Abstract

For three decades Mary Daly has been a well recognized name in American feminist theory. As a philosopher rather than a theologian, she writes on the topic of women and the divine from a unique position, comparable in some ways only to that of the French philosopher Luce Irigaray. While far more interest is shown in the work of Irigaray among English-speaking academics, the major issues still being debated in feminist theory are part of the substance of Daly's work from the beginning. These include the question of language as male-biased and a source of women's oppression: the debate about whether women's goals can be achieved through demands for the recognition of their equality or difference; and considerations about the nature of female subjectivity and selfhood. ;Although Daly's political stance undergoes a major shift after the publication of Beyond God the Father, I contend that some significant influences that are clearly present in her early work continue to operate in spite of her strongly separatist agenda. But along with the strands of Continental philosophy that shape her ideas, Daly dips into the spiritual current of Gnosticism and arrives at a version of transcendent Selfhood that resembles C. G. Jung's as much as Simone de Beauvoir's. Daly also gives clear indications of her familiarity with and admiration for the writings of Monique Wittig, in whose fictions one can discern close thematic affinities with Daly's works. ;Although the highly syncretic nature of Daly's thought is typical of spiritual feminists, their understanding of the Goddess, I argue, is fundamentally different front Daly's. That syncretism leads a number of commentators into interpretations of Daly that are very much against the grain of her thought. The main theoretical problems that are discussed in this dissertation are those of her gynocentric universe, disembodied trenscendence, and an elitist outlook that contradicts her objective of women bonding with the Earth and each other in harmonious community. I also take up Wittig's and Irigaray's analysis of ways in which feminist method can be implicated in old systems of thinking was that are characteristic of Daly