The Impossibility of Female Desire in Pygmalion and The Awakening

In “The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine,” Luce Irigaray argues that, because society uses a patriarchal language that privileges male-gendered logic over female-gender emotion, there is no adequate language to represent female desire. She writes that “feminine pleasure has to remain inarticulate in language, in its own language, if it is not to threaten the underpinnings of logical operations” and, because of this, “what is most strictly forbidden to women today is that they should attempt to express their own pleasure” (796). This inability to articulate female desire means that female desire becomes unutterable, something that cannot be expressed. According to Irigaray, this unutterable-ness of female desire in patriarchal language leaves only one option for women to attempt to express their desire and that is the act of mimicry or mimesis. Mimesis is not an attempt to represent female desire in patriarchal language; instead, mimesis is in attempt through the use of patriarchal language to reveal that female desire cannot be presented, a way to “make ‘visible,’ by an effect of playful repetition, what was supposed to remain invisible – the cover-up of a possible operation of the feminine in language” (795). Mimesis exposes how patriarchal language disallows or denies female desire by circling around the absence of that female desire, by making its absence perfectly clear in a patriarchal discourse.

The concept of a patriarchal discourse, necessary to Irigaray’s argument, is an example of a shared interpretive community, a term coined by Stanley Fish that refers to a discursively-created set of ideas, beliefs, and interpretations that belong to a community or multiple communities. The most important aspe...

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...etative community of patriarchal language, does not allow for the existence of female desire and kills what little life it had in Eliza in these last lines. In the end, the characters of Edna and Eliza reveal the impossibility of female desire, of their having desire, within a culture that cannot articulate or name it.

Works Cited

Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. Ed. Nancy Walker. Boston: Bedford, 2000. Print.

Fish, Stanley. "How to Recognize a Poem When You See One." Is There a Text in this Class? The Authority

of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980. PDF File.

Irigaray, Luce. "The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine." Literary Theory: An

Anthology. By Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2004. Print.

Shaw, George Bernard. Pygmalion. New York: Dover Publications, 1994. Print.