SOURCE: Masland, Lynn. “In Her Own Voice: An Irigarayan Exploration of Women's Discourse in Caro Michele (Natalia Ginzburg) and Lettere a Marina (Dacia Maraini).” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 21, no. 3 (September 1994): 331-40.

[In the following essay, Masland utilizes aspects of Luce Irigaray's theory of women's discourse to compare Ginzburg's Caro Michele and Dacia Maraini's Lettere a Marina.]

Can She speak? Does She have a voice? If She could speak, what would She say?

In this paper, I will apply some aspects of Luce Irigaray's theory of women's discourse to two works of fiction by contemporary Italian women writers. Specifically, I will consider these two works in the light of Irigaray's motifs of the tactile, including her “lips” metaphor; her privileging of a non-logical, non-linear syntax; and her use of images of fluidity, based upon an “economy of fluids.” Subtending my discussion of these motifs from Irigaray's parler femme is the controversy over Irigaray's perceived essentialist bias and whether or not this essentialism is regressive and counter-productive. Like Fuss (1989) and Whitford (1991), I argue that Irigaray's essentialism is useful in the broader effort to articulate a feminine imaginary. Her critique of patriarchal discourse's domination of philosophical discourse (and thus virtually every other Western discourse including the psychoanalytical) is rigorous. Whether she has managed to articulate a discourse which is unequivocally independent of repressed elements of the masculine imaginary can, I think, be questioned; however, she has created the space and terms for an on-going discussion of a feminine imaginary and of a discourse which corresponds to it. Reading these two novels through the prism of Irigaray's analysis, I found my perspective enlarged and altered. Like a palimpsest, meanings, relationships, dimensions and images emerged from these works which I might not have otherwise seen—rather as though I was watching messages written in invisible ink slowly take shape.

THE ESSENTIALIST CONTROVERSY

As feminist theory, Luce Irigaray's Ce Sexe qui n'en est pas un (1977) has elicited a mixed response among feminists. In a recent essay on Irigaray's “contradictions,” Maggie Berg notes (50) that some critics (Plaza, Moi, Jones, Burke) regard Irigaray's work as naïve (since it posits the possibility of a prediscursive sexual identity) and dangerously essentialist (since it posits an eternal essential feminine). Toril Moi approves Irigaray's critique of philosophical discourse as the “discourse of discourses” (the one that lays down the law for all the others), but focuses on the dilemma which Irigaray's effort to produce a positive theory of femininity poses: “To define woman is necessarily to essentialize her” (139). Irigaray, says Moi, is aware of this trap and may, perhaps, seek to undo patriarchal discourse by excessively miming it as the hysteric mimes the patriarchal masculine.¹ Moi draws upon Irigaray's work on feminine mystics: “If the mystic's abject surrender becomes the moment of her liberation, Irigaray's undermining of patriarchy through the overmiming of its discourses may be the one way out of the straitjacket of phallocentrism” (140). But “hysterical miming” and “abject surrender” are unattractive tools for undermining patriarchal discourse, and Moi damns with faint praise. Speculating on Irigaray's theories of a woman's language, Moi is sharply critical of its effectiveness and wary of its potential for “babble,” for sounding like a tale told by an idiot.

Andrea Nye writes that Irigaray calls for an “écriture de la femme” that “would be an ‘excess’ or ‘derangement’ of the male logic in which women are always a lack or an inverted reproduction of a masculine subject” (191). Indeed, the language which Irigaray describes has much in common with the mystical language of ecstasy and union. Nye views this language as the “rediscovered underside of male logic.” As such, she writes, “it continues to be a language of the oppressed, a language without authority, a language which makes no assertions, a language which cries and communicates but cannot establish or prescribe” (211). “It is not necessary,” she adds, “to revert to the powerless speech of dreamers and hysterics” (216).

Two recent books take the discussion of essentialism beyond the stalemate stage. In Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference, Diana Fuss questions whether essentialism has received a “bad rap,” commenting that “few other words in the vocabulary of contemporary critical theory are so persistently maligned … so predictably summoned as a term of infallible critique.” She argues that the “question we should be asking is not ‘is this text essentialist (and therefore “bad”)?’ but rather, ‘if this text is essentialist, what motivates its deployment’” (xi). Examining essentialist and constructionist (“woman” as a complex historical, sociological, cultural construct) arguments, she demonstrates that the two are interrelated rather than mutually exclusive. There is not one essentialism but many essentialisms, each constructed historically and culturally; conversely, underlying each historical construct of difference is some form of collective concept embodied in the construct's sign.

Irigaray's essentialism, argues Fuss, is a tool used in the search for a female imaginary, to be read within “a larger constructionist project re-creating, remetaphorizing the body” (57). Although critics such as Elaine Showalter believe that invoking the female body, even metaphorically, “risks a return to the crude essentialism, the phallic and ovarian theories of art” (1982, 17) or to “anatomy is destiny” traps, Fuss sees Irigaray's parler femme as an effort to establish a locus from which the “speaking woman” can be heard.²

Margaret Whitford also sees at issue the construction of a female imaginary, in which woman is neither silenced, nor the object of masculine desire nor even the pre-verbal mother. Instead, a female imaginary would articulate the desire of a woman-as-speaking-subject. Irigaray uses the tools of (Freudian) psychoanalysis, according to Whitford, to “dismantle the defenses of the [masculine] Western cultural unconscious,” and help the female imaginary find a voice. Irigaray attempts to “theorize the conditions for a female subject which could not be simply incorporated back into the male imaginary as its ‘other’ (the ‘feminine’ of the male philosophers)” (33).

IRIGARAY'S FEMININE IMAGINARY AND “WOMAN'S STYLE”

Irigaray's famous “lips,” described in “Quand nos lèvres se parlent” (Chapt. ll) are seen by Whitford and Fuss as a symbolization of a female imaginary articulated outside of a phallic economy based upon the exchange of women as objects. Touching and multiplicity are characteristic of these “lips,” replacing the speculative gaze of the masculine imaginary. These lips (facial and genital) are two, touching each other, never completely separated, closed and open, neither ever excluding the other; they are motifs of self-touching and proximity (Irigaray 208). Further, the female imaginary, according to Irigaray, privileges a mechanics of fluids—“continu, compressible, dilatable, visqueux, conductible, diffusible” (109)—while the masculine imaginary of Western culture prefers solids—“propriété, production, ordre, forme, unité, visibilité” (85).³

Describing “women's style,” or parler femme, Irigaray writes:

Ce “style,” ou “écriture,” de la femme met plutôt fau aux mots fétiches, aux termes propres, aux formes bien construites. Ce “style” ne privilégie pas le regard mais rend toute figure à sa naissance, aussi tactile. … La simultanéité serait son “propre”. … Toujours fluide … ces frottments entre deux infiniment voisins qui font dynamique. Son “style” résiste à, et fait exploser, toute forme, figure, ideé, concept, solidement établis. Ce qui n'est pas dire que son style n'est rien, comme le laisse croire une discursivité qui ne peut le penser. Mais son “style” ne peut se soutenir comme thèse, ne peut faire l'objet d'une position. … Et même les motifs du “se toucher,” de la “proximité” isolés comme tels ou réduits en énoncés, pourraient effectivement passer pour une tentative d'approprier le fêminin au discourse.

(76)

Characteristics of Irigaray's parler femme, then, include the two lips as a symbol of a female imaginary based upon touch, an autonomous connectedness (not two, not one), an “economy of fluids”; and a syntax which does not necessarily privilege linearity, logic or fact.

TOUCH AND MEMORY IN CARO MICHELE

Natalia Ginzburg's novella Caro Michele (1973) focuses on relationships in a contemporary Italian middle-class family. In the opening passage, sight, action and thought give way to the tactile as Michael's mother, Adriana, becomes her own nurturer. In this scene, whose images underscore Adriana's status as discarded mother and object-of-desire, she wakes up alone in her new house on her birthday. It is snowing outside. Inside, she is isolated with only her image in the mirror, in place of a lover or husband, to greet her. She writes a letter to her absent only son, Michael, telling him in closing that she will spend the morning reading Pascal's Pensées. But rather than reading philosophical discourse, she slips out of active, historical time into her own reverie (fluidity). The morning passes timelessly, as she rests her head in one hand while caressing her feet and ankles with the other. The scene moves from the mirror and the gaze—symbols of the masculine imaginary emphasizing, in a Lacanian sense, separation and loss of intimate relationship—to the maternal touch, as Adriana becomes her own comforter and nurturer. Her hand caressing her feet and ankles approximates that autonomous connectedness which Irigaray identifies as characteristic of a female imaginary or parler femme.

In Caro Michele there is a tension between the patriarchal version of truth, history, importance and reality, as represented by Adriana's “story” about the father and Michael, and her efforts, primarily through memories expressed in her letters, to disrupt the discourse of separation. Disrupting discourse, writes Irigaray, “veut dire que le masculin ne serait plus ‘le tout.’ Ne pourrait plus, à lui seul, définir, circonvenir, circonscrire la, les propriétés du/de tout” (77).

According to Adriana's “story,” her artist husband had no use for her or their four daughters and was only interested in the son. At the time of their separation, he took the son; she, the four daughters. This family “story” becomes a metaphor for the structure of male/female relationships, roles, lives and duties in the larger patriarchal society. Adriana's story can also be seen as an archetypal pattern reflected on individual, societal and mythological levels, i.e., at the time of the divorce (Separation, Fall), the Mother (Demeter, Eve, Magna Mater) vanished with the daughters into oblivion; the artist husband (Creator, Father, God) remained interested only in his sons (Abel, Cain, Jesus).

Although still critical of the mother and daughters, the artist father becomes a lonely, bitter, solitary voice. Out of touch, his paintings (creations) become less and less relevant. He and Adriana maintain strained weekly meetings at which they have little to say to each other. The mother flows determinedly through the lives of her reluctant children: she continues to weave the relationships together through letters and visits. However, her authority is lacking; she has been deposed and is used, rather than respected.

Though cast off by the father and exploited by the son, Adriana uses her memories to interrupt the discourse, the form, the linearity of the patriarchal “storia.” Just as her stubborn presence as deposed mother disrupts the discourse of the “creator” father and “revolutionary” son, so Adriana's memories demonstrate an adaptivity and fluidity which seek to preserve relationships and overcome separation even at the sacrifice of “truth.” A word or thought, like a person, is not dropped but retained, qualified, explained, regarded from various perspectives. The use of an epistolary technique rather than narration or dialogue permits Adriana to tell the story and comment in a non-linear, episodic, associative fashion. Memory cancels separation by time, distance, enmity, indifference. Reflecting Irigaray's contention that parler femme does not necessarily privilege fact, Adriana revises and redefines events through her memories, which assume an importance transcending the factual and privileging connectedness. After the father's death, she writes to Michael:

La morte di tuo padre me ha colpito duramente. Io adesso mi sento molto più sola. … Non so spiegarti perché mi sento più sola da quando é morto. Forse perché avevamo in commune delle memorie. Queste memorie le avevamo solo io e lui al mondo. É vero che non usavamo farne parola quando ci incontravamo. Però mi rendo conto adesso che non era necessario farne parola. … Non erano memorie felici perché io e tuo padre non siamo stati mai molto felici insieme. … Ma non si amano soltanto le memorie felici. A un cero punto della vita, ci si accorge che si amano le memorie.

(380)

Your father's death was a severe blow. Now I feel much more alone. … I can't explain to you why I feel more alone since his death. Maybe because we shared certain memories. We were the only people in the world who shared those memories. It is true that we never referred to them when we met. However, now I realize that it wasn't necessary to talk about them. … They were not happy memories because your father and I had never been very happy together. … However, one loves not just the happy memories. At a certain point in life, one is aware that one simply loves one's memories.

(Ginzburg 41)

The subtext of memory and relationship endures after the deaths of father and son. Adriana and Michael's empathetic friend, Oswald, the figurative “son” who remains with the Mother, view life as the plastic medium for their memories. After Michael's death, Oswald writes to Michael's sister, Angelica:

… tu sai che anche Michele non aveva memoria. … A coltivare le memorie ci siamo forse ancora tu, tua madre, e io, tu per temperamento, io e forse tua madre per temperamento e perché nella nostra vita presente c'è nulla che valga i luoghi e gli attimi incontrati lungo il percorso. Mentre io li vivevo o li guardavo, quegli attimi o quei luoghi, essi avevano uno straordinario splendore, ma perché io sapevo che mi sarei curvato a ricordarli … questo pensiero è per me consolante, perché ci si consola con nulla quando non abbiamo più nulla.

(495-96)

As you well know, Michele had no memory. … We are the only people who try to remember, you, your mother, and I … because there is nothing in our lives at present that can compare with the moments and places we experienced in the course of our lives. While I was living these experiences, they had an extraordinary intensity because I knew that later I would turn to recall them. … I find this a consoling thought. One comforts oneself with nothing when there is nothing else.

(161)

The novel comes full circle to the opening motif of touch, nurture and relationship. In the end, however, Adriana is no longer alone. Oswald now comforts her and himself with memories. As he says, one comforts oneself with nothing. No-thing, as Irigaray points out, is the patriarchal/Freudian view of female sexuality and desire. That sex which is not one is none in the masculine imaginary. In the female imaginary, “elle n'est ni une ni deux” (26), never simply one, but multiple. Oswald puns on “nothing” which becomes “something” outside the patriarchal perspective.

“FLUID” IMAGERY IN LETTERE A MARINA

Another characteristic of Irigaray's parler femme is its basis in what she has styled an “economy of fluids” rather than solids. Describing women's “fluidity,” she writes that women “se diffuseraient selon des modalités peu compatibles avec les cadres du symbolique faisant loi” (106). The “fluidity” of women in phallocentric philosophical and mathematical discourse is opposed to the “solidity” of male discourse, which maintains a “complicité de longue date entre la rationalité et une méchanique des seuls solides” (106; Irigaray's italics). This fluidity “se mélange avec des corps d'état semblable, s'y dilue parfois de façon quasiment homogéne, ce qui rend problématique la distinction de l'un(e) et de l'autre; et d'ailleurs que ça se diffuse déjà ‘en soi-même,’ ce qui déconcerts toute tentative d'identification statique” (110). Milk, luminous flow, acoustic waves, urine, saliva, blood, even plasma are symbols of this fluidity.

Dacia Maraini has been politically active in the Italian feminist movement for the last two decades; her novels reflect her concerns and perspective on women's issues. In Lettere a Marina (1981), the protagonist Bianca, a writer, struggles to describe the parameters of patriarchal constriction through a series of letters addressed to her former woman lover, Marina. Retreating to an Italian seaside village after the break-up of her affair with Marina, she explores her life and relationships—“that accursed Chinese mosaic” revealing the richly complex nature of feminine discourse in a world which is woman-centered rather than male-validated.

In this series of letters, which Bianca does not necessarily intend to mail, images of fluidity predominate. Images of milk, sea, swimming, blood, dreams and magic reflect her inner experience of fluidity of substance, experience and consciousness. Her recalled experiences of abortion, incest, rape, sexual harassment, betrayal, a tender/wry love for her father and an assortment of male lovers all take place at the interface between fluid and solid: that place where she leaves herself to meet the masculine world. In contrast, making feasts, storytelling, sensuality, sharing, oneness and love constitute her experience with other women. She explores the multiplicity of her identities as daughter, mother, sister, friend, lover. The boundaries between her roles blur and merge, making distinction between one and the other problematical.

Whether in a context of breast-feeding or cooking, milk is a recurring image. As a mother, Bianca wanted to give her milk to her stillborn son. Later, she imagines nourishing Marina with her milk. Milk is passed back and forth as an assurance of care. Bianca remembers when the caretaker woman friend of her mother gives her glasses of sweet milk to console her for her mother's absence. Bianca vomits up the milk, rejecting the woman's motherly care, and dreams she is drowning in a “fiume di latte materno” (“river of maternal milk”; Maraini 125).

Sea imagery, indicating variously the flow from the borders of consciousness into the unconscious, the world of the imaginary, of a child-like, foetal escape into an enchanted space, or an ideal world set apart from sordid, every-day reality, permeates Bianca's letters. She swims regularly in the sea, exploring sea caves in which the continual eddying of the sea sounds like “un respiro rauco e lungo come un canto affannoso senza melodia” (“a slow laboured breathing like a hoarse tuneless song”; 143). As a sign, a confirmation that it is time to leave, the sea becomes polluted and putrid at the end of her stay. Her creative, productive period is ending. The sea's sickness reflects her own exhaustion as well as the pain of returning to a sick, lifeless world littered with technological debris.

Like the sea imagery, Bianca's dreams permit a fluctuation between different states of being, different modes of knowledge and perception. Coexistent with the waking world of action, thought, experience and emotion is the night-time dream life, in which another truth is revealed through the marvelous, the fantastic, the symbolic. Bianca recounts her dreams in her letters to Marina, giving them equal importance to day-time events. The recurring phrase “stannotte ho sognato” (“tonight I dreamed”) becomes an incantory “once-upon-a-time” introduction into the fairy-tale dream-world.

Bianca perceives her close relationships to be reciprocal and fluid, without fixed boundaries. Sometimes she feels her mother to be her daughter; sometimes she imagines herself mother to Marina. At other times, she is Marina's daughter. Her father is child, man, Don Juan, Peter Pan. She thinks of him as the Duke of Mantua in Verdi's opera, Rigoletto—a charming, narcissistic lover who always escapes unharmed through the sacrifice of his daughter. Bianca identifies with the Duke's lover, Gilda, caught and betrayed by her love for her father and her sweetheart. Bianca is the sacrificial pawn in a play between her father and her male lovers—the men of the patriarchal economy who would steal the daughter away from the father for their “own.”

For Bianca, Marina is a mysterious, many-faceted figure: daughter, lover, mother, critic. She represents the forbidden world of feminine sensuality, which is not possessed and expressed by the masculine. Through her relationship with Marina, Bianca explores a feminine sensuality and imagery that is not controlled and defined by the phallocentric. Writes Irigaray:

Cet ailleurs de la jouissance de la femme ne se retrouve qu'au prix d'une retraverséedu miroir qui sous-tend toute spéculation. … Retraversée ludique, et confondante, qui permettrait à la femme de retrouver le lieu de son “auto-affection.” Si l'on veut, de son “dieu.” Dieu auquel il est bien évident que le recours, à moins d'admettre son dédoublement, est toujours reconduction du féminin à l'économie phallocratique.

(75; Irigaray's italics)

For Irigaray, crossing back through the Lacanian mirror indicates a voyage into the world of the female imaginary, located “derrère l'écran de la représentation” (9). Marina, like Alice in Irigaray's “Le miroir de l'autre côté” (Chapt. 1), represents the female subject who refuses to be circumscribed or named according to the rules of patriarchal logic. Bianca's relationship with Marina becomes, ultimately, a metaphor for her own subjective journey inward toward her feminine self; Marina, then, is transformed from lover into Bianca's goddess within.

PARLER FEMME: A WOMAN'S VOICE?

The discussion continues. Is Irigaray's parler femme merely the underside of the patriarchal mirror, advocating the abrogation of logic and all the attributes of “male” discourse in the name of an essentialist feminine language which can only resemble the speech of a madwoman? Is she, as Monique Plaza claims, a “patriarchal wolf in sheep's clothing” (Moi 146)? Or if, as Fuss and Whitford suggest, her use of essentialist tools is a deliberate, highly skilled use of psychoanalytic methods to subvert and expose the “phantasies that haunt philosophical discourse” (Whitford 34), is it necessary to portray a woman's language as irrational incoherence, implying, as Whitford describes, a “regression to the pre-Oedipal relation to the body of the mother” (38)?

Moreover, it can be argued, certainly, that a fluidity of syntax, for example, is not limited to women writers, nor are images of milk, sea, blood, dreams, magic, or even mystical language. One can also question these authors' intentional use of a post-modern “women's style” of writing. While Maraini is deliberately exploring the possibilities of a woman-centred world and consciousness, Ginzburg contrasts the “male” and “female” discourses, exposing the inevitable conflicts and non-communication. Both draw upon the “mother” tradition in Italian culture; neither is avant-garde in style; neither uses shockingly subversive or disturbing language. Both fit within a larger tradition of women writers writing primarily for a female audience about women's issues and lives. Is it profitable to analyze these works in light of an écriture feminine or parler femme?

Irigaray claims that women need a metalanguage of their own in order to begin thinking and speaking woman-as-subject. For Irigaray, Whitford writes, “woman-as-subject in language and in the symbolic is the condition of the coming-to-be of woman-as-subject in the social …” (43). Arguing that Irigaray's parler femme, with its emphasis on fluidity, multiplicity and contiguity, is less a descriptive program than a psychological strategy for bringing about change, a paradigmatic shift, Whitford writes: “Irigaray thinks that the only way in which the status of women could be altered fundamentally is by the creation of a powerful female symbolic to represent the other term of sexual difference. What is at stake is the ethical, ontological, and social status of women” (22). Viewed in this light, the reading of women's writings for glimpses of Irigaray's parler femme continues the work of exploring the feminine unconscious for articulations of a female symbolic. Her project contributes to the greater task of establishing terms and a framework for identifying and interpreting the symbols of a feminine construct which would not be simply “the other” of the masculine imaginary but which would constitute women's own voice.

Notes

1. In Irigaray, miming means imitating in an exaggerated way the role assigned to the feminine in patriarchal discourse which posits the masculine as speaking subject (the “I” who articulates his desires). The woman deliberately assumes the feminine style and posture assigned to her within this discourse in order to uncover the mechanisms by which it exploits her (Irigaray 220).

2. The psychoanalytic and linguistic theories of Freud and Lacan form much of the discourse which Irigaray (1982) seeks to undermine. In “Retour sur la théorie psychoanalytique” (Chapt. 3), she outlines Freud's theory of sexual development, constructed upon a masculine imaginary in which women are perceived as “lacking” the male sexual organ and can only serve as an “object-of-desire” for men's sexual fantasies. As infants, Freud observed, both males and females are similar in their libidinal energy. Although he always postulates the libido as masculine, whether manifested in men or women, Freud saw little girls as similar to little boys in the strength of their drives. However, for Freud, the development of femininity requires severe repression of the libidinal drives in order to secure the transformation of her instinctual drives into that passivity which characters, for him, the feminine. Women can not speak as subjects, articulating their own desires, but can only function as the object of men's desire. In the masculine imaginary, women are silent, unable to voice their desire. Lacan takes Freud's Oedipal theory of sexual development and interpolates it into the symbolic order. The real male organ becomes the phallic signifier, a symbol of the power and other attributes which possession of the real organ confers upon the male. According to Lacan, the phallic signifier is the dominant or transcendental signifier, reinforcing “the law of the Father” in the symbolic order. Lacan locates the realm of the mother in the “imaginary” rather than in the “symbolic order,” which belongs to the father. The child must come to see the mother as “castrated”—i.e., lacking the phallus, or signifier of desire—in order to leave the orbit of maternal desire. The father comes between the mother and her desire (child) and the child and his desire (mother). The realm of the mother is pre-verbal, while the acquisition of language signals the child's passage into the symbolic order. The mother is silent and cannot speak. In order for a woman to speak as signifier of the desire of the Other, she rejects an essential part of her femininity, seeking to be recognized for that which she is not—namely, the phallus.

3. All English quotations from Irigaray's Ce Sexe qui n'en est pas un, Ginzburg's Caro Michele, and Maraini's Lettere a Marina are taken from their English translations (see Works Cited).

Works Cited

Berg, Maggie. “Luce Irigaray's ‘Contradictions’: Poststructuralism and Feminism.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 17.1 (Autumn 1991): 50-70.

Fuss, Diana. Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference. New York: Routledge, 1989.

Ginzburg, Natalia. Caro Michele. Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1973.

———. No Way. Trans. Sheila Cudahy. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1974.

Holmlund, Christine. “The Lesbian, The Mother, The Heterosexual Lover: Irigaray's Recodings of Difference.” Feminist Studies 17.2 (Summer 1991).

Irigaray, Luce. Ce Sexe qui n'en est pas un. Paris: Minuit, 1977.

———. This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1985.

Maraini, Dacia. Lettere a Marina. Milano: Bompiani, 1981.

———. Letters to Marina. Trans. Dick Kitto and Elspeth Spottiswood. London: Camden Press, 1987.

Moi, Toril. Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. London: Routledge, 1985.

Nye, Andrea. Feminist Theories and the Philosophies of Man. New York: Routledge, 1988.

Showalter, Elaine. “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness.” Writing and Sexual Difference. Ed. Elizabeth Abel. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982. 9-36.

Whitford, Margaret. Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine. London: Routledge, 1991.