'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 r
esistance 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 quest
ion engender, through the literary or the psychoanalytic work, a woman's voice a
s its speaking subject? Felman explores these questions through close readings o
f autobiographical texts by Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, and Adrienne Ric
h which attempt to redefine women as the subject of their own desire.
