What Does a Woman Want?

Shoshana Felman is a reader of unparalleled subtlety. -- Marjorie Garber, Harvard University

"What does a woman want?" is a male question, originally posed by Freud. This book explores whether this question can engender a woman's voice as its speaking subject. It examines autobiographical texts by Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir and Adrienne Rich, as well as psychoanalytic works.'What does a woman want?'-the question Freud famously formulated in a letter to Marie Bonaparte-is a quintessentially male question that arises from women's resistance to their place in a patriarchal society. But what might it mean, asks Shoshana Felman, for a woman to reclaim this question as her own? Can this question engender, through the literary or the psychoanalytic work, a woman's voice as its speaking subject? Felman explores these questions through close readings of autobiographical texts by Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, and Adrienne Rich which attempt to redefine women as the subject of their own desire.