Helene Cixous’ The Laugh of the Medusa”

Helene Cixous

Helene Cixous, born in 1937 is a French feminist. She along with Luce Irigaray,
Julia Kristeva and various other feminists are part of what is called “French
Feminism,” not by their fact of being born in France, but by them being sharing the
ideas of feminism propagated by feminists in France in 1960s, who have been highly
influenced by the works of Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault and
many others.
They all were highly influenced by theories of post-structuralism and psychoanalysis.
These French feminists like Cixous both used and critiqued the ideas of such theories
to question and challenge the male hegemony.

The ideas of Derrida was used to critique the notion of binaries and the very nature of
language, meaning and the way language plays a heavy role in the subordination of
women, as majority of the concepts and ideas are prejudiced against women and are
socially and culturally constructed by male hegemony to keep women under perpetual
state of subordination.

All these French feminists put great emphasis on women’s physiology and how this
can help and guide women’s writing in a way that it can set itself free from the
constraints of patriarchal prejudices. Cixous seminal work was titled as The laugh of
Medusa and Sorties both of which were published in 1975.

Cixous coins the concept of écriture feminine, translated as feminine writing in

English. In this work The laugh of Medusa, Cixous uses psychoanalysis, inspired
by the work of Lacan as mentioned above, to interpret the Greek mythology in a
manner that challenges the patriarchal hegemony.

This work is written in the form of poetry and the intention of Cixous is to break the
structural norms of logic and argumentation set by patriarchy and instead preferring a
poetic medium, that is more imaginative and isn’t bound by the limits of prosaic logic,
and hence in this we witness the rebel of Cixous against boundaries set on women by
patriarchy.

Through this work, Cixous is urging women to write extensively, as this is the
platform that can change the history, oppose the male hegemony that has suppressed
them and kept them away from such art.

Cixous want women to write in a unique manner, using a pro-female language that
celebrates womanhood, their body and sexuality which have been repressed over the
centuries.

Cixous uses the Greek myth of monster Medusa, who has been depicted as a fierce,
ugly woman, full of rage and has snakes instead of hairs on her head, to argue that this
narrative of Medusa have been distorted by patriarchal man to depict woman who has
desires as dangerous and ugly, contrary to the beautiful, loyal and virgin princess that
is adored by them.

Cixous critiques this very notion where women are either portrayed as the monster
like Medusa or as an “unexplored abyss” an idea proposed by Freud where he
insinuates women as beings who are negative of what men stand for- they are shown
as lacking beings (lacking penis), the mystery of their nature can’t be explored or
understood.

This is what Cixous wants women to be, to be rebellious in nature that defies all
boundaries and structure that patriarchy wants to restraint women in.

Cixous uses the metaphor of the laugh of Medusa as a tool to reject the very idea of
truth, binaries that are deeply ingrained in western patriarchal thoughts as she says
that “You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not
deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing”

This laugh, as explained above, is the laugh of a rebellious woman against male
tyranny in any form whatsoever. For Cixous the goal of this feminine writing, that she
wants women to write with full vigour and freedom is to “smash everything, to shatter
the framework of institutions, to blow up the law, to break up the ‘truth’ and that too
in way as manifested in the demythified version of Medusa with a laughter.

The primary focus of Cixous and writing is on the female body and their parts which
as she writes, “Woman must write herself, and must put herself into the text – as into
the world and into history – by her own movement.” She further reiterates her point
by saying to women, “Write your self. Your body must be heard.”