Les Guérillères

Les Guérillères is a 1969 novel by Monique Wittig.[1] It was translated to English in 1971.[1][2]

Les Guérillères
AuthorMonique Wittig
TranslatorDavid Le Vay
CountryFrance
LanguageFrench
GenreNovel
PublisherLes Éditions de Minuit
Publication date
1969
Published in English
1971

Plot introduction

Les Guérillères is about a war of the sexes, where women 'engage in bloody, victorious battles using knives, machine guns and rocket launchers'.[1] Moreover, sympathetic males join them in their combat.[3]

Literary significance and criticism

An early appreciation of the English translation (by David Le Vay) came from British journalist Sally Beauman, writing in The New York Times Book Review. Beauman considered it a miraculous achievement: it "is the first novel (or hymn, for this book is close to epic poetry) of Women's Liberation".[4] However, Roger Sale in The New York Review of Books opined, 'The book itself turns out to be, sadly, oddly, at times almost maddeningly, quite dull'.[1]

The novel is, some say, based on a concept of women's superiority.[5] "'... [F]ine feminist critics like Toril Moi and Nina Auerbach have read Les guérillères as a closed structure, in which women win the war and institute a new equilibrium of women ruling men'".[6] Toril Moi described the novel as a "depict[ion of] ... life in an Amazonian society involved in a war against men .... [in which] [t]he war is finally won by the women, and peace is celebrated by them and the young men who have been won over to their cause."[7] According to Nina Auerbach, the novel "is the incantatory account of the training and triumph of a female army. Here, the buried warfare of ["Muriel"] Spark's communities explodes in a new Amazonianism."[8] These interpretations are not universal, as Linda Zerilli argued that more important was Monique Wittig's creation of an "'open structure' of freedom."[9]

Polyandry, described in the novel,[10] is interpreted by Laurence M. Porter as part of "militant feminist autonomy".[11]

The novel's 1985 English translation says, "[o]ne of ["[t]he women"] ... relates the story of Vlasta. She tells how under Vlasta's guidance the first female State was created.... Another of them recalls that in the female State men were tolerated only for servile tasks and that they were forbidden under pain of death to bear arms or mount on horseback.... Vlasta's warriors teach all the peasant women who join them how to handle arms."[12] "The women address the young men in these terms, now you understand that we have been fighting as much for you as for ourselves."[13] "They say, it would be a grave mistake to imagine that I would go, me, a woman, to speak violently against men when they have ceased to be my enemies."[14] "[T]hey sing and dance.... Someone interrupts them to praise those males who have joined them in their struggle. Then, ... she begins to read an unfolded paper, for example, When the world changes and one day women are capable of seizing power and devoting themselves to the exercise of arms and letters in which they will doubtless soon excel, woe betide us. I am certain they will pay us out a hundredfold, that they will make us stay all day by the distaff the shuttle and the spinning-wheel, that they will send us to wash dishes in the kitchen. We shall richly deserve it. At these words all the women shout and laugh and clap each other on the shoulder to show their contentment."[15]

By an interpretation, the women and "those men of good will who come to join them" reconcile.[16] Also by an interpretation, "[a]s in the legend of the Amazons, ... it is the women who decide both where to live and how to govern."[11]

The novel inspired Beatriz Santiago Muñoz's Song, Strategy, Sign (2016) film work.

References
  1. Martin, Douglas, Monique Wittig, 67, Feminist Writer, Dies, New York Times, January 12, 2003.
  2. Wittig, Monique, trans. David Le Vay, Les Guérillères (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, reprint 1985 (ISBN 0-8070-6301-0), © 1969 Les Editions de Minuit).
  3. Crowder, Diane Griffin, 'From the Straight Mind to Queer Theory; Implications for Political Movement', Monique Wittig: At the Crossroads of Criticism, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, special issue, Duke University Press, 2007, page 493
  4. Beauman, Sally (10 October 1971). "Women without men, except to kill for fun and survival". New York Times Review of Books. Retrieved 22 July 2017.
  5. Zerilli, Linda M. G., Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2005 (ISBN 0-226-98133-9)), p. 80 n. 51, quoting Laurence M. Porter, Feminist Fantasy and Open Structure in Monique Wittig's Les Guérillères, in Morse, Donald E., Marshall B. Tymn, & Csilla Bertha, eds., The Celebration of the Fantastic: Selected Papers from the Tenth Anniversary International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992 (ISBN 0-313-27814-8)), p. [261] (author prof. Fr. & comparative lit., Mich. State Univ.), and citing Zerilli, Linda M. G., The Trojan Horse of Universalism: Language as a "War Machine" in the Writings of Monique Wittig, in Social Text or Social Text: Theory/Culture/Ideology, nos. 25–26 (1990), pp. 146–170.
  6. Zerilli, Linda M. G., Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom, op. cit., p. 80 n. 51, quoting Laurence M. Porter, Feminist Fantasy and Open Structure in Monique Wittig's Les Guérillères, in Morse, Donald E., Marshall B. Tymn, & Csilla Bertha, eds., The Celebration of the Fantastic: Selected Papers from the Tenth Anniversary International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, op. cit., p. [261] (author prof. Fr. & comparative lit., Mich. State Univ.).
  7. Moi, Toril, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London: Routledge, 2d ed., 2002 (ISBN 0-415-28012-5)), p. 78 (author prof. lit. & romance studies, Duke Univ., N. Car.).
  8. Auerbach, Nina, Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1978 (ISBN 0-674-15168-2)), p. 186.
  9. Zerilli, Linda M. G., Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom, op. cit., p. 80, purportedly quoting within the quotation Laurence M. Porter, Feminist Fantasy and Open Structure in Monique Wittig's Les Guérillères, in Morse, Donald E., et al., eds., The Celebration of the Fantastic, op. cit. (not The Celebration of the Fantastic, id., p. [261], a misquotation or misattribution of Linda Zerilli's, but possibly inferrable from The Celebration of the Fantastic, id., pp. [261] & 268) (for meaning in literary criticism of a structure or system being open or closed, see The Celebration of the Fantastic, id., p. 268).
  10. Wittig, Monique, trans. David Le Vay, Les Guérillères (1985, © 1969), op. cit., p. 112 (probably equivalent to pp. 160–161 in French original, per Laurence M. Porter, op. cit., p. 267).
  11. Porter, Laurence M., Feminist Fantasy and Open Structure in Monique Wittig's Les Guérillères, op. cit., p. 267.
  12. Wittig, Monique, trans. David Le Vay, Les Guérillères (1985, © 1969), op. cit., pp. 114–115 (probably equivalent to pp. 164–165 in French original, per Porter, Laurence M., op. cit., p. 267).
  13. Wittig, Monique, trans. David Le Vay, Les Guérillères (1985, © 1969), op. cit., p. 127.
  14. Wittig, Monique, trans. David Le Vay, Les Guérillères (1985, © 1969), op. cit., p. 131.
  15. Wittig, Monique, trans. David Le Vay, Les Guérillères (1985, © 1969), op. cit., pp. 134–135.
  16. Porter, Laurence M., Feminist Fantasy and Open Structure in Monique Wittig's Les Guérillères, op. cit., p. 267 (citing pp. 176–208 in the French ed.).
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