What Does a Woman Want?

"What does a woman want?" - the question Freud 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. She also examines texts by Sigmund Freud and Honore de Balzac which dramatize, each in its own way, a male encounter with femininity as difference - a male experience of femininity as precisely the emergence of the unexpected, baffling and not always conscious question - "What does a woman want?"