Abstract
This paper seeks to analyze how Monique Wittig explores language as an oppressive tool in the hands of patriarchy in her text Les Guerilleres (1969), asserting the need for a womanist culture by reworking androcentric myths. Les Guerilleres, though basically categorized as a work of Science fiction, has tremendously contributed to feminist literature, in the sense that Wittig uses the ‘text’ as a literary “war machine” to “pulverize the old form and formal conventions.” Wittig delineates women characters who are ‘warriors’ out to destroy patriarchal institutions and, most importantly, transform prevalent notions of subject identity through deconstruction of language. The paper examines how Wittig employs the French pronouns ‘elles’ and ‘ils’ extensively to linguistically disrupt gender, creating an Amazonian Utopia in which lesbians lead a revolution against the concepts of gender.
Keywords: Monique Wittig, Les Guerilleres, feminist literature, gender, language, patriarchy, lesbian subjectivity, second wave feminism
Introduction
Monique Wittig, a radical feminist in the French women’s liberation movement, greatly influenced the Western feminists with her revolutionary and subversive writings. This paper seeks to analyze how Wittig explores language as an oppressive tool in the hands of patriarchy in her text Les Guerilleres (1969), asserting the need for a womanist culture by reworking androcentric myths. Les Guerilleres, though basically categorized as a work of Science fiction, has tremendously contributed to feminist literature, in the sense that Wittig uses the ‘text’ as a literary “war machine,” the term adopted by Wittig in her book, The Straight Mind and other Essays. The goal of such a war machine is to “pulverize the old form and formal conventions” (89). It is but appropriate, then, that Wittig has delineated women characters who are ‘warriors’ and who are out to destroy and kill men, but most importantly transform prevalent notions of subject identity through deconstruction of language. Since Wittig draws on the myth of the Amazon, the text is symbolic of war field where an eternal battle between the sexes is going on.
In her works, Lesbian Peoples (1978), The Lesbian Body (1973), The Opoponax (1964), Monique Wittig has deployed the post modernist narrative technique to explore the role of language in the social construction of sexuality and femininity. She seeks to dislocate ‘the myth of woman’ through a lesbian subjectivity. In Les Guerillers, for instance, Wittig tries to eliminate the masculine pronoun ‘il’ and to make the feminine pronoun ‘Elles’, universal. In her non-fiction book, The Straight Mind and Other Essays (1992) she debates the concept of gender, the role of language in culture and the role of women in the social contract and political theory. Wittig rightly argues that,
Gender is the linguistic index of the political opposition between the sexes. Gender is used here in the singular because there are not two genders. There is only one: the feminine, the “masculine” not being a gender. For the masculine is not the masculine but the general. (qtd in Butler 20)
By attributing particular traits to the female body which are otherwise essential biological differences, man tends to suppress women politically, socially and economically.
The Warrior Women and the Destruction of Patriarchy
In Les Guerillers, Wittig systematically destroys the heroic male epic, myths and legends. She reverses the value of the masculine through the introduction of (lesbian/warrior) soldiers. There are only feminine characters and objects, which work to deconstruct and displace “heterosexual binary thinking” (Winston 233). Wittig, in a series of prose poems, powerfully presents a war like situation where women warriors proclaim the destruction of patriarchal institutions:
They say, I shall be the Universal Vengeance … . They say, War, rally … . They say that once they have the arms in their hands they will not yield them. They say that they will shake the world like thunder and lightning. (LG 120)
They sing about the fate of a young girl which is brilliant as the sun, when in the house of her mother, whereas after marriage, “the woman under the roof of her husband is like a chained dog. The slave rarely tastes the delights of love, the woman never” (LG 108). As the women move forward in great armies they narrate stories to one another of ancient myths — as that of the quests for the Grail, the Round Table which symbolize the circle, the zero, the sphere representing the Vulva. For Wittig these “quests for the Grail were not successful, that they remained of the nature of the Legend” (LG 45). This could probably mean that men were not successful in defining the ‘nature’ of women because they existed only as legends or ideas.
Wittig alludes to the Tree of knowledge saying that the woman who eats the fruit from the tree would become knowledgeable as they say “the circle is your symbol / you exist from all eternity / you will exist for all eternity” (52–53). Man had reduced woman to a ‘zero’, confirming her to the circle, but these warrior women adopt the very symbol of the sphere as a weapon against men, “the zero, the O, the perfect circle that you invent to imprison them and to overthrow them” (114). Jane Winston’s article “Gender and Sexual Identity” discusses how Wittig’s oeuvre sought to,
destroy the signifying system structured around the phallus, and create a new one around the O. Of the many alchemical symbols in Wittig’s work, the O, symbol of transformation is most prevalent … at different times, it stands for the vulva, water, the island of lesbos, a mirror, the female breast Wittig’s O is a site of transformation, the place and means by which the mark of O’s enslavement … is transubstantiated into the epic of female power and emancipation. (Winston 233)
They (lesbian soldiers) constantly remind themselves of the ‘cause’ they are gathered for and tell tales about great warrior women, invoking and beseeching the blessings of Minerva — the goddess of war, Hippolyta, the queen of the Amazons. They hate being compared to the earth and the sea; they rather prefer to be compared to the planets, the stars, the suns, “that which burns those who struggle bravely those who do not surrender” (80). Wittig presents the whole saga in an epic manner, a battle being waged in all the directions, the women rise like an ocean against the men, consuming them in their violence and outrage. They encourage each other by saying, “remain united like the characters in a book. Do not abandon the collectivity” (58).
They are guided by a single principle, that of the celebration of the body as a single whole:
They say henceforward what they are, is not subject to compromise. They say they must now stop exalting the vulva. They say that they must break the last bond that binds them to a dead culture. They say that any symbol that exalts the fragmented body is transient, must disappear. They, the women say the integrity of the body their first principle, advance marching together into another world. (LG 72)
As part of the revolution, they set out to break those symbols of patriarchy which chain them in the name of gender or feminine duties. They set fire to sewing machines, type-writers, plates, stones, pans, brooms, washing-machines, vacuum cleaners etc. Those which do not burn, they cover them with blue/red/green paint; reassemble them in a distorted manner giving them new names.
Wittig’s Subversion of Language and Gender
By rejecting the patriarchal ‘symbolic order’ Wittig rejects not only the masculine, but also the feminine. Her job is to displace the binary category of sex/gender, to deconstruct these heterosexual ‘constructs’, in turn providing a raison-d’etre for other possibilities of identity for the body. As Judith Butler in Gender Trouble argues that “for Wittig, the task is not to prefer the feminine side of the binary to the masculine, but to displace the binary as such through a specifically lesbian disintegration of its constitutive categories” (126).
The warrior women in Les Gurilleres laugh it off when they say, “it is to fall between Scylla and Charybdis, to avoid one religious ideology only to adopt another, they say that both one and the other have this in common, that they are no longer valid” (80). This ‘counter culture’ rejects the patriarchal ‘symbolic-order’ which is inherently oppressive, at the same time creates an Amazonian Utopia in which lesbians lead a revolution against the concepts of gender.
Wittig, similarly, employs the French pronouns ‘elles’ and ‘ils’ extensively to linguistically disrupt gender. While elles refers to ‘women’ (plural) i.e., a collective pronoun, ‘ils’ refers to the masculine (collective pronoun for ‘men’). Just as ‘Mankind’ is universal and includes ‘womankind’, the particular, even when there are more women than men so does ‘ils’ stand for the universal and is inclusive of the particular ‘elles’. As the women (elles) in Les Guerilleres say,
Men have expelled you from the world of symbols and yet they have given you names … . They write, of their authority to accord names, that it goes back so far that the origin of language itself may be considered an act of authority emanating from those who dominate … they have attached a particular word to an object or a fact … . They say the language you speak is made up of words that are killing you. They say the language you speak is made up of signs that rightly speaking designate what men have appropriated. (112, 114)
Wittig deliberately avoids the use of terms like ‘men’, and ‘women’, at the same time using the pronoun ‘elles’ (English ‘They’) as universal, thereby attempting a linguistic assault on the masculine collective pronoun ‘ils’. Elles is empowered with supreme authority over the world as well as the word. As David Glover in his book Genders points out that,
By installing a basic division at the core of our being, the heterosexual imagination denies women the capacity to act as subjects, something that can only be achieved by taking control over the ways in which language is used. (XXX)
Since domination occurs through language which creates an illusion, a hierarchy which in turn becomes a social reality, Wittig’s goal is to first deconstruct that language. As the warrior women in Les Guerilleres propose,
They say, we must disregard the statements we have been compelled to deliver contrary to our opinion and in conformity with the codes and conventions of the cultures that have domesticated us. They say that all books must be burned and only those preserved that can present them to advantage in a future age. They say there is no reality before it has been given shape by words rules regulations. They say that everything has to be remade starting from basic principles. They say that in the first place the vocabulary of every language is to be examined, modified, turned upside down, that every word must be screened. (134)
Conclusion
By ‘fixing’ the patriarchal language Wittig aims at fixing ‘patriarchy’. For this purpose she has adopted or appropriated the male literary genres. Wittig has chosen the heroic male epic while revolutionizing the genre of male bastion and transforming it into ‘feminist Utopian thinking and cultural criticism’ (Cortiel 7). Through such experimental writing, Wittig makes a deliberate and conscious effort to envisage an all female space, the lesbian, outside the ‘symbolic’ thereby representing a privileged site of separation from the heterosexual matrix that signifies the possibility of overcoming patriarchal control at the material and ideological level. For this purpose, she rejects the prevailing concepts of gender/sexual identity and consequently the myth of woman in her revolutionary work of art.
At the end of the war ‘elles’ establishes itself as a sovereign subject, thereby universalizing the particular and giving it a new subject identity. As language is considered to determine subjectivity and simultaneously gender our identity, Wittig uses the literary text as the battleground to create an alternative ‘non-phallogocentric’ discourse, thereby re-appropriating patriarchal language that serves to universalize the particular, reclaiming the lost ground that patriarchy monopolizes. Writing becomes a political action that critiques the heterosexual institutions that regulate gender.
Works Cited
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1999.
Cortiel, Jeanne. Demand my Writing: Joanna Russ, Feminism, and Science Fiction. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999.
Glover, David and Kaplan, Cora. Genders. London: Routledge, 2000.
Winston, Jane. “Gender and sexual identity in the modern French novel.” The Cambridge Companion to the French Novel. Ed. Timothy Unwin. U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 223-240.
Wittig, Monique. Les Guerilleres. 1971. Trans. Le Vay. Boston: Beacon Press, 1985.
---. The Straight Mind and other Essays. USA: Beacon Press, 1992.