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The female voice, the carrier of female subjectivity, has been greatly mutilated or silenced in Western discourse. Andrea Rich's poem, “Diving Into the Wreck,” and Elizabeth Harrison's classical studies, in particular, Themus, suggest a metaphor of woman's presence and voice as entombed or buried under layers of profound Pompeiian repression. Similarly, Gilbert and Gubar's superb literary excursions into the surfacing of women's words map the extreme difficulties of women writers in obtaining the pen for themselves which had been held exclusively by men. They propose that woman's body acted as the context or blank page for male imagination and command of writing with pen and ink. Paint and canvas also have been held in the domain of male subjectivity literally as well as figuratively. Such analyses lead us further into the etiology of cultural and personal discourse.
The same difficulties have haunted psychoanalytic theory in that the male perspective, the capture of pen and ink and public discourse, skewed perspectives on women and women's development and the nature of femininity. On the other hand, women began to write theory out of their own experience and gradually different perspectives emerged about the nature of feminine subjectivity.
In France, psychoanalysis birthed several powerful female figures who addressed the absence of the female voice. Feminist psychoanalytic argument surfaced in France in association with the revolutions of 1968, a watershed in which new subjective perspectives were released that had formerly been excluded from traditional discourse. One legacy of 1968 was the gathering of modernism into its late phase, postmodernism, in which the belief in established reference was badly shaken and replaced