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Les Guérillères
by Monique Wittig
| List Price: |
$16.00 |
Unavailable for
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Paperback
Publisher: Beacon Press
One of the most widely read and frequently cited feminist novels of our time.
"A delectable epic of sex warfare . . . an extraordinary leap of the imagination into the politics of oppression and revolt."
—Mary McCarthy
| Customer Reviews: |
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| Brilliant, Comic, Horrific |
| Customer Rating: 4 out of 5 |
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Monique Wittig's Les Guerilleres is an epic poem and a memorial to the fallen, the right hand pages at the end of each series of scenes is dominated by lists of bold capitalized names that the reader begins to realize are the names of the dead.
Les Guerilleres embodies a traditional epic plot of conquering a monster that has terrorized a society--and showing the magical and practical things that society and its heroes have done to kill the monster and return to harmony.
By creating an epic of violence, battle, and conquest for women, Wittig attempts to abolish sex classifications as "essentialist" or "natural" and has created a language and a system of symbols that can be read without the implicit overlay of masculine domination. No small task.
Wittig focuses intensely on this language that is itself violence.
"The language you speak is made up of words that are killing you. The language you speak is made up of signs that rightly designate what men have appropriated."
Later she expresses that the central fallacy of the masculine world is an acceptance or happiness in being either dominated or dominating. Both of these choices are refuted by Wittig.
"Better to see your guts in the sun and utter a death rattle than to live a life that anyone can appropriate. What belongs to you on this earth? Only death. No power on earth can take that away from you. And--consider explain tell yourself--if happiness consists in the possession of something then hold fast to this sovereign happiness--to die."
Like true epic heros Wittig's characters are only satisfied with freedom and fighting for the cause. This also turns upside down the essentialist or "natural" understanding of women as givers of life, symbols of life, and nurturers. They become throughout Les Guerilleres bringers of death, celebrants of life and death, individuals elevated to active and violent heroic or symbolic proportion.
The form of the narrative itself is a symbol--a circle beginning and ending with a society in which the sexes are divided and a war has already been waged. The first half of the epic focuses on the society's vaginal-centric mythology--in which symbols for the vulva are seen everywhere and books called `feminaries' reinforce this vision of the world itself being a symbol of the vulva. This is actually hilarious. Later in the narrative women have abandoned the `feminaries' and the practice of consciously seeing vulva's everywhere--they have moved on from their core history and mythology, and this is where the narrative brings up the existence of men and then proceeds to describe a war against them.
Les Guerilleres also embodies the epic in that it can be cut apart and any piece can stand on its own, and that the individual human interacts with broader societal and historical forces. Particularly forces that must be conquered:
"He has enslaved you by trickery, you who were great strong valiant. He has stolen your wisdom from you, he has closed your memory to what you were, he has made of you that which is not, which does not speak, which does not possess, which does not write. He has made you a vile and fallen creature. He has gagged abused and betrayed you by means of stratagems he has stultified your understanding, he has woven around you a long list of defects that he declared essential to your well being, to your nature."
I mean come on, who wouldn't want to kill these people?
Wittig's book is about wrath as much as conquering the problem of masculinity. Men are skinned, tortured, humiliated, hacked to pieces and buried in mass graves. The men that have joined the women in battle must be reeducated and then are exalted. An end of violence is declared and "Paradise," wittig claims, "exists in the shadow of the sword."
For this kind of violence to be read with zealous acceptance there can be no more appropriate form than that of an epic honoring soldiers. We understand this implicitly as listeners of the news, and consumers of political media.
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| profound |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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Highly motivational and inspiring. It forces you to create worlds inside your head. Profound! Hi Lea.
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| Fire circle chants |
| Customer Rating: 4 out of 5 |
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Through a series of dazzling prose poems, Wittig tells the tale of a tribe of women warriors overthrowing patriarchy, and she challenges gender constructs through her language. It's a powerful and inspirational book about sex warfare, rather like "The Handmaid's Tale" or some songs by Tori Amos. A definite radical feminist classic worth reading and re-reading.
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| warfare |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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This book is interesting, and perhaps groundbreaking. Unlike the previous reviewer, however, I'm not sure I'd want to call this original feminist text "seminal."
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| Profound, groundbreaking, important. |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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Published originally in 1963, it was groundbreaking in its exquisite, poetic-stream-of-consciousness use of language (these days oft called "experimental"), its contribution to postmodern theory, feminist thought, utopian literature... really seminal stuff. And so yummy to read. Her vision is of a female (amazonian-like) revolution, a world in which the (patriarchal) strictures of language are dismantled to create something new entirely. It's a landmark for its contribution, but also as an extraordinary piece of literature in itself. Prose so shining you want to lick it off the page.
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