The Laugh of the Medusa by Helene Cixous
Link to Cixous reading

In the vein of DuPlessis, Cixous implores women to find their voice. To write without fear or guilt and to refute all stereotypes which have been forced upon them by man.

To write about the woman who refuses to stay in the “dark” and deserves to step into the light of who she really is, leaving the former facade of herself behind.

“And why don’t you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it.” (Cixous, p. 876)

Cixous wants woman to know herself, body and soul and not hold back. To be seen not as an object defined by others but as someone in control of her wants, needs and desires.

In order for woman to truly write in this way she must know who she really is and agree to basically go to war with a society that has so wrongfully represented her—

How does she do this without being labeled insane, sacrilegious, or a conspirator? What price will she pay for knowing herself and acting on her true potential?

            Some of Cixous’ in depth descriptions of woman make me proud to be one and others make me feel as if she is trying so hard to make her point that she is being seen as a mad woman, obsessing over the process of freeing us from ourselves.   I think her message is passed over and maybe even misunderstood by a generation that did not live within the constraints she describes. How does one appreciate the need to break away from the “old” when their reality is grounded in the "new?"

            I remember being at an early childhood education conference years ago and one of the speakers was talking about behavior and explained that the reason why privileged children, i.e. those surrounded by love, support, a healthy environment, quality education etc. don’t appreciate it –is because they can.” They have the luxury to do so because it is all they know as opposed to a time in which Cixous is conveying, a period where women were merely objects, even property of men.  We are writing today on blogs and saying whatever we damn well please, can you imagine the suppression of which she speaks? I can empathize but will never know.  

            DuPlessis and Cixous both use metaphorical language to help us know.  They describe how woman has been denied expression of any sort and thought of as completely inferior to man. Ironic, how much responsibility falls on a woman, yet they are considered last, if at all.

            In For the Etruscans DuPlessis writes about the wife who no one helped from the burning hut and compares her to a most-important language that was the last to be deciphered. Cixous, p. 880 also speaks to the duplicative roles of woman and how they are expected to be everything but are still never enough.

“…guilty at every turn: for having desires, for not having any; for being frigid, for being “too hot”; for not being both at once…”

            Yet there is another side to Cixous that builds the woman up by declaring her uniqueness and empowering her to realize and act on her potential.

 “But  what strikes me is the infinite  richness  of  their individual  constitutions:  you  can't talk about a female sexuality, uniform,  homogeneous, classifiable  into codes-any more than  you can  talk  about one unconscious resembling another.” (Cixous, p. 876) and  "It is time to liberate the New Woman from the Old by coming to know her—by loving her for getting by, for getting beyond the Old without delay, by going out ahead of what the New Woman will be, as an arrow quite the bow with a movement that gathers and separates the vibrations musically, in order to be more than herself.” (Cixous, p. 878)
            I applaud Cixous and DuPlessis for their ability to translate raw emotion into words. For their powerful way of expressing the struggle between trying to get woman to appreciate all she is and balancing that with the strength, courage, even rage needed to finally stand up for that woman  in the face of resistance and scrutiny. I don’t know how exactly the women before me have overcame such internal and external strife to find  the voice they have today—but this new woman is grateful.

It was, and for some parts of the world still is a great risk to write this way and we are only doing so now because of those who took it.