[By using myth in Les Guérillères Monique Wittig] transcends the twentieth century and envisions a utopia in which old myths have been adapted to achieve new ends. By this use of myth Wittig makes two important points about women in the twentieth century: they are trapped by myth, yet they can find a mythic means of escape from entrapment.

Two principal types of myth—classical and contemporary—are used by Wittig. By "classical" myths I mean legends from Greek and Roman antiquity, folktales, and Bible stories. By "contemporary" I refer to the kinds of myths described by Roland Barthes in Mythologies, those cultural—sometimes class-associated—myths by which humans define themselves. Freudian "theories" of masculine physiological superiority comprise the most important contemporary myth dealt with by Wittig.

Out of the materials of both classical and contemporary myths, Wittig constructs in Les Guérillères a new mythology similar to the one described by Joseph Campbell in Myths To Live By. According to him a new mythology is identical to "… the old, everlasting, perennial mythology, in its 'subjective sense,' poetically renewed in terms neither of a remembered past nor a projected future, but of now … to the waking of individuals in the knowledge of themselves…." This new mythology in Les Guérillères twice accomplishes the goal of awakened individuals that Campbell describes. In a fictional sense, the already-awakened—enlightened—individuals are the superwomen in the novel whose lives have been defined by the feminist myths of their culture. In a real sense, however, the waking individuals are the novel's readers, we who realize the necessity of creating our own mythologies. (p. 47)

Readers are swept up into an acceptance of the values of this fictional world…. A pattern is established which depends upon the juxtaposing of the guérillères' culture with our own. Observing the guérillère culture, the reader notices how, when myths differ and folktales change, behavior differs. Icarus does not fall into the sea. Snow-White is no longer passive. The guérillères aggress. Observing these changed myths and behaviors the reader realizes that she is trapped into certain behavior by a complex intermeshing of her own culture's myths. The question the reader asks: How can one get free?

In Les Guérillères Wittig provides an answer to this question. The answer suggested by Wittig's text is that the reader should do as Wittig has done in Les Guérillères: build her own mythology….

The new mythology which Wittig creates for her readers and for her warrior-women in Les Guérillères possesses a classical base. Besides her use of the legend about the Amazon-women, she adapts for a female culture several other Greek and Roman male-centered myths…. (p. 48)

Other types of classical myths—folktales, and even Bible stories—are adapted for the guérillère culture…. [There] are contemporary myths which entrap. The point is, however, that they can also be reshaped to liberate women. One in particular is crucial to an understanding of Les Guérillères, the Freudian myth of male physiological and psychological supremacy. This "theory," and its corollary, female inferiority, are equatable with prevailing cultural notions about female sexuality…. Les Guérillères contains an affirmative myth to replace Freud's "theory." According to this myth a large group of women, the guérillères, refuse to repeat the litany that affirms male superiority: "The women say, I refuse to mumble after them the words lack of penis lack of money lack of insignia lack of name. I refuse to pronounce the names of possession and nonpossession."… (p. 49)

Wittig's society of guérillères encourages a comfortable, affirmative pride in female genitalia….

But besides her response to the Freudian myth, Wittig includes in Les Guérillères a simultaneously ancient and modern mythdrawing: the circle. Three circles adorn three separate, otherwise blank pages of the text. Besides these three circles, others are found metaphorically reproduced in almost all of the book's 172 passages…. In Les Guérillères, the reader realizes that she is confronting an androgynous whole. Both male and female are at the center of an immense circle in Wittig's text, one with all center and no circumference. Before this androgynous circle becomes reality though, a revolution between males and females is fought, with women winning the liberation they had already earned and been enjoying. (p. 50)

[In] Les Guérillères circles are not symbols for the female vulva. "They [the guérillères] do not say that vulvas are to be compared to suns, planets, innumerable galaxies. They do not say that gyratory movements are like vulvas."… The guérillères are free from our conventions….

The Guérillères keep records of their activities, a kind of instruction book-history text in which all the women are free to write. The women call this book a "feminary." Wittig's novel for our civilization is also a kind of "feminary." It is an instruction book designed to explain how one achieves liberation. Wittig's thesis is that feminine history can be changed by changing the myths about femininity. (p. 51)