In A Tale of Two Cities, the code words for the resistance movement are: "recalled to life." In many ways this summarizes the woman writer's experience in the twentieth century, as she writes of her desire without the previous necessity of writing an encoded passion. Like Dickens's Madame Defarge who sat in the midst of men planning importantly, while she knitted the secrets of the revolution, women of the past silently created their own code for sexual expression. From Augustine's theory of women with wandering wombs who ensnared and entrapped men, to the church's promulgation of this view of women, women have usually had little choice when dealing with their own sexuality. In fiction and in life, women have often been isolated, mutilated, scorned, and declared insane to remove the perceived potential volatility of women's desires. Historically, women have mostly been depicted as desirable but not desiring. Yet contemporary women writers are reclaiming and rewriting their own versions of themselves. Many women are emancipating the text of themselves and urgently learning to speak. As Helene Cixous declared: "By writing her self, women will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display...[thus achieving] emancipation of the marvelous text of her self that she must urgently learn to speak."

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