The half-conscious discovery that man’s power, strength, and domination are arbitrarily enacted and all creatures are equalized and subjugated under adherence to rules set forth from an indiscernible source.   The culmination of the former and the final ironic epiphany, which the author has chosen to unveil only to the reader, finally seals the book as feminist discourse. 
In arguing that The Old Man and the Sea is L’ecriture feminine, or woman’s writing, I have built my argument from the feminist theories of the French feminists, namely Julia Kristeva with the psychoanalytical tools of Jacques Lacan. The French feminists argue that by disrupting patriarchal archetypes in literature through the destruction of male generated binary opposites—strong/weak, superior/inferior, analytical/emotional—feminist discourse will arise from the ruins (Booker 91).