2. “Where is the….woman who, kept in the dark about herself, …hasn’t been ashamed of her strength? Who, feeling a funny desire stirring inside of her (to sing, to write, to dare to speak, in short, to bring out something new), hasn’t thought she was sick?” (pg. 1644) “They (women) can be taught that their territory is black…your continent is dark. Dark is dangerous. You can’t see anything in the dark, you’re afraid…” (pg. 1645) Women often live confined by “two horrifying myths; between the Medusa and the abyss.” On the one hand, women feel as if they are monsters. They grow up feeling ashamed of their own desires and feelings, and become guilty when they express them, even if it’s done in secret. Women are associated with inferiority and darkness; with the moon, death, passivity, weakness. They’ve come to believe it, to live as if the Feminine Self is a “dark continent”, unable to be known or explored. Women have come to see themselves as monsters of the abyss, as the Medusa loathed and feared by all; dangerous, ugly, meant to be suppressed.

3. “Men have committed the greatest crime against women. Insidiously, violently, they led them to hate women, to be their own enemies….” (pg. 1645) “I know why you haven’t written. Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, it’s reserved for the great – that is, for “great men”….” (pg. 1644) “Writing has been run by a libidinal and cultural – hence political, typically masculine – economy; …where the repression of women has been perpetuated, over and over…it has been one with the phallocentric tradition.” (pg. 1646) So far, women haven’t been considered part of the canon of great writers; literature has been dominated by men and masculine concepts. Harmful stereotypes and ideas about women have been created and perpetuated by ages of literature written by men, who don’t know the female experience. They’ve created a society and culture that suppresses women’s voices, and led women to hate and fear what they don’t know; themselves. Helene Cixous - YouTube Helene Cixous - YouTube

4. “Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it…let no one hold you back, let nothing stop you.” (pg. 1644) “By writing herself, women will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her…censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write your self. Your body must be heard. Only then will the immense resources of the unconscious spring forth.” (pg. 1646). Cixous encourages women to write in order to take back her “body”. By writing women will reclaim their individuality, their ability to express themselves. It will help her rediscover herself, to explore her body and her desires, to allow her body – her self – to be heard. By knowing herself, understanding herself, she will be absolved of the guilt of the monster and rediscover how to breathe. She’ll rediscover pleasure. She will realize the strength within herself. Writing as a woman, writing the female experience to share with other women and herself, will help rebuild the proud feminine identity that years of suppression and self-hate has lost. Writing will open the gates for women to love themselves again.

5. “It is by writing, from and toward women, and by taking up the challenge of speech which has been governed by the phallus, that woman will confirm women in a place other than that which is reserved in and by the symbolic, that is, in a place other than silence.” (pg. 1647) “Because the ‘economy’ of her drives is prodigious, she cannot fail, in seizing the occasion to speak, to transform directly and indirectly all systems of exchange based on masculine thrift.” (pg. 1648) Cixous encourages women to write, for only by writing will women’s voices be heard once again. When women begin to speak, they will emerge from their suppressed silence and take their place in history. Their perspective will be heard, their experiences shared, their stories acknowledged. Women will take their rightful place in the canon alongside men. By speaking as a woman, with an ‘economy’ – an experience and relation with the world and the self – different from man, she ends a world dominated by the masculine voice. By simply raising hers, she creates a ripple of change through all phallocentric systems.

6. “Writing is precisely the very possibility of change….” (pg. 1646) “A feminine text cannot fail to be more than subversive. It is volcanic; as it is written it brings about an upheaval of the old property crust, carrier of masculine investments; there’s no other way. There’s no room for her if she’s not a he. If she’s a her-she, it’s in order to smash everything, to shatter the framework of institutions, to blow up the law, to break up the “truth” with laughter.” (pg. 1652) Cixous believes in the power of the written word. Believes in literature, in writing, as the sword which cuts the path to revolution within a society, as the great baton which can orchestrate the profoundest of change. Writing has the power to move people, to touch them, to transform them. It has the ability to alter perspectives and thoughts. Cixous encourages women to write so that they may tap into that unlimited well of power found within writing. A solitary woman’s voice may be lost in a crowd, but it sings bright as the stars from within the pages of a book, where nothing can silence her. Bright enough to bring women out of the darkness of the abyss suppression has cast her into.

7. In The Little Mermaid, Ariel literally gives up her voice for the sake of a man (who she knows basically nothing about except he’s hot; that’s a whole other set of issues) In The Help, Skeeter helps give a voice to Aibileen, Minny, and many suppressed black women by writing a book that tells their story and experience

8. Ariel gets back her voice, but loses her original identity – a mermaid – in order to keep her man, gets married, but at the expense of who she used to be and everything she once knew. The book Skeeter writes is a hit, and widely read. The women she wrote about now have a voice; they are being heard through their story, their experience being shared, understood, Becoming a weapon for potential change, others aware of their struggle Conclusion? BAD Great!

9. “It is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing, and this is an impossibility that will remain, for this practice can never be theorized, enclosed, coded – which doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.” (pg. 1648) “It is women who are opening up to and benefitting from this vatic bisexuality which doesn’t annul differences but stirs them up, pursues them, increases their number. In a certain way, ‘women is bisexual’.” (pg. 1649) However, Cixous doesn’t define the particulars of a feminine text. She believes to do so would give into the patriarchal systems of thought, and so surpasses the system by refusing a definition – insisting that, by resisting definition, feminine texts can “surpass the discourse that regulates the phallocentric system.” Basically, Cixous wants to free language from binaries, from rigid categories; not to create a new order of strictly male and female, but a linguistic realm without exclusion, which celebrates and encourages differences without end that complement each other. Language should be free, and undefined, and no longer suppressed to phallocentric ideas of binaries of negation; not what is and what lacks, but what all is and can be.

10. “But look, our seas are what we make of them; …and we ourselves are sea, sand, coral, seaweed, beaches, tides, swimmers, children, waves…what matter would rebuff us? We know how to speak them all.” (pg. 1653) “The woman arriving over and over again does not stand still; she’s everywhere, she exchanges, she is the desire-that-gives.” (pg. 1655) “It’s not impossible, and this is what nourishes life – a love that has no commerce with the apprehensive desire that provides against the lack and stultifies the strange; a love that rejoices in the exchange that multiples.” (pg. 1655) Women aren’t dominated by the Lack, aren’t governed by fear and destructive desires. Instead, Cixous believes women - and men as well, for “it will be up to man and women to render obsolete their former relationship” (pg. 1653) – should turn to an economy of exchange, of giving and receiving, where desire isn’t centered on a dominant part but the complete whole of a person. A woman is a giver, unbound by limits, willing to give of herself to others and still not lose her identity; to embrace all voices, all realms of possibility and multiplicity, and she does so through language, limitless and alive, for her years of suppression has made her appreciate freedom in a way that a male-dominated society cannot. She moves a dynamic of hatred and loss, once focused on lack, into one of love, that fears no difference – whose love encompasses, cherishes, an infinity of differences.

11. “I am for you what you want me to be at the moment you look at me…at every instant. In one another we will never be lacking.” (pg. 1655) “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.” (pg. 1650) In summary, when women emerge from silence, raising their written voices, they have the power, the potential, to transform the world as we know it. To enter the history, and the canon, and inspire change. And when women speak, they discover there is nothing to fear in the Medusa, that there is nothing she lacks, nothing she is to be ashamed of. Women are not monsters. She is not the unreachable abyss. She is Medusa; proud, brave, gorgeous, and as her written words sing, she’s bathed in startling intensities of light.

12. She, of shadow, gazes upon a story of pale ashes serpent secrets curl into nails painted in dirt (hot black clench of shame, her glance avert) and drip, drip damply down black lashes She, of nightmare, the taunting mirror glimmers and catches terrible tormenting treacherous flaws He did assert (cold white clutch of guilt, her throat hurt) and down, down with shattered bloody glass crashes She writes, and at last no lie can taint herself, joy shining beauty with the sun on her lips as truth dances delighted upon her tongue She speaks, and at last hope is sprung herself, proud shimmering courage no scepter can eclipse as no little girl’s stories are ever again unsung