Femininity Versus Androgyny in The Laugh of the Medusa and A Room of Ones Own :: A Room of Ones Own Essays

Femininity Versus Androgyny in The express emotion of the medusan and A Room of Ones Own There is much flip over in feminist circles over the best way to liberate women by dint of paternity. Some argue that a female writer should, in an sudor to recapture her stolen identity, attack her oppressive influences and embrace her femininity, simultaneously fostering dimorphic literary, linguistic, and social arenas. Others contend that the feminization of writing pigeonholes women into an artistic slave morality, a mindset that expends creative energy on battle and not production, and inefficiently overturns stereotypes and foments positive social change rather, one should lose gender uncomfortableness and write androgynously. Hlne Cixous and Virginia Woolf, in The Laugh of the Medusa and A Room of Ones Own, respectively, epitomize these opposing ideologies, highlighting different diachronic sources for womens literary persecution, theorizing divergent plans for womens progres s, and stylistically mirroring their ideas. Ultimately, the primary difference is in each philosophys time frame and belief over how much influence writing has to empower, to borrow a current feminist buzzword. For Cixous, womens writing goes hand in hand with womens liberation Writing is precisely the very possibility of change, the office that can serve as a springboard for subversive thought, the prophetic movement of a transformation of social and cultural structures (311). Woolf, however, sees womens writing as emblematic of and dependent on womens progress in general completely with a room of her own and five hundred a year, through widespread social change, will her fictional Mary Carmichael be a poet (94). One of Cixouss main intents is to break up, to destroy (309). This destruction of injustice colour her entire perspective much of her essay is devoted to reaction, to toppling the tyranny of men. mens writing, she argues, is a locus where the repression of women has been perpetuated, over and over, more or less consciously, and...has grossly exaggerated all the signs of cozy opposition (311). Cixous compares womens self-image to that of disenfranchised blacks They can be taught that their territory is black because you are Africa, you are black. Your continent is dark. Dark is dangerous...And so we declare internalized this horror of the dark (310). Through these cultural judgments, men have made for women an antinarcissism...They have constructed the infamous logic of antilove (310). She connects this antilove most strongly with self-loathing for the clay Weve been turned away from our bodies, shamefully taught to ignore them, to strike them with that stupid sexual modesty (315).