Coming out Fighting: The Warrior Girls of Monique Wittig's L'Opoponax

By stripping the Bildungsroman of its traditional male associations and employing the stylistic patterns of the Nouveau Roman, Monique Wittig achieved in L'Opoponax a reputation of literary innovation and infused a marked feminist element into these genres. In this novel about the evolution of young women, Wittig carved out progressive ideological terrain by suggesting same-sex intimacy among young schoolgirls, thus "outing" the characters of her first novel against the backdrop of the sexist/heterosexist society of the early 1960s. Wittig accomplished in this novel the important task of identifying and valorizing gay women in literature through her unapologetic depictions of lesbian romance and fledgling eroticism, but the circumstances into which she released her characters were hostile. Although Simone de Beauvoir's recounting of the torture of Djamila Boupacha had raised consciousness about the abuse of women in France during this era, being lesbian in the anti-lesbian milieu of the early 1960s was nonetheless still dangerous: in July, 1960, homosexuality was declared a "social plague" in France (Robinson 4), and until political solidarity within the gay community arose in the late sixties and early seventies, most discussions of homosexuality were either rife with homophobic dysphemism or heterocentric explanations of gayness: for example, in 1973, a member of the women's group 'Psychanalyse et Politique' offered this interpretation: "l'homosexualité primaire des femmes devrait n'être qu'un passage vers une hétérosexualité retrouvée et vraiment libre" (Muchnik 64). Logically, given this environment of antagonism, Wittig's subsequent narrative projects began to battle the structures that had facilitated the establishment of homophobic/sexist hegemony, and beginning with Les Guérillères , violence became a central theme in her novels. However, as Hélène Vivienne Wenzel notes, "The serious reader of Wittig would quickly discover that already germinal in L'Opoponax are all the elements of feminist ideology which are developed further in her later works" (Wenzel 265). Consequently, it is precisely through the treatment of violence and bellicosity in this novel that Wittig first actuates a subversive undermining and deconstruction of sexism and homophobia. L'Opoponax is the story of the growth and maturity of a young protagonist named Catherine Legrand who attends a Catholic girls school. Although novels about youth are commonplace in literature, the particular power with which Wittig narrates the developmental processes that children undergo prompted Claude Simon to issue a unique proclamation upon reading the novel for the first time: "Je ne suis plus moi, je ne suis pas non plus une certaine petite fille: je deviens l'enfance" (Simon 71). Simon's affirmation of the universal childlike aspect of the novel invites a reference to Wittig's closing statement in her essay "The Trojan Horse": "It is the attempted universalization of the point of view that turns or does not turn a literary work into a war machine" (The Straight Mind 75). Leah Hewitt writes, "Already in The Opoponax , Wittig manages to