This article examines the contradictory representation of female space in Simone de Beauvoir's 1940s fiction. While Beauvoir generally supports Virginia Woolf's "room of one's own" as an ideal environment for women seeking intellectual independence, her fictional rooms are frequently spaces of claustrophobic imprisonment in which women suffer physical or mental breakdowns. This ambiguity in Beauvoir's wartime writings is intimately related, I suggest, to her changing conceptions of the self–other relation in this period.