This chapter focuses on the crucial transition from private to public discourse for women, and on the importance of the continuing dialogue between these two areas in feminist poetry. Part of the author's analysis will take the form of a comparison between a discourse designated 'feminine' by certain scientific discourses - the discourse of the hysteric (a victim of the bourgeois home who is not generally considered to be politically progressive) - and the work of a contemporary poet from Northern Ireland, Medbh McGuckian. For Bakhtin, in order for popular carnival to become politically effective it must enter the institution of literature. In her history of hysteria, I. Veith charts a continuity in the accusation of excessive sexual needs in all these aberrant women, from the witch's copulation with the devil (curable by burning) to the hysteric's masturbation (curable by clitoridectomy).