Monique Wittig Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Mary Beth Pringle Spraggins

Critical Essay by Mary Beth Pringle Spraggins

[By using myth in Les Guérillères Monique Wittig] transcends the twentieth century and envisions a utopia in which old myths have been adapted to achieve new ends. By this use of myth Wittig makes two important points about women in the twentieth century: they are trapped by myth, yet they can find a mythic means of escape from entrapment.

Two principal types of myth—classical and contemporary—are used by Wittig. By "classical" myths I mean legends from Greek and Roman antiquity, folktales, and Bible stories. By "contemporary" I refer to the kinds of myths described by Roland Barthes in Mythologies, those cultural—sometimes class-associated—myths by which humans define themselves. Freudian "theories" of masculine physiological superiority comprise the most important contemporary myth dealt with by Wittig.

Out of the materials of both classical and contemporary myths, Wittig constructs in Les Guérillères a new mythology similar to the one described by Joseph Campbell in...
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