What Does a Woman Want?: Reading and Sexual Difference

by Shoshana Felman

'What does a woman want?'―the question Freud famously formulated in a letter to Marie Bonaparte―is a quintessentially male question that arises from women's resistance to their place in a patriarchal society. But what might it mean, asks Shoshana Felman, for a woman to reclaim this question as her own? Can this question engender, through the literary or the psychoanalytic work, a woman's voice as its speaking subject? Felman explores these questions through close readings of autobiographical texts by Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, and Adrienne Rich which attempt to redefine women as the subject of their own desire.

Genres: Feminism, Academic, Psychoanalysis

184 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1993

About the author

Shoshana Felman is an American literary critic and current Woodruff Professor of Comparative Literature and French at Emory University. She was on the faculty of Yale University from 1970 to 2004, where in 1986 she was awarded the Thomas E. Donnelly Professorship of French and Comparative Literature. She specializes in 19th and 20th century French literature, psychoanalysis, trauma and testimony, and law and literature. Felman earned her Ph.D. at the University of Grenoble in France in 1970.

Felman works in the fields of psychoanalytic literary criticism, performativity theory, feminism, Holocaust testimony, and other areas, though her writings frequently question, ironize, or test the limits of the very critical methods being employed. Often in her writing a reversal will occur so that the critical vocabulary gets subjected to and converted into the terms of the literary or cultural object being scrutinized rather than simply settling the meaning of the object; thus in Felman's style of criticism there is no fixed hierarchy of theory over and beyond the reach of the literary object. As such, her methods share an affinity with deconstruction, for which she is sometimes associated with the Yale School and colleagues such as Paul de Man.

Jacques Lacan is a significant influence on Felman and she was among the vanguard of theorists—and perhaps foremost among those addressing Anglophone audiences—to rigorously apply his concepts to the study of literature.

Since the 1990s Felman has written texts on testimony and trauma, particularly in the context of the Holocaust and other collective trauma.

Reviews

[Jamie Logan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Minus 1 star for too much Freud
No thank you Beardy McDickBrain

[Jamie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'll need to come back to this one, as I'm not sure I quite buy (or perhaps simply don't understand) the notion of the "female mind" that has been effaced through the normative injunction in literature for male readers. To implicitly rely on a notion of 'liberating' the feminine way of reading seems to me, (a) very in line with a tradition of French feminist though, and (b) unproductive in relation to Felman's discussion of the instability of self-knowledge and autobiography. So this deserves a re-read, and will be getting one when I've more time in the spring. Really powerful reading of Freud's Irma dream, and though I've not read Balzac, her chapters on his stories were fun reads. It's the first and last chapters, however, where Felman stakes her claim--and it's to those chapters that I need to return before making a clear response to this text.

[Emily Buehne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Deconstruction of sexual difference, reading of psychoanalysis/Freud dream, women can't have an autobiography, need to do synthesis of theory, autobiography, and literature, to have autobiography need to have self-resistance of text