The Impossibility of Female Desire in Pygmalion and The Awakening Essay

In The Power of treat and the Subordination of the Feminine, Luce Irigaray argues that, because society uses a hoary address that privileges male-gendered logic over female-gender emotion, there is no adequate lyric to mean female desire. She writes that feminine pleasure has to remain inarticulate in language, in its own language, if it is not to threaten the underpinnings of logical operations and, because of this, what is most strictly forbidden to women today is that they should attempt to express their own pleasure (796). This softness to articulate female desire means that female desire becomes unutterable, something that cannot be expressed. According to Irigaray, this unutterable-ness of female desire in patriarchal language leaves all one option for women to attempt to express their desire and that is the act of exaggeration or mimesis. Mimesis is not an attempt to represent female desire in patriarchal language instead, mimesis is in attempt through the use of patr iarchal language to reveal that female desire cannot be presented, a musical mode to make visible, by an effect of playful repetition, what was supposed to remain undetectable the cover-up of a possible operation of the feminine in language (795). Mimesis exposes how patriarchal language disallows or denies female desire by circling some the absence of that female desire, by making its absence perfectly crown in a patriarchal discourse.The concept of a patriarchal discourse, incumbent to Irigarays argument, is an example of a shared interpretive lodge, a shape coined by Stanley Fish that refers to a discursively-created set of ideas, beliefs, and interpretations that belong to a community or multiple communities. The most important aspe... ...etative community of patriarchal language, does not allow for the existence of female desire and kills what little life it had in Eliza in these last lines. In the end, the characters of Edna and Eliza reveal the impossibility of femal e desire, of their having desire, within a culture that cannot articulate or name it.Works CitedChopin, Kate. The Awakening. Ed. Nancy Walker. capital of Massachusetts Bedford, 2000. Print.Fish, Stanley. How to Recognize a Poem When You See One. Is There a school text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge, MA Harvard University Press, 1980. PDF File.Irigaray, Luce. The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine. Literary Theory An Anthology. By Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden, MA Blackwell Pub., 2004. Print.Shaw, George Bernard. Pygmalion. New York capital of Delaware Publications, 1994. Print.