In “The power of discourse and the subordination of the feminine”, Luce Irigaray argues that, since society uses a patriarchal language that privileges male gender logic over to the female one. gender emotion, there is no adequate language to represent female desire. She writes that "female pleasure must remain unarticulated in language, in its own language, if it does not want to jeopardize the foundations of logical operations" and, for this reason, "what is most severely forbidden to women today is attempting to express their pleasure” (796). This inability to articulate female desire causes female desire to become inexpressible, something that cannot be expressed. According to Irigaray, this unspeakability of female desire in patriarchal language leaves women with only one option to attempt to express their desire and that is the act of mimicry or mimesis. Mimesis is not an attempt to represent female desire in a patriarchal language; instead, mimesis is an attempt, through the use of patriarchal language, to reveal that female desire cannot be presented, a way to “make 'visible,' through an effect of playful repetition, what should have remained invisible – the cover of a possible operation of the feminine in language" (795). Mimesis exposes how patriarchal language disallows or denies female desire by revolving around the absence of that female desire, making its absence perfectly clear in a patriarchal discourse. The concept of patriarchal discourse, necessary to Irigaray's argument, is an example of a shared interpretation community, a term coined by Stanley Fish that refers to a set of discursively created ideas, beliefs and interpretations that belong to one or more communities . The most important aspect… middle of the paper… etative community of patriarchal language, does not allow the existence of female desire and kills what little life there was in Eliza in these last lines. Ultimately, the characters of Edna and Eliza reveal the impossibility of female desire, of their desire, within a culture that cannot articulate or name it. Works Cited Chopin, Kate. The awakening. Ed. Nancy Walker. Boston: Bedford, 2000. Print. Fish, Stanley. “How to Know a Poem When You See One.” Is there a text in this class? The authority of interpretive communities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980. PDF file.Irigaray, Luce. "The power of discourse and the subordination of the feminine". Literary Theory: AnAnthology. By Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2004. Print.Shaw, George Bernard. Pygmalion. New York: Dover Publications, 1994. Print.