Lejeune, who is best known for his work concerning the "autobio-
graphical pact," takes care to appear a sympathetic reader. He tells
how he was "astonished, bewildered, overwhelmed" by reading
these texts. ⁴ Nevertheless, he contends that he cannot "discern the
specificity of feminine autobiographical writing" in them. He is well
aware, he says, that one can always argue that "these women write
in a language imposed on them by men." Still he maintains that
although "it is easy enough to see, in the use of language, the
strategy of discourse, and the organization of the narrative, the
cultural and social differences of the authors," there is no evidence
of "sexual difference." ⁵ "Perhaps male narratives are on the whole
less bleak, possibly because of the professional satisfactions men
can claim. And yet even this is not certain.... What women are
undoubtedly trying to gain through the tool of autobiography is
equality in the expression of unhappiness." ⁶ Thus Lejeune con-
cludes that while women's writing may express the bleakness of
their lives, it is not distinctive.

Further complicating the problem of defining the inherent differ-
ences in women's literary production is postmodernism's epistemo-
logical problematizing of the subject (male or female). ⁷ As Susan
Suleiman puts it:

What seemed, at first, an unproblematic desideratum -- let woman speak
her own body, assume her own subject-hood -- has become problematized,
complicated by increasingly difficult questions: what exactly do we mean
when we speak of woman as subject, whether of speech or writing or of
her own body: Is there such a thing as a (or the) subject? Is there such a
thing as woman's body, woman's sexuality? Is there such a thing as woman,
or for that matter, man? ⁸

Postmodernism's assault on traditional and essentialist modes of
thought has placed feminists in a double bind, forcing them to
choose between an epistemology that defines the gendered self as a
social construct and a politics that claims the uniqueness of women's
experience.

Nancy K. Miller has attempted to find a way out of this impasse
by arguing that difference lies in the content and themes of women's
texts. She finds untrue the assertion that feminine writing by women
does not yet exist. Miller contends that those who have been looking

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