SOURCE: Ching, Barbara. “French Feminist Theory, Literary History, and Hélisenne de Crenne's Les Angoysses douloureuses.” French Literature Series 16 (1989): 17-26.

In the following essay, Ching maintains that in Les Angoysses douloureuses de Crenne writes of her imprisonment in the female body that is used by men to make her an object, but then uses that status to express her subjectivity.

The despairing claim of Luce Irigaray that “any theory of the ‘subject’ has always been appropriated by the ‘masculine’” (133) raises the despairing question of the status and history of her own discourse (Felman 4). If women are categorically and eternally excluded from subjectivity, and therefore excluded from male discourse, speaking only in the name of the man—father or husband—who controls them, we have to wonder who Luce Irigaray is and how she came to write all this feminist theory.

Fortunately these are not the unanswerable questions critics...