SOURCE: Gray, Frances. “Elemental Philosophy: Language and Ontology in Mary Daly's Texts.” In Feminist Interpretations of Mary Daly, edited by Sarah Lucia Hoagland and Marilyn Frye, pp. 222-45. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000.

In the following essay, Gray examines Daly's subversion of male-defined language and philosophy through the calculated use of metaphor, naming, and linguistic inventions, particularly as such strategies reveal Daly's view of language as fundamentally linked to the process of becoming.

You are the icon of woman sexual in herself like a great forest tree in flower, liriodendron bearing sweet tulips, cups of joy and drunkenness. You drink strength from your dark fierce roots and you hang at the sun's own fiery breast and with the green cities of your boughs you shelter and celebrate woman, with the cauldron of your energies burning red, burning green. 

—Marge Piercy, “The Window of the Woman Burning”

In...