #2

Madame Curie Critical Essay #2

Winters is a freelance writer and editor. In the following essay, she discusses views of womanhood in Eve Curie's Madame Curie.

"The life of Marie Curie contains prodigies in such number that one would like to tell her story like a legend," her daughter Eve writes in her introduction to her biography, Madame Curie. "She was a woman; she belonged to an oppressed nation; she was poor; she was beautiful.... It would have been a crime to add the slightest ornament to this story, so like a myth."

The story is like a myth in many ways, and in some ways Eve Curie commits the crime she deplores; instead of clarifying the myth, she adds to it. Throughout the book, she presents an idealized image of Marie Curie as a heroic, self-sacrificing, and saintly figure. This image is augmented by the language she uses. She writes in...
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