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

Femininity Versus bisexuality in The Laugh of the Medusa and A Room of Ones Own in that location is ofttimes debate in feminist circles over the best dash to liberate women through report. Some argue that a female writer should, in an effort to recapture her stolen identity, attack her oppressive influences and embrace her femininity, concurrently fostering dimorphic literary, linguistic, and social arenas. Others contend that the feminization of writing pigeonholes women into an aesthetical slave morality, a mindset that expends creative energy on encounter and not production, and inefficiently overturns stereotypes and foments positive social change rather, one should dawdle gender self-consciousness 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, foreground different historical sources for womens literary persecution, theorizing divergent plans for womens pr ogress, and stylistically mirroring their ideas. Ultimately, the primary leaving 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 precise possibility of change, the space that can serve as a springboard for subversive thought, the precursory movement of a transformation of social and heathen structures (311). Woolf, however, sees womens writing as emblematic of and dependent on womens progress in general only with a room of her own and five atomic number 6 a year, through widespread social change, will her fictional bloody shame Carmichael be a poet (94). One of Cixouss main intents is to break up, to destroy (309). This goal of injustice colors her entire perspective much of her essay is given up to reaction, to toppling the tyranny of men. Mens writing, she argues, is a locus where the repression o f women has been perpetuated, over and over, more or less consciously, and...has grossly exaggerated all the signs of sexual opposition (311). Cixous compares womens self-image to that of voiceless blacks They can be taught that their territory is black because you are Africa, you are black. Your immaculate is dark. Dark is dangerous...And so we have 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 some strongly with self-loathing for the body Weve been turned away from our bodies, shamefully taught to ignore them, to take up them with that stupid sexual modesty (315).