There is much debate in feminist circles about the "best" way to liberate women through writing. Some argue that a woman writer should, in an effort to regain her stolen identity, attack her oppressive influences and embrace her femininity, while fostering dimorphic literary, linguistic, and social arenas. Others argue that the feminization of writing pigeonholes women into an artistic slave morality, a mindset that expends creative energy in combat and not production, and ineffectively subverts stereotypes and foments positive social change; rather, one must lose all gender consciousness and write androgynously. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Hélène Cixous and Virginia Woolf, in “The Laugh of the Medusa” and “A Room of One's Own,” respectively, embody these opposing ideologies , highlighting different historical sources on the literary persecution of women, theorizing divergent plans for women's progress, and stylistically reflecting their ideas. Ultimately, the main difference lies in the time frame of each philosophy and the belief about the influence that writing should “empower,” to borrow a current feminist buzzword. For Cixous, women's writing goes hand in hand with women's liberation: "Writing is precisely the very possibility of change, the space which can serve as a springboard for subversive thought, the precursor movement of a transformation of social and cultural structures” (311). . Woolf, however, views women's writing as emblematic of and dependent on the progress of women in general; only with “a room of her own and five hundred dollars a year,” thanks to widespread social change, will her fictional Mary Carmichael “be a poet” (94). One of Cixous' main intentions is to "break, destroy" (309). ). This destruction of injustice colors his entire perspective; a large part of his essay is devoted to reaction, to the overthrow of the tyranny of men. Male writing, she asserts, "is a place where the repression of women has been perpetuated, again and again, more or less consciously, and... has grossly exaggerated all signs of sexual opposition" (311). . Cixous compares the image of women to that of black people deprived of their rights: “We can teach them that their territory is black: because you are Africa, you are black. Your continent is dark. Darkness is dangerous... That's why we have internalized this horror. darkness” (310). Through these cultural judgments, men “have created an anti-narcissism for women!... They have constructed the famous logic of anti-love” (310). She very strongly links this anti-love to self-loathing for the body: “We have been turned away from our body, we have been shamefully taught to ignore it, to hit it with this stupid sexual modesty” (315). “Shamefully” has two meanings here; men have been morally shamed in the lessons they have passed on, and women now carry this shame: “Censor the body and you at the same time censor breathing and speech” (312). This self-embarrassment destroyed women's will to speak. , to act, to individuate: “I wanted this woman to write and proclaim this unique empire so that other women, other unacknowledged sovereigns, could cry out: I too, am overflowing; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows incredible desires. -of songs" (309). Cixous continues this passage with more images of repressed eroticism and creativity: "See you soonmany times, I too felt so filled with luminous torrents that I could have burst... And I too, I said nothing, I showed; I didn't say anything. I did not open my mouth...I was ashamed, I was afraid, and I swallowed my shame and my fear” (309). The verb “swallow,” a passive act of submission with sexual connotations, embodies women’s plight of mental subjugation. Although Woolf acknowledges this historical subjugation, she links it less to an appalling self-image and shame than to a socio-economic servitude that has chained Woolf's Manichean views on gender relations focusing on self-sufficiency achieved thanks to the money: “I wondered why Mrs. Seton had no money to leave us; and what effect poverty had on domestic life and prevented them from writing. the mind; and what effect wealth has on the mind” (24). Money, for Woolf, is one of the main providers of freedom, and this freedom results in a feeling of superiority or, in the case of poverty, inferiority: "Life... demands confidence in itself... And how can we generate this imponderable quality...? Thinking that others are inferior to yourself. By feeling that one possesses a certain innate superiority - it could be wealth, or rank... - over others” (34-5). Woolf connects this superiority/inferiority game to the relationship between men and women: “Women have served for all these centuries as mirrors possessing the magical and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. .. This is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insisted so insistently on the inferiority of women, because if they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge themselves” (35-6). Since women have been traditionally oppressed to meet the needs of men, it follows that a man's triumphs should parallel a woman's failures. Woolf illustrates this with a focused look at the fictional life of William Shakespeare's sister. Judith, as Woolf calls her, is immediately presented as an appendage of the household, while her brother has carte blanche: “This escapade sent him seeking his fortune. in London... Very soon he found work in the theater, became a successful actor and lived in the center of the universe... Meanwhile, his extraordinarily gifted sister, let us assume, stayed at home ...she was not sent to school...before she reached adolescence she was to be betrothed to the son of a neighboring wool stapler” (47). William's "center of the universe" provides a depressing contrast to Judith's wool-stapling husband. Woolf's martyr flees to London, where she is greeted with more misogyny, this time of a more personal nature: "No woman," declared [the stage manager], "could be an actress... She could receive no training in his profession." (48). Judith ends up committing suicide in the face of this adversity. Her story is a parable of the intense social and economic struggle faced by any creatively oriented woman, but Woolf finds another reason for women's silence: a lack of economic and social freedom linked to a lack of personal freedom, d 'privacy. "If a woman wrote," Woolf wrote, "she should write in the common parlor. And, as Miss Nightengale complained so vehemently, - 'women never have half an hour... to be able to call their clean" - she was always interrupted... Jane Austen wrote like this at the end of her days. ?... She was careful that her occupation was not suspected"" (67). This connection with the family room was diminishing not only the amount of work produced by women, but also ensured that the variety would never rival that of men's literature: “If Tolstoy had lived... in isolation... he would hardly have been able, I thought, to write War and Peace” (71). In addition, War and Peace is considered one of the greatest novels in the world because “it is masculine values ​​that predominate... It is an important book, believes the critic, because it deals with war. It is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing room” (73-4). Thus, according to Woolf, it was the triumvirate of economic, social and domestic slavery that inhibited creative women in the past. Like Cixous, Woolf argues that men placed an “inferior” label on women, which rendered them mute; unlike her counterpart, Woolf is not interested in the nuances of this inferiority complex, namely the theft of the body from women's identity. Her historical study is more akin to Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique," which explores the "unnamed problem" that confined women to the domestic sphere. This division of opinion becomes most apparent in Cixous and Woolf's solutions to strengthen women's writing. Cixous calls for nothing less than a gender revolution through literature: “When the “repressed” of their culture and society return, it is an explosive return, totally destructive and astonishing. , with a force never yet unleashed and equal to the most forbidding repression” (315). She states that their “fragility; a fragility, a vulnerability, equal to their incomparable intensity” allowed women to “bombard [Freud’s] mosaic statue with their carnal and passionate bodily words” (315). The thematic orientations of Cixous are undoubtedly segregationist: “I write woman: woman must write woman. And man, man” (310). This does not mean writing like most women throughout the ages, which Cixous derides as either indistinguishable from male writing or stereotypically feminine – "sensitive - intuitive - dreamer, etc." (311). Rather, women should create a new terrain in which they can celebrate themselves and their bodies: "It is time for women to begin marking their achievements in written and spoken language... It is by writing, from and towards women, and by taking up the challenge of speech which has been governed by the phallus, that women will confirm women... in a place other than silence” (312). Language is key for Cixous; affirming that it will explode Lacan's "Law", she urges "Let this be done, immediately, in language" (316). “Woman has always functioned “in the discourse of man,” she asserts, and the essay’s most sexual imagery emerges in its call to overturn men’s language: “It’s time for her to dislocate this “interior”... biting. this language with its own teeth to invent a language into which to penetrate. And you will see how easily it will spring from this “inside” – this “inside” where once it crouched so sleepily – to overflow towards itself. the lips she will cover the foam" (316). Indeed, this passage does not resemble any male essayist - informal, poetic, loaded with erotic images that appropriate male ejaculation. This new "bisexual" language facilitates the new theme: “It is women who open up and benefit from this vatic bisexuality which does not cancel out differences but stirs them up, pursues them, multiplies them” (314). must be constantly aware of liberation: “Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language which will break down partitions, classes and rhetorics” (315). the act of writing: “Write! and your selfish text will be known better than the flesh and the, 1989.