Reflections on Monique Wittig's Les Guérillères (1969) 3: La guerre! À quoi ça sert?

Monique Wittig (1935-2003) 

French feminist philosopher and author of 

Les Guérillères (1969)  

 Let the sun shine / the world is ours!

 

 

I.

 

Monique Wittig published her first novel, L'Opoponax, in 1964 and it won her immediate attention both at home and abroad.  

 

But it's her second book, Les Guérillères (1969) - a landmark text in the lesbian feminist canon - that is our concern here [a]. In particular, the third part of this novel, having previously discussed the first two parts in two earlier posts: click here. This third part recounts the war fought between the two political classes (or 'sexes') that ends with the establishment of a lesbian sovereign state. 

 

For Wittig, as a radical lesbian writer, it's not just men who are the problem: heterosexuality is itself a political regime (and form of normativity) that must be overthrown, thereby dissolving the categories of man and woman. Feminists who failed (or refused) to see this and called for reform were, in her view, simply rearranging the furniture along straight lines.  

 

It all sounds very revolutionary, but I suspect Judith Butler was right to identify a lingering metaphysics of presence in Wittig's thinking - i.e., something that presupposes a pre-discursive and universal human subject (though defenders of Wittig argue that this is a misunderstanding of her work).   

 

 

II.

   

Part three opens with a couple of passages, worth quoting in full and discussing in detail, that certainly make one sit up and take note:

 

"Look at him, this cripple, who hides his calves as best he can. Look at his timid springless gait. In his cities it is easy to do him violence. You lie in wait for him at a street-corner one night. He thinks you are beckoning to him. You profit by this to take him by surprise, he hasnt even the reflex to cry out. Ambushed in his towns you chase him, you lay hands on him, you capture him, you surprise him shouting with all your might."  (60)

 

"The women say that they could not eat hare veal or fowl, they say that they could not eat animals, but man, yes, they may. He says to them throwing his head back with pride, poor wretches of women, if you eat him who will go to work in the fields, who will produce food consumer goods, who will make the aeroplanes, who will pilot them, who will provide the spermatozoa, who will write the books, who in fact will govern? Then the women laugh, baring their teeth to the fullest extent." (60)

 

Now, obviously, Wittig is not advocating violence against disabled men [b] or cannibalism (at least I don't think so). The passages are meant, one assumes, as provocative satire, subverting traditional gender roles and critiquing the arrogance and violence of the old carnophallogocentric regime that systematically oppressed women and consumed the flesh of animals.     

 

When Wittig refers to the man as a cripple to be chased and ambushed in city streets, or as something to be captured, cooked, and eaten, she is reversing the historical portrayal of women as weak and vulnerable targets in urban spaces and of animals as merely things to be hunted or factory farmed. She is asking men: How does it feel to be victimised? How does it feel to be preyed upon? 

 

The response to this encapsulates the conceited belief that society cannot function without male authority, labour, and leadership: that man is indispensable. 

 

Wittig thinks this laughable - although it might be noted that the dissident feminist Camille Paglia would absolutely agree that the modern world heavily relies upon men doing much of the most dangerous and dirty work and she would criticise Wittig for ignoring the fact that not only have men constructed the great cities, but the conceptual universe as well [c]. 

 

 

III.

 

I'm glad to discover that Wittig's neo-Amazons keep up the fine tradition of going into battle topless. Upon a given signal, "the women [...] uttering a terrible cry, suddenly rip off the upper part of their garments, uncovering their naked gleaming breasts" (61).  

 

Some of them, laughing as they do so, aggressively (and defiantly) thrust their breasts forward. 

 

Now, it should be pointed out that what I describe as a fine tradition is actually an ancient myth rather than historical military practice. Even the original Amazons, as fierce a tribe of female warriors as ever lived, probably wore standard protective clothing and armour and didn't go into battle with their tits out (and nor, for the record, did they remove their right breast in order to handle their weapons more effectively). 

 

I'm sure Wittig would be aware of this. And so, perhaps - being French and of a revolutionary disposition - she was thinking more of Delacroix's La Liberté guidant le peuple (1830) ... 

 

 

IV. 

Les guérillères paint their faces and their limbs in bright colours with war paint. They utter cries that are so truly blood-curdling that "many of their adversaries drop their weapons" (63) and run for the hills in great terror and confusion, attempting to block up their ears as they do so.  

 

And run they might: for the women delight in mass slaughter - they even have a death chant that calls upon the vultures to feast on the corpses they have supplied - and when on the rare occasion that they do take male prisoners, they strip them naked and make them parade through the streets so that they can be jeered and spat at. 

 

Having been publicly (and sexually) humiliated, they are then subjected to extreme torture, using the greatest possible violence: "The women stop their ears with wax so as not hear their discordant cries." (68) When dead, the bodies are flayed and the skins are tanned in the usual manner or put on public display in the sun.   

Paradise exists in the shadow of the sword ... the torture chamber and the mass grave [d]. 

 

 

V.

 

Somewhat strangely, considering their love of snakes commented on in part two of this post (fragment xii), Wittig's warrior women dream of the time when they can crush the head of the serpent who encouraged Eve to eat the apple. 

 

Personally, I think the Lawrentian idea of reconciliation is better. 

 

In a discarded passage from The Plumed Serpent (1926), the revolutionary leader Don Ramón instructs Kate Leslie to go tell her fellow Irish women that "the Cross is a Tree again, and they may eat the fruit if they can reach the branches [...] the snake coils in peace around the ankle of Eve, and she no longer tries to bruise his head" [e].   

 

Like Lawrence, I am of the view that peace needs to be made with the serpent and acknowledged as having its own being. Not crushed or cast out, denigrated or denied [f]. 

 

 

VI. 

 

Readers might be pleased to hear that eventually there is a peace and reconciliation between the sexes - that rather than maintaining a permanent separatist state, the women accept the young men into their new world beneath a honey-coloured sun (although only after they have put to the sword "all those who do not acknowledge their might" (81) and accept the radical dismantling of gender binaries).  

 

They assure the young men that they have been fighting for their future and their freedom too. Gathering at an outdoor celebration of music, food, language, and love, les guérillères say: "let there be erased from human memory the longest most murderous war it has ever known" (79). 

 

They express their wish that all survivors will "form a lasting alliance that no future dispute can compromise" (79). And that's got to be better, surely, than turning the earth into hell ...? 

 

After all, permanent insurrection - driven by anger and the politics of hate - gets to be a bit of a bore and if it's fun at first to be more barbarous than Attila the Hun, one can't help recalling Lawrence's words in a letter to Aldous Huxley: "if you only palpitate to murder" it ultimately produces inertia and an "atrophy of the feelings" [g].  

 

So - all's well that ends well, then? Not quite. For the New Order is marked by mass book burnings and a Year Zero ideology. I express my concern with these things in part one of this post (fragment xix). 

 

And I can't help wondering just how happy the young men with their smooth round faces really are living in a lesbian utopia, with its permanently mild climate and unchanging seasons, and all dressed (somewhat ironically) in identical little-boy blue clothing ...?

 

We are told that these young men with their shrunken loins and trembling with emotion are "full of grace and beauty" (87), but they have basically been emasculated and feminised. 

 

The war is over! The war is over! cry les guérillères. 

 

Yet one notices that they still dress in militant black and remain armed to the teeth with clubs, knives, rifles, and rocket launchers - and some continue to parade around bare-breasted, just to let the young men know they remain warriors still.  

 

Notes

 

[a] Considered a pivotal text by feminist and lesbian thinkers, Les Guérillères was originally published by Les Editions de Minuit (1969). David Le Vay's 1971 English translation has been used in numerous editions, including the Beacon Press edition (1985) and the University of Illinois Press edition (2007).

      Here, I am using the /ubu Editions e-book (2007). This free digital publishing project - created as part of UbuWeb - is an online archive for avant-garde writing founded by the American poet and cultural provocateur Kenneth Goldsmith. 

 

[b] I have to say, even when understood as symbolism designed to shock readers, using disability as a metaphor for weakness or vulnerability is problematic, relying as it does on harmful, real-world stereotypes about disabled bodies. For many contemporary readers, such imagery is offensive, regardless of the author's intent.

 

[c] In Sexual Personae (1990), Paglia outlines her belief that civilisation is an Apollonian fabrication i.e., a structure of order, geometry, law, and leadership created by men to defend against the chaotic, untamed forces of nature (the Dionysian or chthonic realm). Ever the provocateuse, Paglia famously argued that building civilisation had been left in female hands, we would still be living in mud huts. 

      Somewhat paradoxically, however, Paglia does not believe this is because men are stronger than women; on the contrary, she sees masculinity as fragile and in constant need of social reinforcement. 

      Readers might be interested in an article by Mark J. Perry published on the American Enterprise Institute's website (9 Sept 2018) discussing Paglia's view on the indispensability of men: click here.    

[d] The mutilated bodies of those men either killed in battle or in captivity, are thrown into a mass grave. The bodies of the many women killed are placed side by side in communal graves: "All the bodies have been mummified and treated with care for long preservation." (81)

 

[e] D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, ed. L. D. Clarke (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 547.

 

[f] See the post 'Lawrence, Derrida, and the Snake' (17 July 2025), where I develop this theme with reference to Jacques Derrida's reading of Lawrence's poem 'Snake' in his 2009 book The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. I., trans. Geoffrey Bennington, ed. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud (Chicago University Press). 

 

[g] D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VI, ed. James T. Boulton, Margaret H. Boulton, with Gerald M. Lacy (Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 600. The letter has been dated by the editors as 28 October, 1928.

 

 

Dionysos Versus the Amazons

I.

One of two final (prose) poems written by D. H. Lawrence was a work inspired by a reading of Plutarch, concerning the bloody battle fought between the god Dionysos and his followers and the tribe of warrior women known by many names amongst the ancient Greeks, but most commonly remembered today as the Amazons [Ἀμαζόνες].

According to Plutarch, after an initial skirmish at the coastal city of Ephesus, the Amazons fled to the island of Samos, where they were pursued by Dionysos and slaughtered en masse. Lawrence seems to be in little doubt as to who instigated the violence. He writes:

"Oh small-breasted, brilliant Amazons, will you never leave off attacking the Bull-foot, for whom the Charities weave ivy-garlands?"

And, a little later, he notes: "the Amazons swept out of cover with bare limbs flashing and bronze spears lifted."

What Lawrence doesn't do in his reimagining of the myth, is explain why the Amazons should be so fiercely determined to resist the triumph of Dionysos. To understand that, we need to turn to the work of the 19thC theorist of ancient matriarchy, Johann Jakob Bachofen ...


II.

Bachofen is probably best remembered today (if at all) as the author of Das Mutterrecht (1861); a seminal work in which he argues that Woman in her role of sacred (earth) mother is the origin of all human religion, culture and society.

According to Bachofen's post-Hegelian perspective, human cultural evolution consists of several stages, culminating in the Apollonian age in which all traces of the Mutterecht and the matriarchal past were eradicated, and from which modern (solar-phallic) civilisation emerged.

Whilst convinced that, ultimately, there's a progressive movement from base matter to the luminous unfolding of spirit, Bachofen doesn't argue for a smooth, developmental process. He insists, rather, that each shift from one phase to the next is marked by violence and there are often long periods during which regressive forces gain the upper hand and force humanity backwards. 

As the Dionysian phase of cultural evolution was one in which earlier female traditions were either masculinised or destroyed as the phallocratic order of patriarchy slowly began to emerge and assert itself, there was, therefore, good reason for the Amazons to be pissed (as Americans like to say).

It should be noted, however, that Bachofen doesn't approve of their feminist uprising, dismissing it as both reactionary and perverse and decrying the Amazons as a bunch of hate-filled, homocidal, war-loving maidens [männerfeindlichen, männertötenden, kreigerischen Jungfrauen].

He celebrates their defeat by Dionysos as the restoration of the natural order; finally, says Bachofen, women can find their fulfilment (and destiny) via glad submission to the male in all his glory. 
  

III.

I suppose the question is: did Lawrence know of Bachofen and was the latter an influence of any sort?

Well, whilst I don't recall him ever mentioning Bachofen, one suspects Lawrence would have known the name, being as he was well read in German literature and philosophy and married to a woman who would have almost certainly been familiar with Bachofen's ideas.   

What's interesting is that even whilst Lawrence would have detested Bachofen's idealism, he himself frequently wrote within the terms and confines of metaphysical dualism; darkness and light, passive and active, and - most crucially - male and female.

Indeed, like Bachofen, Lawrence sometimes seems to read all human history in terms of a battle of the sexes. And, like Bachofen, whilst he declares his sympathies are with the women, Lawrence often seems deeply troubled by the thought of women who have liberated themselves from men and phallocentric culture entirely, such as Amazons and lesbians.

Thus, it's noticeable that in his poem Lawrence seems more concerned about the fate of the beasts that accompanied Dionysus into battle, than the fate of the women who were put to the sword:

"The rocks are torn with the piercing death-cries of elephants, the great and piercing cry of elephants dying at the hands of the last of the Amazons, rips the island rocks."  

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Elephants of Dionysos', The Poems, Vol. III, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 1615-16. This work, along with another (untitled) prose poem, was found on a short manuscript torn from a notebook. They are believed to be the last poems Lawrence wrote, composed at the beginning of December, 1929.

W. R. Halliday, The Greek Questions of Plutarch, (Oxford, 1928); see Question 56. This is the edition that Lawrence consulted when writing his poem on Dionysos and the Amazons. 

Johann Jakob Bachofen, Myth, Religion, and Mother Right, trans. Ralph Manheim, (Princeton University Press, 1992).

Cynthia Eller; Gentlemen and Amazons: The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, 1861-1900, (University of California Press, 2011). See Chapter 3: On the Launching Pad: J. J. Bachofen and Das Mutterrecht, which I found particularly helpful when writing this post.  

This post is for Maria.