“The Laugh of the Medusa” by Helen Cixous, Essay Example

Female writing spread nowadays having characteristics of forms, genres, styles and narration perspectives was not always that various and accepted in society. Writing just as speaking not so long ago was prohibited for women just as any other right. For any individual, irrespective of sex, ability to speak and express their ideas is as essential as breathing and thinking. Only in the process of free and unconditioned self-expression in words written or spoken a personality can develop. Helen Cixous in the article “The Laugh of the Medusa” put stress on the liberation of woman through writing. In her work, she did not only suggested that female style of writing is different from male, more expressive, symbolical, intertextual and full of literary allusion, she showed all that on the example of her writing.  The offered essay is aimed to show how Cixous’s idea of female writing and theory of “writing the body” are implemented in her article, what the aim of this article, targeted audience were and how the article effected the audience. This exploration is conducted through the analysis of historical context of the work, description of the theoretical frame in which Cixous wrote, critiques and analysis of the article by other explorers, relation of the text to the intersectionality within and among women and description of theoretical and political implications of the article.

The time when the article was written 1975 coincided with the second wave of the feminist movement, which was characterized by the struggle for the wider range of rights than voting or legal. It paid more attention to actual inequality on the working place and in society in general. Issues of sexuality, family, maternity and reproductive rights became central in theoretical and political discussion at that time. From the theoretical perspective, feminist thought of the time was preoccupied with essentialism and opposition of sexes in the system of biased genders and stereotypic roles. According to the essentialist approach, femininity is an unchangeable phenomenal characteristic of all women, meaning universal female identity. Although essentialists rejected conservative biological differences between genders and considered women and men equal, they practically followed the same tradition of opposing genders on the basis of biology and unification of individualism in each of genders. In her article, Cixous proclaimed completely new idea for her time, which will later become the essence of third wave of feminism – structuralism. She considered women should not identify themselves in opposition to men “as signifier that has always referred back to the opposite signifier” (887). Woman should find her own unique identity in the symbolic self-expression of writing. Characteristic feature is that each woman has her own identity, her way of self-expression; thus, every woman is seen as an individual, and symbolical revelation can be understood in many different ways, but it is revealed through the hidden meaning and metaphor that can be understood only be female consciousness, “women are writing women” (876).The target audience of her article was women contemporary to her. Since Cixous opposed the feminist thought of her time, she aimed to reveal to all women liberation beyond biased system of sex and gender and set them free of “phallocentric system of perception”, and show them revelation of femininity expressed in the understanding of their body and creative nature of their consciousness (877).

“The Laugh of Medusa” like no other work of Cixous reveals her theoretical framework of philosophical thought. She uses the knowledge of Freud about subconscious, expression of sexual implication in various symbols, especially Greek mythology that carries Ancient archetypal information of human subconsciousness. Just as Freud, Cixous showed the phallocentric perception of human existence and that males view women and make them see themselves through the perspective of lack – lack of thing distinguishing man from a woman and “castration’s lack ” (884). Cixous compares men to the Sirens that sing sweetly lies about history and meaning of women in it (885). She argues that male perception of Medusa as ugly, monstrous creature of death symbolizes their fear of a free woman that speaks and understands her sexuality and desires. Medusa – New Woman behind male perception – is “not deadly… she’s beautiful, and she’s laughing” (885). In order the Old Woman, who is afraid of herself, to become a New Woman, she has to write the body. In this context, Cixous applies her theory of female “write the body”. Through understanding of a female body, its unshameful nature and sexuality, woman can discover creativity and female symbolical consciousness. Since very few woman had realized and “won back their bodies”, those who had already won should write to help others understand themselves:

“Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics and regulations” (886)

The female manner of writing is different from male; it cannot be conditioned by rules, dogmas and knowhow; it should be spontaneous, sensual, expressive and even chaotic sometimes. Just as physical body and consciousness are individual, female writing style cannot be distinguished in terms of norms and borders of regulations.  Female narration is free and flying: “flying is woman’s gesture-flying in language and making it fly” (887). Characteristic feature of Cixous’ text is that she does not merely speak of the new pattern in female writing, but she shows it on the example of her article. She makes the audience not only to consider the topic of female bodily writing but shows its bright example in her text. Subsequently, the audience begins to feel the author’s thoughts through the narration. There is no need to imagine what it is like to write through the body, reader can experience it through the text of Cixous. Such expressiveness of the narration is reached through the intetextuality of the text, use of explicit language, symbolism, metaphors, comparisons, various colorful adjectives.  Deviation from male rules of writing is achieved by application of long, sometimes redundant sentences and full parenthetical insertions. Some parts of narration were similar to the flaw of consciousness achieved by breaking sentences to unconventional. Thus, linearity of thinking was broken.

In the context of text’s relation to the intersectionality within and among women, Cixous argued that in the phallocentric system female liberation and freedom were denied but not as nonexistent rather as ugly, unnatural and monstrous amtters embodied in the symbol of Medusa. Through the creation of dogmas, stereotypes and social place for women “men have committed the greatest crime against women – they have  led  them  to hate women,  to be their own  enemies,  to mobilize  their  immense strength  against  themselves,  to be the executants of  their  virile  needs.  They have made for women an antinarcissism!” (878). Women are not able to love themselves since they do not know themselves, by following male phallocentric pattern of lacking, women felt incomplete and  castrated from the ideal symbol of male supremacy. Consideration of themselves inferior to males resulted in female inner discrimination and undervaluation of their abilities and opportunities. Women began to favor “the infamous logic of antilove” (878). Since women did not accept their femininity and need for liberation, their perception of deviant behavior of liberated women was negative and embodied the symbol of monstrous Medusa. Fear and misperception of their femininity and those liberated Medusa-like women resulted in discrimination among women. There were those of Penelope kind and those of Medusa, and no one would try to see what is behind the mask of scary, snake-headed monster and understand it (879).

Having quite unusual approach to the female liberation, Cixous was much criticized by her contemporaries as well as modern thinkers. Her contemporaries considered the idea of female bisexuality and female individualism, derived from the concept of “writing body”, to oppose the prevailing at that time concept of female unified identity. She was criticized for rejecting common essence of female nature; thus, by giving a woman bisexual nature, she was getting close to the idea of androgynous nature of both sexes, which was largely opposed by the essentialist feminism. Essentialists considered that, in her article, Cixous referred to the biological aspects of female and male writing; thus, she showed the disparity between sexes, and since she did not state that female writing style was more sophisticated or equal to males, she was criticized for following traditional, opposing bias conditioned by biological inequality. Being considered the early representative of the structuralism in feminism, Cixous did not escape criticism from the third-wave feminism.  Subsequently, she was criticized for the opposite aspect than essentialists considered being deviant. The famous metaphor used in the analyzed text “white ink” referring to the “good mother’s milk” was used to show the closeness of body and writing and unison of creativity physical with mental (881). From the perspective of third-wave feminism, such comparison might be too essentialist and again referred to the biological aspects of femininity. In this sense maternity was seen as a social stereotype of the sexual inequality rather than creative liberation proclaimed by Cixous. In both cases, it seems that critics studied text out of its symbolical meaning and narrative purpose.

The meaning of “The Laugh of Medusa” for theoretical and political perspectives of the feminism development is that it showed the new perspective in the feminist thought, beyond the opposition of biased terms of male/female, good/bad, and normal/deviant. In this article, Cixous contributed to further development of bisexuality, queer theory, structuralism in the feminist movement and individualism, diversity in female self-perception. From the literary perspective, she developed new narration perspective – female expressive “write the body” pattern. She also spoke of the new dimension of female liberation – writing, which was not well developed before, except for works of Woolf. Cixous was a fresh wind in the second-wave of the feminist movement. Medusa foreshadowed coming of Lilith’s new age.

Work Cited

Cixous, Helen “The Laugh Of the Medusa”. Tr. Cohen Keith and Cohen Paula. Signs, vol. 1, no.4, Summer 1976, pp. 875 – 893. Print.