INTRODUCTION

This chapter might easily have been called ‘French feminism’, because many early commentators have used this umbrella term when analysing the work of Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva.¹ However, there are a number of difficulties with this categorisation which make ‘poststructuralist feminism’ a more appropriate one. First, none of the three is French by birth: Cixous was born in Algeria, Irigaray in Belgium and Kristeva in Bulgaria. They exhibit more hybrid and tangential relationships with the country where they now live and work than might seem appropriate in writers categorised unproblematically as ‘French’. Secondly, their work is not in any way representative of mainstream feminist political activity or thinking in France, which they argue is flawed by its reformist agenda, which merely echoes masculine, bourgeois political conventions and structures. Thirdly, the category ‘French feminism’ has arguably been created to serve certain US and UK political and intellectual agendas: in an imperialist move, ideas which would seem unpalatable if ascribed to UK or US authors are categorised as ‘French’ in order to make them seem exotic and ‘other’, but thus paradoxically acceptable.² If there are problems with the ‘Frenchness’ of French feminism it is equally difficult to describe Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva as ‘feminist’. All three have expressed (to varying degrees) their discomfort with the term. Partly their objections are made as judgements about its specific meaning in the French context, as is suggested above, but they also imply a wider suspicion about the usefulness of categories which they believe to be part of masculine thinking.

This chapter has opened defensively by describing why a particular way of defining certain theorists has not been used. This strategy suggests some of the reasons why characterising these writers' work as ‘poststructuralist’ may be more appropriate than describing them as ‘French’. If Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva share anything it is their sense of the potential instability of concepts like nation, gender and identity. This sceptical approach is distinct from a structuralist one which explains concepts in terms of fundamentally stable structures. Structuralists such as Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan, who examined the way that structures determine meaning in language, kinship relations and the psyche respectively, assumed that it is possible to uncover the underlying patterns which explain the way that something works. In their different disciplines of linguistics, anthropology and psychoanalysis, Saussure, Lévi-Strauss and Lacan examined the binary oppositions which provide the foundations for human behaviour and language use. A binary opposition consists of a pair of terms which are dependent on each other to make sense. These terms exist in a hierarchy, where one is more valued than the other. Immediately accessible examples are ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ and ‘young’ and ‘old’. It is important to recognise that structuralism looks beneath the apparent diversity of surface phenomena to find those structures which explain the actual function of such phenomena. Structuralism explains that function in terms of relationships between oppositions, rather than in terms of any intrinsic meaning which can be found in any one thing. So, to return to my example, the concept ‘masculinity’ is unthinkable without the concept ‘femininity’, because it can only be thought in opposition to that concept, and vice versa. It should be obvious that in the opposition masculine/feminine the term ‘masculine’ is the more valued one and thus comes first in the hierarchy.

Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva began writing in the 1960s in Europe when structuralism came to prominence. It had the greatest impact on precisely those disciplines which have most influenced these three writers: linguistics, philosophy and psychoanalysis.³ As writers and theorists Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva all share an inheritance which includes respect for, and divergence from, their structuralist forebears. Along with writers like Jacques Derrida, they are suspicious of the totalising claims of structuralist linguistics to explain the diversity and plurality of language. Derrida's thinking has been hugely influential in literary studies, and many commentators on Cixous's, Irigaray's and Kristeva have argued their indebtedness to his work.⁴ I would prefer to situate all four as part of a turn away from structuralism which embraces the notion of language as inherently unstable. Thus, whereas structuralist linguistics proposes a theory of language as explicable in terms of underlying governing oppositions between terms, poststructuralism suggests that language always eludes final, fixed meanings. Cixous's, Irigaray's and Kristeva's work uses a number of devices such as punning, allusion, quotation, neologism, compound words, and what we may think of as ‘poetic’ language. Their writing forces us to recognise that the meaning of a word or concept is not merely ‘constructed’ in relation to another opposing word or concept, but is always open to deconstruction. The meaning of a word can never be defined finally or absolutely because meanings generate other meanings endlessly. Similarly, binary oppositions are inherently unstable because there will always be occasions when the hierarchy of terms inverts itself (moments when, to return to our example of masculinity and femininity, femininity becomes the more privileged term, as in certain sorts of religious or mystical discourses). There will also be points where a third term exceeds and destabilises the distinction between opposed terms, as in the case of transgressive or queer sexualities of various kinds (see Chapter 7), which disturb the masculine/feminine binary by parodying elements of both or bringing them into sharp juxtaposition in the same context. Cixous's, Irigaray's and Kristeva's work also necessitates a reappraisal of the distinction between creative and critical writing, pointing in fact to the collapse of this binary distinction as a useful way of categorising different kinds of writing. For poststructuralists all writing is important because we can only really know anything through language: language, if it does not always actually construct our perceptions and experiences, always mediates them.⁵

In applying the insights of structuralist linguistics to the practice and theory of psychoanalysis Jacques Lacan provided a model for Cixous's, Irigaray's and Kristeva's writing practice. In this case it is justifiable to claim an influence which is more direct than that of Derrida.⁶ Lacan's argument that ‘the unconscious is structured like a language’⁷ suggests that we acquire identity, or consciousness, at the same time as we learn to speak, also the same point at which we acquire an unconscious. In order to understand this point, we need to relate his ideas to Freud's discussion of the Oedipal stage, mentioned in the previous chapter. For Freud, the Oedipal stage marks the moment at which the child gives up the mother as love object and attaches to the father. Lacan argues that this is a crucial point which marks the child's exit from what he terms the ‘Imaginary’ and entrance into the ‘Symbolic Order’. For Lacan, the Symbolic Order connotes the adult, normative, patriarchal, rational world, dominated by the phallus, which symbolises what he terms the Law of the Father. It is marked by division of the self from the other (and specifically the mother), the acquisition of language and the creation of desire. The Imaginary can be equated with the pre-Oedipal stage, in which the child is less aware of any consistent distinctions between himself and others, has no language, has no sense of loss, and thus has no sense of desire. It is only through acquiring language and passing into the Symbolic Order that identity can be assumed, and this process goes hand in hand with the creation of the unconscious through the repression of those experiences, such as a sense of oneness with the mother, which form part of the Imaginary. The Imaginary is not a stage which is completely outgrown once entry into the Symbolic Order occurs; rather than perceiving them as linear sequences it is important to understand that, like other binary oppositions, they only acquire meaning in relation to each other.⁸

The crucial intervention of our triumvirate of poststructuralist feminists into this debate is first to foreground and secondly to question its basis in gendered assumptions. For both Derrida and Lacan the feminine is simultaneously excluded and essential. Derrida makes femininity into the figure of linguistic undecidability;⁹ Lacan makes woman something which does not exist in the Symbolic Order, but which, through repression of desire for the (m)other, founds the creation of that order in the first place. In other words, it is the rejection of the maternal which allows the masculine subject to assume his privileged place in patriarchy, and the refusal of the awareness of linguistic play (equated metaphorically with femininity) which, however temporarily, allows the creation of apparently fixed meanings. Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva ask, in different ways, what women readers, thinkers and writers do when faced with their essential exclusion from language and the Symbolic. The following analysis will consider Cixous's ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ first, followed by Irigaray's ‘When Our Lips Speak Together’ and Kristeva's ‘From One Identity to An Other’. The reasons for this choice will become apparent en route.

HéLèNE CIXOUS, ‘THE LAUGH OF THE MEDUSA’ (FIRST PUBLISHED IN FRENCH IN 1975; IN ENGLISH IN 1976)

The first thing a reader of Hélène Cixous's ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ might notice is its poetic, lyrical style. The text does not read like most of the theory we have already examined: it seems ‘literary’ and creative rather than formal and structured. This ‘literariness’ is part of Cixous's pleasure in language, in the playful, wayward capacity of a word to mean more than any single interpretation of it might suggest. Some of this is admittedly lost in translation (see for example footnotes 7 and 8 to the essay, which explain the double meanings of certain words in French). Other examples, such as the play on the slippage between ‘sex’ and ‘sects’ in the sentence ‘Let the priests tremble, we're going to show them our sects!’,¹⁰ still work in English. Cixous emphasises linguistic ambivalence for two purposes: to undermine the phallocentric (literally, centred on the phallus) foundations of culture and writing, which attempt to deny such playfulness, and to suggest ways of writing which might provide different and authentic versions of femininity for women readers. In her analysis of existing culture and writing she suggests that woman has always functioned as the ‘other’: as whatever is excluded in order to create culture in the first place. Like de Beauvoir, Cixous's analysis of western culture suggests that femininity is never allowed to be anything but the opposite of masculinity: ‘writing has been run by a libidinal and cultural—hence political, typically masculine—economy … this locus has grossly exaggerated all the signs of sexual opposition (and not sexual difference), where woman has never her turn to speak’ (p. 249).

The distinction between opposition and difference is crucial: in psychoanalytic terms women merely lack the phallus; the real differences in their bodies are not acknowledged. It is those positive differences that Cixous argues must be brought into feminine writing to disturb and alter the functioning of the patriarchal machinery: ‘Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies—for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text’ (p. 244). Cixous rejects liberal or reformist agendas which seek to give women access to those rights and privileges which patriarchy offers to men because they ultimately fail to acknowledge women's difference. Her analogy between the female body and women's writing is designed to point out the paradox that the physical, material facts of sexed bodies are seen, explicitly, as irrelevant to writing and culture, but implicitly function (in the case of the female body) as the rejected basis for the creation of that culture in the first place.

In calling for the writing of a feminine difference based on women's bodies Cixous takes a deliberate risk. The essay relies on a feminine imagery which consists of fluency, liquidity, softness, monstrosity, sickness, darkness, exclusion, song, hysteria, pregnancy, maternity and sexuality. She risks aligning femininity with the physical, emotional and irrational in ways which merely echo patriarchal stereotyping. For Cixous, however, it is only by taking this risk that real change can be effected in the patriarchal status quo: this imagery has to be revalorised before it can be abandoned at some future point. Her strategy is to deploy stereotypically feminine imagery repetitiously and with humour so that it acquires subversive qualities: the subversive qualities inherent in the instability of language itself. She thus hopes to point beyond the existing order: ‘At times it is in the fissure caused by an earthquake, through that radical mutation of things brought on by a material upheaval when every structure is for a moment thrown off balance and an ephemeral wildness sweeps order away, that the poet slips something by, for a brief span, of woman’ (p. 249).

‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ forces together the physical and the linguistic, which are normally held to be opposites. In doing so the essay points out two things: first, that bodies, and their gendered qualities, are discursively constructed and secondly, that language is marked by traces of a physicality which cannot be eradicated. The body is textual and the text is physical; it is at the site of this conundrum that, for Cixous, feminine writing and new forms of femininity can precariously exist. The essay's concentration on maternity, bisexuality, love and the gift as points where culture and nature collide is particularly important. If normative masculinity and entry into the Symbolic Order are founded on a repression of the relation with the mother, then women's resurrection of that relation in writing can inscribe new forms of femininity in culture. The closeness of the relationship between mother and daughter is never effectually abandoned by women. As we saw in the last chapter, they have little inducement to renounce it and identify with the father, unlike the boy who has the prospect of one day wielding his father's power, if he gives up the mother. Releasing the unconscious force of the maternal relation into language is thus an essential part of writing women's difference. This ‘maternal return’ also explains Cixous's interest in bisexuality: a woman's first love relationship is with someone of her own sex, and she never entirely represses this fact: ‘at present, for historico-cultural reasons, it is women who are opening up to and benefiting from this vatic bisexuality which doesn't annul differences but stirs them up, pursues them, increases their number’ (p. 254). Cixous's bisexuality is not the idea of ‘having it both ways’, which would invalidate feminine difference by containing it within a sexuality still ultimately governed by the phallus. Rather it is a plural and inclusive conception of desire which genuinely acknowledges difference. Desire and love on such terms become potentially liberating: ‘Woman of course has a desire for a “loving desire” and not a jealous one. But not because she is gelded; not because she's deprived and needs to be filled out, like some wounded person who wants to console herself or seek vengeance. I don't want a penis to decorate my body with. But I do desire the other for the other, whole and entire, male or female' (p. 262). Cixous demonstrates that desire and love function in a patriarchal society in economic terms, where systems of exchange dominate. Men expect something in return for an emotional or sexual investment, because the Symbolic Order relies on entry into the rights and privileges of patriarchy as a reward for giving up the desire for the mother. Abandoning this desire also avoids the feared punishment of castration: the fate of the mother and all women. Cixous argues that women's ability to give without thought of return distinguishes their relationships from those of men. This giving eludes and disturbs the masculine libidinal economy which organises desire and emotion around concepts like profit, loss and IOU.

To appreciate Cixous's aims in ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ means to agree with her alignment of writing with the body, and politics. Ultimately, she refuses a representational theory of language, one which sees language as a separate system from society which can only attempt to mirror that society accurately. Instead, she argues that both language and society are interpenetrating discourses, consisting of text open to reading, interpretation and rewriting. Interventions in writing and culture will inevitably change society, since to separate the two is a false opposition. To take the Medusa, whose face, in legend, turned men to stone, who became, for Freud, a metaphor for castration anxiety in men,¹¹ and write the following does make a difference: ‘You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing’ (p. 255).

LUCE IRIGARAY, ‘WHEN OUR LIPS SPEAK TOGETHER’ (FIRST PUBLISHED IN FRENCH IN 1977; IN ENGLISH IN 1980)

Luce Irigaray's ‘When Our Lips Speak Together’ is in some ways very like ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’. A reader who begins with Cixous's essay and follows it with Irigaray's is likely to note the similar lyrical and polemical style. Compare the openings: ‘I shall speak about women's writing: about what it will do’ (Cixous, p. 245); ‘If we keep on speaking the same language together, we're going to reproduce the same history’.¹² Irigaray's analysis also resembles Cixous's in its discussion of the ‘othering’ of woman in western patriarchal culture. However, Irigaray emphasises that in positioning woman as man's opposite or inferior copy (through emphasising her lack of a penis instead of, for example, the presence of a vagina) patriarchy actually constructs femininity as the ‘same’ as masculinity—the same because still centred on the presence or absence of the phallus: ‘Listen: all round us, men and women sound just the same. The same discussions, the same arguments, the same scenes. The same attractions and separations. The same difficulties, the same impossibility of making connections. The same … Same … Always the same’ (p. 205). Whereas for Cixous it is otherness and difference that must be distinguished, for Irigaray otherness conceals sameness, so woman's difference must be written into culture and into the Symbolic Order to challenge what is, in effect, woman's absence as woman.

Irigaray embraces imagery of fluidity, proximity, touch and blood to create a language of feminine difference. This strategy resembles Cixous's in its deliberately risky tactical adoption of patriarchy's essentialist stereotyping of women: ‘I love you: body shared, undivided. Neither you nor I severed. There is no need for blood shed, between us. No need for a wound to remind us that blood exists. It flows within us, from us. Blood is familiar, close. You are all red. And so very white. Both at once’ (pp. 206-7). She also works with a very similar conception of the gift to Cixous's. By virtue of the absence of expectation of a return, the gift of one woman to another disrupts the masculine libidinal economy which tries to prevent the free circulation and exchange of desire.

The main difference between Cixous's and Irigaray's essays that readers are likely to notice is the evocation of lesbian love in ‘When Our Lips Speak Together’. The speaking voice in Irigaray's essay addresses an unspecified ‘you’, a ‘you’ who shares desire, pleasure and emotional contact with the speaker. Although the sex of both is never explicitly specified, Irigaray uses the resonant image of the two lips to suggest not merely the lips of the mouth but also the lips of the vagina: her own and another woman's:

Open your lips; don't open them simply. I don't open them simply. We—you/I—are neither open nor closed. We never separate simply: a single word cannot be pronounced, produced, uttered by our mouths. Between our lips, yours and mine, several voices, several ways of speaking resound endlessly, back and forth. One is never separable from the other … You touch me all over at the same time. In all senses. Why only one song, one speech, one text at a time? To seduce, to satisfy, to fill one of my ‘holes’? With you, I don't have any. We are not lacks, voids awaiting sustenance, plenitude, fulfillment from the other. By our lips we are women.

(pp. 209-10)

The suggestiveness of this language forces us as readers to confront the proximity, even interweaving, of the body and discourse: the sexuality of textuality and vice versa. Irigaray's performance of this textual sexuality effectively writes woman as presence and difference precisely because, in evoking lesbian sexuality she speaks the unspeakable within phallocentric culture. Her writing practice in this instance is arguably more effective than Cixous's because she avoids some of the risks of recuperation involved in associating femininity with maternity and bisexuality. In creating what one critic has termed a ‘lipeccentric’ text,¹³ Irigaray raises an important issue: the extent to which writing and culture function metaphorically. Both she and Cixous are concerned with the implications for women of the fact that femininity in patriarchy stands metaphorically for what is outside culture. Indeed, Irigaray suggests that metaphor itself works by virtue of similarity, identity, sameness—the denial of difference: it functions according to patriarchal rules. Irigaray's text forces us to ask whether its lips are literal, metaphorical, or something in between. Her ‘lipeccentrism’ particularly responds to, and questions, Lacan's privileging of the phallus in the Symbolic order. In bringing together anatomical and cultural meanings in new configurations she questions the conventional metaphorical, or representational, relation between text and body. For Irigaray the body is always textual but the text is also physical, a point spoken forcefully by the essay's ‘two lips’. This is why, if we return for a moment to the opening sentences of Cixous's and Irigaray's essays (quoted at the start of this section on Irigaray) it is worth noting the emphasis on speech, as well as writing, in both.

JULIA KRISTEVA, ‘FROM ONE IDENTITY TO AN OTHER’ (FIRST PUBLISHED IN FRENCH IN 1975; IN ENGLISH IN 1980)

The dense and difficult style of Julia Kristeva's ‘From One Identity to An Other’ contrasts markedly with the evocative lyricism of Cixous's and Irigaray's pieces. Readers are confronted with a wide range of reference to other philosophers and linguists and extensive use of theoretical terminology (which is not always explained). Rather than anxiously trace the precise meaning of words like ‘noesis’ and ‘noemis’, it seems more appropriate in this context to grasp the central ideas in the essay in relation to those of Cixous and Irigaray. Like them, Kristeva is interested in questioning the dominance of representational theories of language, but she is also interested in what kind of speaking or writing subject such ideas imply. Structuralist linguistics was the most influential theory of language in 1975 when the essay was written, and part of Kristeva's purpose is to demonstrate that it has more in common with earlier theories of language than might at first be apparent. This commonality exists, for Kristeva, because structuralist linguistics still implies a conventional idea of the ‘thetic’ subject and language. The thetic subject, or self, is one that fails to acknowledge difference within itself. It assumes it has unity, identity and ability to act, or, in linguistic terms, to predicate (the ability to affirm, deny or assert): to make a thesis or statement. Such a conception of subjectivity and language is important, because it is this aspect of language that creates its socially enforcing power. However, Kristeva goes on to discuss language which embraces heterogeneity or difference. In the language of poetry she finds evidence of what she calls a ‘semiotic disposition’:

There is within poetic language … a heterogeneousness to meaning and signification. This heterogeneousness, detected genetically in the first echolalias of infants … which is later reactivated … in psychotic discourse … produces in poetic language ‘musical’ but also nonsense effects that destroy not only accepted beliefs and significations, but, in radical experiments, syntax itself, that guarantee of thetic consciousness.¹⁴

Before infants learn to speak they ‘babble’; psychotic episodes produce similar linguistic effects in those who experience them. The speaking subject in both these examples is, for Kristeva, outside the symbolic order, which guarantees logical meaning in both language and subjectivity. The child has not yet entered the symbolic and accepted/learnt its rules; the psychotic has (perhaps temporarily) abandoned them. These examples are interesting to Kristeva because they provide evidence of a disposition which she argues exists in any language (p. 101), but which is admitted more obviously in poetic language. Poetic language demonstrates an ‘undecidable process between sense and nonsense, between language and rhythm … between the symbolic and the semiotic’ (p. 103). She finds the semiotic in poetry in its sentential rhythms, which allow a sentence to acquire multiple meanings and connotations, and obscene words, which mark the eruption of desire into the text. The semiotic disposition of poetry encourages the reader ‘to shatter his own judging consciousness in order to grant passage through it to this rhythmic drive … experienced as jouissance’ (p. 110). Jouissance is an almost untranslatable term embracing many meanings including intense pleasure. Poetic language must therefore create a different type of subjectivity in the writer and reader from the thetic subject of conventional language. Kristeva terms this the ‘subject-in-process’ (p. 103) because it is fractured, diffuse and open to change.

Kristeva's essay argues that the semiotic disposition in language is intrinsically disruptive to the social order. Like Cixous and Irigaray she thus makes moves to imbricate (overlap) the political and the textual. The most important distinction between her ideas and theirs is the extent to which she is prepared to align the semiotic and difference with femininity and the body. She does link the semiotic with the unconscious and the physical, but she only provisionally suggests that the semiotic could be maternal or feminine. She borrows Plato's image of the ‘chora’ to describe the semiotic as a ‘receptacle … unnameable, improbable, hybrid, anterior to naming, to the One, to the father, and consequently, maternally connoted to such an extent that it merits “not even the rank of syllable”’ (p. 102). Later in the essay she describes symbolic language as marking the repression of the relation with the mother and identifies the semiotic with ‘reactivating this repressed instinctual, maternal element’. Poetic language is thus the ‘equivalent of incest’ because it resists the linguistic and social exchange of women which founds patriarchy (p. 104). These ideas seem to resemble Cixous's and Irigaray's views about woman's exclusion from language and the symbolic and the necessity of provisionally writing her back into it as presence and difference, but there is an important distinction. For Kristeva, the semiotic is not something which can be accessed or made present in any simple or straightforward fashion, even as a tactical move. It only comes into existence in language in tension with the symbolic because it is only through such an antagonistic oscillation that either term acquires meaning: ‘It goes without saying that, concerning a signifying practice, that is, a socially communicable discourse like poetic language, this semiotic heterogeneity posited by theory is inseparable from … the symbolic function of significance’ (p. 102). Similarly, the semiotic only comes to have maternal ‘connotations’ in tense relation with the paternal connotations of symbolic language. Towards the end of the essay Kristeva remarks:

It is probably necessary to be a woman (ultimate guarantee of sociality beyond the wreckage of the paternal symbolic function, as well as the inexhaustible generator of its renewal, of its expansion) not to renounce theoretical reason but to compel it to increase its power by giving it an object beyond its limits. Such a position, it seems to me, provides a possible basis for a theory of signification, which, confronted with poetic language, could not in any way account for it, but would rather use it as an indication of what is heterogeneous to meaning (to sign and predication): instinctual economies, always and at the same time open to biophysiological socio-historical constraints.

(p. 113)

Kristeva offers readers a version of femininity as a position which provides an example of what exceeds the symbolic order, even if that excess is always at the same time marked and defined by the symbolic. For Kristeva, woman is a space or place which makes clear how the entire system functions by showing, paradoxically, what is theoretically absent from it. Thus femininity is on the edge of the semiotic and the symbolic, an extremely important and necessary position to be in. Trying to move woman from margin or limit to centre-stage, using the tactic of writing her physical difference into language, is a strategy that will not change the symbolic order, but will merely be recuperated by it. However, there is an ambiguity remaining in the above quotation, which centres on the word ‘probably’ in the opening phrase. This probability troublingly refers us back to biophysiology—to the sexed body. Even if it is probable that those sexed female occupy the position of femininity more easily than those sexed male then Kristeva retains a definition of femininity which, like Cixous's and Irigaray's, hints at biologically essentialist notions of woman.

VIRGINIA WOOLF, ORLANDO (1928)

Virginia Woolf's work is often placed in two contexts: those of modernism and feminism. She is permitted entry into the high modernist literary canon (dominated by male writers such as T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce and Ezra Pound) because of her critique of those aspects of the nineteenth-century and Edwardian realist novel which failed to give a truthful impression of people's inner lives.¹⁵ She experimented with conventions of character portrayal, plotting and narration, creating different ways of presenting thoughts and feelings by using devices like interior monologue, shifting narrative perspectives, unconventional chronology and subjective portrayals of the passing of time. Her novels use lyrical, poetic, sometimes playful and ironic styles. To interpret her writing in this fashion is to see it as part of a wider cultural shift that occurred in the first part of the twentieth century. In part a reaction to the shocking events of the early decades of the century such as world war, the General Strike, economic depression, unemployment and the Wall Street Crash, the movement in the arts known as modernism sought to question the assumptions of earlier writers, thinkers, artists and musicians that it was possible to create the truth about the world in any simple, objective or exterior way. This version of Woolf's oeuvre emphasises novels like To the Lighthouse, Mrs Dalloway and The Waves and sees them as contributing to the breakup of the ‘nineteenth-century consensus’.¹⁶

Those who wish to situate Woolf in a feminist context discuss her in very different terms. Instead of analysing what might appear to be the purely formalist, deconstructive and potentially nihilist aspects of her work, feminist critics have concerned themselves with Woolf's practical suggestions for improving the inferior position of women in early twentieth-century society. As we saw in chapter one, Woolf's views in essays like A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas can be aligned with other first-wave feminists' insistence that material changes are needed to enable women to become men's equals. Many critics have focused on the non-fiction, and on the images of women characters such as Lily Briscoe and Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse, as evidence of Woolf's commitment to a feminist politics. It is clear that these versions of Woolf's writing are potentially conflicting. Scepticism about the ability to write an objective, truthful version of reality does not happily accompany a confident ability to diagnose accurately the problems in society's treatment of women. However, this apparent conflict may say more about criticism of Woolf's work than it does about the work itself. For Woolf, the stylistic experiments associated with modernism are inseparable from the political aims of feminism. More recent criticism has demonstrated that the construction of the traditional patriarchal modernist canon is interwoven with gender issues.¹⁷ It has sought to include other women modernists in the canon and redefine modernism in ways which account for gender differences. The First World War, for example, may have had very different effects on the lives and writing of men and women. For some women, it may even have had an emancipatory effect, offering the opportunity to work outside the home for the first time. Many women modernists, including Woolf, saw their avant-garde styles as ways of attacking the patriarchal status quo.

THEORY INTO PRACTICE

What could be called a simultaneously deconstructive and reconstructive strategy is present in Woolf's Orlando (1928). This is one of the ways in which it can most obviously be interpreted using feminist poststructuralist theory. The opening sentence of the novel is immediately suggestive of the ambivalent, playfully deconstructive style of Cixous's and Irigaray's essays: ‘He—for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it—was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters.’¹⁸ Orlando is performing the typically aggressive action of a young Renaissance nobleman, yet his masculinity is cast in doubt by the parenthetical statement which apparently seeks to confirm it. This ostentatious digression, or ‘aside’, thus anticipates the central ambiguous event half-way through the novel, where the protagonist inexplicably changes sex from male to female. Woolf's style throughout Orlando seeks to foreground and, by implication, to question many conventions and rules: rules of biography (the text purports to be a biography), fiction, sexuality, gender and identity. Orlando continually points out the rigid, turgid conventions of the biography in Woolf's era: the ‘plodding’ through from birth to death, the deliberate omission of unpleasant or inappropriate material, the hagiographic style. This was in part, no doubt, a joking reference to the fact that her father had been the editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, which was in her day a dry tome recording the lives of great men in exactly such terms. The narrator jokes about the insufficiency of manuscript evidence at crucial points in Orlando's life, and ironically bemoans the moments when Orlando does nothing worth recording except think. Serious points are being made about the version of a life contemporary biographical conventions necessarily created.

Orlando also brings a deconstructive strategy to bear on questions of gender. The change of sex enables the narrator to play with many different interpretations of gender identity and sexual difference, yet Woolf particularly wishes to suggest that throughout the historical sweep of the text, woman remains ‘other to’ yet ‘same as’ man (to use Cixous's and Irigaray's terms respectively). She demonstrates how necessary woman is to man's self-definition, and how he struggles to resist this knowledge by continual attempts to exclude and dominate women. As she travels home to England after becoming a woman, Orlando is in an odd transitional state where she is learning the rules of femininity while not forgetting those of masculinity. Initially she enjoys the lazy passivity of being a wealthy woman on board ship, the decorative display of feminine clothing and the ability to refuse or yield flirtatiously to male demands. The prospect of being rescued by a brave sailor in an emergency is exciting, as is the sexual power she can exert merely by showing her ankle. However, she gradually comes to realise that these qualities are instituted in women in order that men can define themselves as the opposite: as active, independent, rational, functional and self-controlled creatures. She also realises that those defined according to these masculine attributes exert a power and control which she loses now she is a woman. The othering of woman has real social effects, but it also poorly conceals the fact that if men's self-definition is so dependent on positioning women as their other then they are potentially vulnerable. This vulnerability arises from the threat of women's real difference asserting itself in a way which disrupts what Irigaray terms the economy of the Same: a sexual economy centred on the phallus.

In the essays discussed earlier in this chapter Cixous and Irigaray deliberately write a stereotypically physical language of feminine difference as a tactical move in order to insert woman into the symbolic order. Kristeva is sceptical about this, arguing instead that poetic language embodies semiotic forces which can have feminine connotations, but which exist in inescapable tension with the symbolic, patriarchal aspects of language. Orlando's use of multiple and conflicting explanations for the protagonist's change of sex suggests several answers to the question of what constitutes gender identity. Exactly similar ambiguities around biology, textuality and sexuality are created. Immediately after her change of sex, the narrator remarks: ‘We may take advantage of this pause in the narrative to make certain statements. Orlando had become a woman—there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been’ (p. 133). The narrator appears to suggest that at the most profound level there is some aspect of Orlando which remains fundamentally the same throughout the experience, and implies that this is essentially ungendered. The indeterminacy centres on the phrase ‘in every other respect’: by implication, it could be argued that becoming a woman is such a significant experience that in no ‘respect’ can Orlando remain unaffected. Later in the novel the narrator reconsiders what was already an ambivalent account of the effects of the sex change: ‘what was said a short time ago about there being no change in Orlando the man and Orlando the woman was ceasing to be altogether true’ (p. 179). Orlando is becoming more modest about her intelligence and more concerned with her appearance. The narrator then offers several explanations for this shift. Initially she seems to support the idea that social conditioning is all important in creating one's personal experience of gender: ‘the change of clothes had, some philosophers will say, much to do with it. Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than merely to keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world's view of us … it is clothes that wear us and not we them’ (pp. 179-80). This startling inversion of our conventional idea that we choose our clothes to express or reflect certain aspects of our selves makes the social constructionist argument forcefully. Immediately, however, the narrator does an about-face: ‘That is the view of some philosophers and wise ones, but on the whole, we incline to another. The difference between the sexes is happily one of great profundity. Clothes are but a symbol of something hid deep beneath. It was a change in Orlando herself that dictated her choice of a woman's dress and of a woman's sex’ (pp. 180-1). The metaphors of depth and surface here suggest that one's biological sex is all-important, and is simply mirrored in our gender identity. This biologically essentialist argument is immediately complicated, however: ‘Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above’ (p. 181). Here we encounter the idea that human nature is basically androgynous, an argument with which we are familiar from A Room of One's Own, discussed in Chapter 1. Carefully tracing some of the shifts in opinions about Orlando's change of sex and its effects demonstrates that the text demands close reading, and that often the ambiguities in the treatment of this issue are generated at the level of the sentence. Orlando resists what Kristeva would term ‘thetic’ language and allows the semiotic to erupt in the text in its digressions, contradictions, interruptions, ellipses and hiatuses. After all, what else is Orlando but a ‘subject-in-process’? The text also creates a reading subject who is ‘in process’. One is forced to abandon any desire for consistency, unity and conclusive argument and instead accept deferral, indeterminacy and ambiguity.

It would appear that Woolf is only willing to link this experience with Orlando's body on occasions, but the physicality of the female body persists as a deliberately troubling remnant in the text, as it does in Kristeva's ‘From One Identity to An Other’. The actual effects of the change of sex on Orlando's body are never alluded to; this creates an ‘unsaid’ in the novel, an ‘unsaid’ which is actually very important. It is also obvious that the confusion about gender only really begins when Orlando becomes a woman. Possessing a body sexed female is what causes proliferating interpretations rather than the sex change itself—it is doubtful whether the same sorts of anxieties would come into play if Orlando had changed from a woman into a man. At points Woolf does consider the implications of writing the female body as difference. Throughout the text Orlando has ambitions to become a writer, but her long poem, ‘The Oak Tree’, is only published after she has become a woman, which strongly suggests that the experience of becoming female is creatively necessary for her to succeed as a writer. Writing well is linked in the text with experiences of bisexuality, love and maternity, a link also made in Cixous's ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’. It is after Orlando marries Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine and just before her son is born that she completes her manuscript and Nick Greene arranges to publish it. Both Shelmerdine and Orlando are intensely aware of, and attracted by, the qualities of the other sex each possesses: ‘“Are you positive you aren't a man?” he would ask anxiously, and she would echo, “Can it be possible you're not a woman?” and then they must put it to the proof without more ado’ (p. 246). Yet these qualities of manliness in Orlando and womanliness in Shelmerdine paradoxically ‘prove’ their essential difference: ‘“I am a woman,” she thought, “a real woman, at last.” She thanked Bonthrop from the bottom of her heart for this rare and unexpected delight’ (p. 241). Orlando and Shelmerdine take pleasure in the desire this difference and plurality create. Their love and marriage allows Orlando to write well for the first time, and the agreement to publish her manuscript is closely followed by the birth of her son. The narrator's hint that something of significance is about to happen is followed by a lengthy digression which tries to conceal, in typically Victorian fashion, the embarrassment of the pregnancy and labour. The birth itself is announced as follows: ‘“It's a very fine boy, M'Lady,” said Mrs Banting, the midwife, putting her first-born child into Orlando's arms. In other words Orlando was safely delivered of a son on Thursday, March the 20th, at three o'clock in the morning’ (p. 282). The experience of maternity is never referred to again. This absence, like the absence of reference to the physical facts of Orlando's becoming female, is indicative both of its official exclusion from the symbolic order, and its importance as the foundation of that order.

Like Irigaray, Woolf also aligns writing the female body, albeit implicitly, with lesbianism. The novel was written as a tribute to her lover Vita Sackville-West, whose life, history and country seat were the models for Orlando's; it is full of in-jokes which Vita and her family would have understood. It has been persuasively argued that Woolf concealed the lesbian aspects of the text to avoid the opprobrium attendant on the appearance of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, which deals explicitly with lesbian issues, three months before Orlando was published.¹⁹ Suggestions of same-sex love exist as ironic traces throughout the novel. As a young nobleman at the court of King James, Orlando is intensely attracted to a person whom he at first assumes to be a boy because she is such a good skater. He is ‘ready to tear his hair with vexation that the person was of his own sex, and thus all embraces were out of the question’ (p. 36). The ostensible relief on his (and the text's) part when Sasha turns out to be a woman (albeit one who possesses distinctly masculine qualities) does not invalidate the erotic thrill attached to the prospect of a homosexual liaison. A very similar episode occurs much later on, when Orlando has become a woman, but chooses to dress as a man to go for an evening walk. She is accosted by a prostitute, and does not reveal her sex until the last possible moment. The erotic potential of the scene is considerable and persists as a disturbing supplement in the text. Immediately after her change of sex, Orlando finds that her deepest feelings are still for women. Although this is explained as ‘the culpable laggardry of the human frame to adapt itself to convention’ (p. 154), Orlando is still greatly affected by suddenly seeing Sasha again at the very end of the novel, when one might assume that such an adaptation would have taken place. To read the lesbian subtext of the novel carefully may mean acknowledging the possibility that Orlando's change of sex is motivated by the desire to experience same-sex love with other women.

Orlando debates the same central question which puzzles Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva: how to deal with women's difference while simultaneously acknowledging that that difference cannot really exist in the patriarchal symbolic order. When Orlando reveals the fact that she is a woman to the prostitute, Nell gathers together her friends and all the women share an enjoyable evening of gossip, chat and rumination on their situations. What they actually say is not told to the reader, indeed the idea that such an evening of companionship among women is possible is doubted by the narrator who, instead, ironically repeats a series of men's opinions of women:

‘It is well known’, says Mr S. W., ‘that when they lack the stimulus of the other sex, women can find nothing to say to each other. When they are alone, they do not talk, they scratch.’ And since they cannot talk together and scratching cannot continue without interruption and it is well known (Mr T. R. has proved it) ‘that women are incapable of any feeling of affection for their own sex and hold each other in the greatest aversion’, what can we suppose that women do when they seek out each other's society?

As that is not a question that can engage the attention of a sensible man, let us, who enjoy the immunity of all biographers and historians from any sex whatever, pass it over, and merely state that Orlando professed great enjoyment in the society of her own sex, and leave it to the gentlemen to prove, as they are very fond of doing, that this is impossible.

(p. 210)

In this clever passage, the narrator assumes a sexless voice merely to demonstrate that this apparent ‘neutrality’ can easily conceal masculine prejudice. In quoting examples of such prejudice about women Woolf mimics it so that it begins to seem ridiculous. The possibility that women enjoy each other's company then emerges by implication from the gaps in the text. This exactly resembles poststructuralist feminism's insistence on deconstructing the category ‘woman’ as it exists in patriarchy, but simultaneously reconstructing it tactically and strategically using the flawed language available. Woolf suggests, like Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva, that the body and language are mired together and that language is thus a political weapon and has more than a merely representational or metaphorical function. The fact that Orlando is a woman is finally confirmed linguistically, through the thetic language of the Law: ‘my sex is pronounced indisputably female’ (p. 243). Immediately after her change of sex the shifts in the pronouns used to describe Orlando (‘we must for convention's sake say “her” for “his”, and “she” for “he”—p. 133) also demonstrate the importance of language in creating a binary gender system. Orlando particularly ponders the relation between life and art, and finds the conventional metaphorical or representational way of perceiving this relationship deeply unsatisfactory. He notes his own propensity to use elaborate figurative language, and finally deems it pointless, recognising that perceiving the relation between life and poetry, or masculinity and femininity, as metaphorical fails to account for difference. In each case, the latter is not a similar copy of the former because both are discursively constructed in multiple ways.

PRACTICE INTO THEORY

The reception of Woolf's Orlando suggests one important problem with feminist poststructuralist theory: the possibility that the risk attached to using essentialist language to define woman's difference—however strategically—is too great to make it worth taking. Isn't emphasising the importance of women's bodies and suggesting that they are the source of innate differences between men and women exactly what patriarchy has always believed, and is quite happy to hear? In the Victorian period the ideology of separate spheres for women and men, which confined middle-class women in the home, was based on beliefs about the intrinsic differences of women's physical natures from men's. Many early feminist readers of Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva found their arguments to be essentialist, and failed to see this essentialism as a tactical move.²⁰ If this interpretation can be suggested by other feminists it is more than likely to be made by readers unsympathetic to feminism of any kind. Jacqueline Rose discusses Kristeva's work as encountering a dilemma: ‘the hideous moment when a theory arms itself with a concept of femininity as different, a something other to the culture as it is known, only to find itself face to face with, or even entrenched within, the most grotesque and fully cultural stereotypes of femininity itself’.²¹ This risk of incorporation is well demonstrated by the way that contemporary readers and reviewers perceived Orlando: as a humorous, light-hearted ‘romp’ which was not to be taken too seriously. Indeed, this view was shared by Woolf herself during the novel's composition.²² Treating Orlando in this way meant that it had to wait for feminist criticism to take it seriously; the novel is very rarely given any lengthy discussion in early studies of Woolf's work.

This point suggests that what Rose calls the ‘fully cultural’ nature of femininity is, like the fully cultural nature of a text's reception, inescapable. The idea that somehow femininity exists outside of or before culture, language or the symbolic, and can therefore be the source of a disruptive language of difference, cannot, according to this argument, be the case, even in the very provisional sense which Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva may imply. Similarly, the transgressive aspects of Orlando can only be perceived by those looking for them: irony is in the eye of the beholder. The text itself suggests that the exact difference in Orlando once she becomes a woman is almost impossible to locate outside what are perceived as its ‘effects’ in society. The experience of being both a man and a woman and the fact that Orlando lives from the Elizabethan age until 1928 without aging much make her uniquely placed to understand how ‘woman’ means something very different in different historical periods. In the Victorian era, for example, Orlando notes with distaste the new emphasis on life-long companionate marriage, but is unable to resist its manifestation in an irritating tingling in her wedding-ring finger, an irritation that persists until she finds a husband to appease it. The fact that the desire for marriage precedes meeting a likely suitor is an ironic comment on the Victorian idealisation of romantic love, which concealed a ruthlessly economic marriage market. The physical effects of these ideologies on Orlando suggest that the body cannot be the source of pre-cultural meanings because it is entirely culturally produced.

Orlando retains an emphasis on economic and social forces in constructing identity, which is not surprising for the author of A Room of One's Own. It is important that Orlando is a wealthy property owner, and one of the significant ways in which her femininity creates problems is when her ownership of this property is questioned. The lack of emphasis on such material factors in poststructuralist feminist analyses is grounded in the argument that the economic and social are discursively constructed anyway. It is this breaking-up of an apparently false opposition between language and reality that explains the political significance Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva accord to writing. However, it is certainly not the case that poetic language, or writing the body, necessarily has a socially subversive function: that function is, as we have seen in relation to the reception of Orlando, context-dependent. Decisions about what gets published are often made on commercial grounds. Virginia Woolf and her husband ran their own press, but the publication of Orlando's ‘The Oak Tree’ suggests some of the fortuitous chances involved for those less fortunate. Her meeting with Nicholas Greene and the fact that he is now in a position powerful enough to help her, by contacting publishers and reviewers, are matters of chance. More importantly, the text suggests that one reason why Orlando makes a success of ‘The Oak Tree’ is because it is now in keeping with ‘the spirit of the age’ (p. 253), not because she is finally able to write her female body. In other words, it is because ‘The Oak Tree’ fits with Victorian ideologies that it is published, which suggests the exact opposite of the anarchic effects Kristeva perceives in poetic language. Breaking down the distinction between such language and the economic and social by demonstrating that both are discourses does not mean that they are the same discourse with identical effects, which are equally significant in shaping our lives.

There is also a problem with the idea that ambiguous, ironic and complex language generates productive questioning in the reader. Many readers of both Woolf's Orlando and Kristeva's work, in particular, find it impossibly abstruse, experiencing nothing but frustration and resentment. All four of the writers discussed here use such language particularly when making extensive reference to their literary, philosophical and cultural heritage, which is usually male. Even though such allusions are very rarely respectful, it is often difficult to ‘get the joke’ if one does not know the source. The treatment of their psychoanalytical forefathers is a case in point. Without a knowledge of Freud and Lacan (as a bare minimum) it is difficult to understand the vocabulary of Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva, and to comprehend how this playfully and inventively innovates on previous orthodoxies. If we pause to consider Orlando as a commentary on Freudian psychoanalysis a similar point can be made. The Hogarth Press, owned and run by the Woolfs, published the English translation of all of Freud and work by other contemporary psychoanalysts such as Melanie Klein and Ernest Jones. Although Woolf claimed not to have read Freud until 1939, the year she met him, many of her friends and relations were training as analysts and invited them as speakers. She was thus part of a circle in which psychoanalysis was influential,²³ and we could read Orlando as a travesty of Freud's account of the acquisition of gender identity. Freud's story arguably creates a straightforwardly narrative and even teleological (designed to serve a particular purpose) version of normative masculine development. Woolf institutes an incredible, deliberately excessive example of such a development (the change of sex). She asks whether this change can be understood in any way as part of a progressive sequence or whether it is in fact profoundly anti-narrative, because totally random. She also makes Orlando, who began life biologically male, reach an ‘end-point’ (if she has one) of being female; a joke at the expense of Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex, which ultimately seeks to align gender identity and sexual object choice with genital sexuality. All of these allusions are lost on the reader who has no acquaintance with Freud. If Woolf, Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva are so concerned to disrupt the patriarchal symbolic order then why do they make so much reference to their male forebears anyway? Is the risk of being perceived as ‘dutiful daughters’ worth taking?

Of related concern is the fact that many of the examples of subversive feminine writing that Kristeva and Cixous discuss are by men. Kristeva mentions Mayakovsky, Artaud, Lautréamont, Mallarmé, Beckett, the Marquis de Sade and Céline. Cixous mentions in a footnote Colette, Marguerite Duras and Jean Genet. Irigaray's essay does not explicitly apply her ideas to any writer's work. This discovery of femininity as a trace in the most canonical male texts certainly breaks down any assumption of a naive, or automatic, link between anatomy and style, but an equally significant part of the trio's argument concerns the ways in which this link must be reconstructed, admittedly in more sophisticated ways. It would seem necessary to demonstrate this in relation to writing by women authors. Woolf's Orlando, as has been suggested, provides a good case in point, which is why it has been included here, especially since it is also, like many of the male examples, a modernist text.

Another significant accusation levelled at Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva concerns the way they downplay differences between women. This is apparent in the number of occasions when they tend to discuss ‘woman’ rather than ‘women’. Their analyses don't always acknowledge the fact that class, race and sexuality can fracture and complicate such a simple categorisation. By placing their work in the context of the practice of clitoridectomy Gayatri Spivak suggestively complicates ideas about the female body as source for a subversive writing: ‘I see no way to avoid insisting that there has to be a simultaneous other focus: not merely who am I? But who is the other woman? How am I naming her? How does she name me?’²⁴ It could be argued that Orlando's narrowness in class terms has similarly reductive effects. The text takes great pleasure in the aristocratic, luxurious life of its protagonist and relishes the manifestations of wealth and property that surround him/her. Orlando's love of land and his country house stays with him when he becomes a ‘she’—this is one of the ways in which a continuity of identity is suggested. The most significant effect of the change of sex is to call into question Orlando's rights to her estate, and the novel takes pains to restore these by the end. Undoubtedly, very different effects would be prominent in the life of a man of a lower class who underwent a similar change. The pleasure the novel takes in class privilege is one of its least enjoyable aspects, unless we see Orlando as satirising that pleasure as well as celebrating it. The episode where Orlando lives with the gypsies for a short while immediately after becoming a woman is an interesting case in point. The gypsies react to her proud descriptions of her house and lineage with polite embarrassment: they ‘thought a descent of four or five hundred years only the meanest possible … there was nothing specially memorable or desirable in ancient birth; vagabonds and beggars all shared it … there was no more vulgar ambition than to possess bedrooms by the hundred … when the whole earth is ours’ (p. 142). The narrator is certainly using this episode to jibe at upper-class assumptions. Part of Woolf's complex attitude is bound up with her feelings for Vita, whose background was significantly different from Woolf's own, but the text does at times suggest that women of different classes share more than they realise. When Orlando spends an evening with Nell and her prostitute friends the differences between them are merely superficial, and are lost beneath the key experience of exploitation by men.

The implicit nature of the lesbian subtext in Orlando also suggests some of the difficulties in Irigaray's evocation of lesbianism in ‘When Our Lips Speak Together’. Woman is the underside and the mainstay of the symbolic order for Irigaray; lesbianism, in evoking the initial same-sex love relation with the mother, inserts woman as positive difference into that order. This performs what one critic has termed a ‘provisional maneuver, one whose function is tactical and temporary, remedial—one step in a long series of struggles necessary to establish an autonomous identity for women’.²⁵ Lesbianism thus becomes subordinate to a narrative which seeks to empower all women. This exactly resembles the place accorded lesbianism in Orlando, where it is hidden beneath a more overt narrative about androgyny and the emancipation of women. The association between lesbianism and maternity, and the emphasis on maternity in the writing of Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva, has also been severely challenged. Judith Butler argues that the maternal body is not ‘the hidden ground of all signification, the tacit cause of all culture’. Rather, it is ‘an effect or consequence of a system of sexuality in which the female body is required to assume maternity as the essence of its self and the law of its desire’.²⁶ Elsewhere, she argues that it is the lesbian who is culturally constructed as ‘other’ yet essential to those distinctions which are crucial to the patriarchal symbolic order such as mind/matter and gender/sex: not the woman.²⁷ Therefore lesbianism cannot be easily abandoned once its tactical effectiveness appears to have served its purpose (a position some have found Irigaray taking in her more recent interest in heterosexual love relationships).²⁸ The maternal metaphor for lesbian sexuality has been questioned by more recent interest in lesbian S/M practices as subversive rewritings or redeployments of gay male and male heterosexual sexual practices.²⁹ The heterosexism of patriarchal culture will not be effectively challenged until the difference of lesbianism, as well as differences of class and race, is genuinely acknowledged within it. These debates will be discussed in more depth in Chapters 7 and 8.

CONCLUSION

What becomes clear when we read Virginia Woolf's Oriando alongside Hélène Cixous's ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, Luce Irigaray's ‘When Our Lips Speak Together’ and Julia Kristeva's ‘From One Identity to An Other’ is the sheer variety of interpretations they all produce, and the fact that many of these are totally contradictory. Most of these contradictions centre, as we have seen, around the position of the sexed body in relation to culture, writing and politics, and the questioning of that very phrase ‘in relation to’ (metaphorical, and thus problematic!). In raising these issues and generating debate about them, all four of these texts perform a vital function: in Kristevan terms they are poetic texts which embody the ‘undecidable process … between the symbolic and the semiotic’ (p. 103). They forcibly generate productive uncertainty in the reading subject. In their simultaneous use of deconstructive and reconstructive linguistic strategies, they are all (even Orlando) distinctly poststructuralist feminist texts.

Notes

1. See, for example, Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, New French Feminisms: An Anthology (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1981); Hester Eisenstein and Alice Jardine, The Future of Difference (Boston, Mass.: G. K. Hall, 1980); Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London: Routledge, 1985).

2. See Christine Delphy, ‘The Invention of French Feminism: An Essential Move’, Yale French Studies, (1993), 190-221.

3. In discussing linguistics and psychoanalysis at the expense of philosophy I am repeating an interpretative manoeuvre which has been questioned in recent criticism, particularly of Irigaray and Kristeva. (See, for example, Tina Chanter, Ethics of Eros: Irigaray's Rewriting of the Philosophers (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 3; John Lechte, Julia Kristeva (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 14.) However, I think the choice is justified precisely because of the significance of that interpretative manoeuvre in appropriations of their work in English as a discipline which has emphasised the linguistic and psychoanalytic as more directly relevant to a process of textual interpretation.

4. See, for example, Toril Moi, pp. 104-8 for discussion of Cixous's debt to Derrida, Margaret Whitford, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 123 for discussion of how Irigaray moves beyond Derrida, and Lechte, pp. 95-9 for discussion of Derrida's influence on Kristeva.

5. On structuralism see Robert Scholes, Structuralism in Literature (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974) and Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature (London: Routledge, 1975). On poststructuralism see Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, ed. Robert Young (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981).

6. Luce Irigaray trained with Lacan at the Ecole Freudienne, from which she was expelled after the publication of Speculum of the Other Woman. A large proportion of commentators on Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva situate them in relation to Lacan, or explain explicitly why they are not doing so. See, for example, Moi (pp. 99-101), Jane Gallop, Feminism and Psychoanalysis: The Daughter's Seduction (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982) and Elizabeth Grosz, Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1989).

7. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar. Book III: The Psychoses, 1955-56, trans. Russell Grigg (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 167.

8. A useful introduction to the work of Lacan in relation to feminism is Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (London: Routledge, 1990).

9. See particularly Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles/Eperons: Les Styles de Nietzsche, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1979).

10. Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, New French Feminisms: An Anthology, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1981), 245-64 (p. 255).

11. Sigmund Freud, ‘Medusa's Head’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1940), pp. 273-4.

12. Luce Irigaray, ‘When Our Lips Speak Together’, in This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 205-18 (p. 205).

13. Maggie Berg, ‘Luce Irigaray's “Contradictions”: Poststructuralism and Feminism’, Signs, 17 (1991), 50-70 (65).

14. Julia Kristeva, ‘From One Identity to an Other’, in The Portable Kristeva, ed. Kelly Oliver (New York: Columbia, 1997), pp. 93-115 (p. 101).

15. See Virginia Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’, in The Common Reader, First Series (London: The Hogarth Press, 1968), pp. 184-95.

16. Peter Faulkner, Modernism (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 2.

17. See for example Bonnie Kime Scott, Refiguring Modernism, vol. 1: The Women of 1928 (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1995) and The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1990), and Joseph Boone, Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

18. Virginia Woolf, Orlando, ed. Rachel Bowlby, World's Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 13.

19. Sherron Knopp, ‘“If I Saw You Would You Kiss Me?”: Sapphism and the Subversiveness of Virginia Woolf's Orlando’, PMLA, 103 (1988), 24-34.

20. See for example Moi's judgements of Cixous and Irigaray.

21. Jacqueline Rose, ‘Julia Kristeva—Take Two’, in Ethics, Politics and Difference in Julia Kristeva's Writing, ed. Kelly Oliver (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 41-61 (pp. 52-3).

22. Woolf refers to it as ‘all a joke; & yet gay & quick reading I think; a writers' holiday’, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 1925-1930, vol. 3, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London: Hogarth, 1980). For contemporary reviews see Virginia Woolf: The Critical Heritage, ed. Robin Majundar and Allen McLaurin (London: Routledge, 1975), pp. 222-54.

23. See Elizabeth Abel, Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

24. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘French Feminism in an International Frame’, in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 134-53 (p. 144).

25. Elizabeth Grosz, ‘The Hetero and the Homo’, in Engaging with Irigaray: Feminist Philosophy and Modern European Thought, ed. Carolyn Burke, Naomi Schor and Margaret Whitford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 335-50 (p. 339).

26. Judith Butler, ‘The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva’, in Ethics, Politics and Difference in Julia Kristeva's Writing, ed. Kelly Oliver (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 164-78 (p. 177).

27. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 51.

28. See, for example, Irigaray, An Ethic of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993) and Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Gillian C. Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

29. See, for example, Teresa de Lauretis, The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1994).