Les Guérillères

Lore & Background

Les Guérillères is about a war of the sexes, where women engage in bloody, victorious battles using knives, machine guns and rocket launchers. Sympathetic males join them in their combat. Some interpretations hold that the novel is based on a concept of women's superiority, with fine feminist critics like Toril Moi and Nina Auerbach reading it as a closed structure in which women win the war and institute a new equilibrium of women ruling men. Toril Moi described the novel as depicting life in an Amazonian society involved in a war against men, where the war is finally won by the women, and peace is celebrated by them and the young men who have been won over to their cause. Nina Auerbach called it the incantatory account of the training and triumph of a female army. These interpretations are not universal, as Linda M.G. Zerilli argued that more important was Monique Wittig's creation of an 'open structure' of freedom.

Reader's Guide

Les Guérillères holds significance as an early work of the Women's Liberation movement, with Sally Beauman in The New York Times Book Review calling it 'the first novel (or hymn, for this book is close to epic poetry) of Women's Liberation.' However, Roger Sale in The New York Review of Books found the book 'sadly, oddly, at times almost maddeningly, quite dull.' The novel's depiction of polyandry has been interpreted by Laurence M. Porter as part of 'militant feminist autonomy.' The novel inspired Beatriz Santiago Muñoz's film work Song, Strategy, Sign (2016). The text includes episodes such as the story of Vlasta, under whose guidance the first female State was created, where men were tolerated only for servile tasks and forbidden under pain of death to bear arms or mount on horseback. The women address young men saying they have been fighting as much for them as for themselves, and they sing and dance, praising those males who have joined them. The novel's legacy includes ongoing critical debate about whether it presents a closed or open structure of freedom.

Did You Know?

• The novel was translated into English in 1971 by David Le Vay.
• Sally Beauman called it 'the first novel (or hymn) of Women's Liberation'.
• The story of Vlasta and the first female State is not part of Les Guérillères; it is from a different work, such as the Czech legend of Vlasta and the Maidens' War.