ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the traditional narrative paradigms—namely the Aristotelian Narrative of Linearity and the Freudian Narrative of Triangularity—are used to construct histories which are essentially patronymic and phallogocentric. To provide Woman with a history is to increase her value by making her legitimate, by giving her a proper name, by locating her within a proper family, by situating her in a proper narrative. The Oedipal narrative is the history of the proper Self appropriating itself appropriately. What is at stake, then, in re/dressing histories is the production of new narratives, new discourses, new idioms. The task is not to add women to the already existing history. Adding women to history is not synonymous with adding women's history. But perhaps Woman can (un)speak in the unthought, not-yet-thought, non-spaces produced by alternative paradigms, by new idioms, by paralogical and paratactical and, thus, illegitimate discourses.
