The Laugh of the Medusa

Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood;
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature’s mischief! Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry ‘Hold, hold!’

— Macbeth, Act I, Scene V

The year is 1968. Left-wing unrest simmers. In May, it explodes into anger, protest, and the threat of revolution. A quarter of France takes to the streets in protest against capitalism, rampant consumerism, the threat of American imperialism, and the repression of tradition. Students tear up the pavement stones to build barricades. Liberating chants echo through deserted streets: Il est interdit de interdire, or Soyez realistes, demandez l’impossible, or Élections, piège à con¹. In the heat of the moment few would care that their fire would peter out and their hopes would be turned to disillusion and nostalgia for a lost future. The political possibilities of May 1968 did not outlive the year, but in the foment of desires to create the new, Hélène Cixous would see a vision of new territories in feminist literature. Seven years later, in an essay titled Le Rire de la Méduse, she would urge women to “Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it.”

The Laugh of the Medusa is a beautiful text, but I find my words unequal to the text that I am meant to “advertise” (what a dull damp word that reeks of the financier). I begin with a long passage from the text. If the passage piques your interest, read on or go and read the essay. If it does not, well, tant pis.

We begin:

I wished that that woman would write and proclaim this unique empire so that other women, other unacknowledged sovereigns, might exclaim: I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard-of songs. Time and again I, too, have felt so full of luminous torrents that I could burst—burst with forms much more beautiful than those which are put up in frames and sold for a stinking fortune. And I, too, said nothing, showed nothing; I didn’t open my mouth, I didn’t repaint my half of the world. I was ashamed. I was afraid, and I swallowed my shame and my fear. I said to myself: You are mad! What’s the meaning of these waves, these floods, these outbursts? Where is the ebullient, infinite woman who, immersed as she was in her naiveté, kept in the dark about herself, led into self-disdain by the great arm of parental-conjugal phallocentrism, hasn’t been ashamed of her strength? Who, surprised and horrified by the fantastic tumult of her drives (for she was made to believe that a well-adjusted normal woman has a… divine composure), hasn’t accused herself of being a monster? Who, feeling a funny desire stirring inside her (to sing, to write, to dare to speak, in short, to bring out something new), hasn’t thought she was sick? Well, her shameful sickness is that she resists death, that she makes trouble.

The Laugh of the Medusa is a text that exhorts women to write as women, as the other, as the seductive and sexually charged; it is an exhortation to renounce the rules of writing set down by men who abandon the body to write through the mind alone as if reason without feeling could compass existence. Women must write outside categories. Women must write with white ink to carve out new territories from the ineffable spaces that lie beyond the rational.

Woman un-thinks the unifying, regulating history that homogenizes and channels forces, herding contradictions into a single battlefield.

The witches return from their caves in the dark woods that terrified old men and little boys and bring with them a new song that replenishes and revitalizes our exhausted literature.

The Laugh of the Medusa is a feminist text, an écriture, a sort of nexus of everything around writing that cannot be subsumed by the text and which corresponds to no empirical reality. Cixous borrows from the post-structuralist tradition the doubts that language can adequately reality. The Word, the atom of textual meaning, only signifies through differences. What we call a “tree” is a tree not through some Platonic ideal of a tree that we carry in our minds since birth, but by reference to everything else that is not a tree. This leaves a gap between sign and signifier that cannot be bridged. Language is a mere replacement of this for that. We tend to believe, carrying on our backs the weight of tradition since Plato, that the replacement is total, or that, at least, with enough qualifiers and sufficient hypotactic complexity, it can become total. This is a dream.² To the extent that Truth exists, it cannot be captured completely in language. Language does not support a metaphysics. We renounce Truth, but we gain Poetry in the interstitial spaces between the word and the thing itself. These gaps—shadows, mirrors, enigmas, figurations—are counter-images to the Word, to Truth, and, for Cixous, to the Male. To investigate and emphasize these gaps is a transgressive act and a revolt against both logo– and phallo–centrism.

Hélène Cixous was born in Oran, Algeria, to a multicultural Jewish family. Her father died while she was young; her mother became a midwife and young Hélène would often accompany her during the day. In the turmoil of the Algerian Civil War, Cixous emigrates to Paris. At university she meets Jacques Derrida and is introduced to the writings of Clarice Lispector, both strong influences on her later philosophy and thought. She obtains a chair in English literature at the University of Nanterre while she finishes work on a doctoral dissertation on James Joyce.

So then, a Jewish woman from a former colony whose politics are revolutionary and whose philosophy targets the core of Western thought writes an essay of feminist literary theory with the title The Laugh of the Medusa. But why should the Medusa laugh? Medusa is the original femme fatale (or femme tragique) of mythology, the woman whose locks of hair are hissing snakes, and whose gaze can turn to stone any man that dares look on her. There is nothing in the myth to make us laugh. Medusa is born beautiful:

Beyond all others she
was famed for beauty, and the envious hope
of many suitors. Words would fail to tell
the glory of her hair, most wonderful
of all her charms.

— Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book IV

Her beauty inflames the desire of Poseidon, god of the sea. Mortals cannot fight against gods, and so she is raped in Athena’s temple. Bright-eyed Athena, patron and protectress of heroes, goddess who won Athens in a contest against Poseidon, shies her eyes from the crime and punishes the victim.

Poseidon raped her in chaste Athena’s temple. While enraged
she turned her head away and held her shield
before her eyes. To punish that great crime
Athena changed the Gorgon’s splendid hair
to serpents horrible. And now to strike
her foes with fear, she wears upon her breast
those awful vipers—creatures of her rage.

Shunned and tormented, Medusa flees Greece and wanders throughout Northern Africa. She settles in a remote rocky place hidden deep within a dark wood far beyond the tallest mountains of Africa. She is so terrible to look at that all who face her gaze are turned to stone. She awaits death. Her wish is eventually granted:

“Along the way, in fields and by the roads,
I saw on all sides men and animals—
like statues—turned to flinty stone at sight
of dread Medusa’s visage. Nevertheless
reflected on the brazen shield, I bore
upon my left, I saw her horrid face.

“When she was helpless in the power of sleep
and even her serpent-hair was slumber-bound,
I struck, and took her head sheer from the neck.—
To winged Pegasus the blood gave birth,
his brother also, twins of rapid wing.”

A woman is raped by a god while the goddess that is meant to protect her turns her glowing locks of hair to horrible snakes. She wanders the earth in search of a place where she can be left in peace to die a solitary death, but men cannot resist the temptation to see the disgraced woman. It is meaningful that a tale older than writing makes a monster of a woman whose only wish is to live outside the society of men. Men look at her and are turned to stone because she is that which they cannot control: the purely feminine that reflects the petrifying oppression of the patriarchy onto the beholder. Out of the blood of her corpse springs the animal that will give man wings. It is only by killing that which we cannot understand that we can lay claim to spaces where our imagination wants to soar.

This is the myth that Cixous interrogates. The Medusa of myth, the monster with serpent hair whose gaze turns others to stone, is a tragic figure because her laugh and joy, survival and perseverance have been written out to protect the male ego from anything that would challenge its rule. To look Medusa in the eye is to subject yourself to the feminine. This is too much for most. The gaze of the Medusa can only be seen in a mirror, through a glass darkly. For Cixous, the feminine is a mode of thinking, a mode of writing that proclaims the body supreme over the mind, and whose harmonies are those of the first song, the motherly lullaby. The feminine is the self-assurance to look the dread Medusa in the eye and to become not paralyzed but energized.

In women’s speech, as in their writing, that element which never stops resonating, which, once we’ve been permeated by it, profoundly and imperceptibly touched by it, retains the power of moving us—that element is the song: first music from the first voice of love which is alive in every woman. Why this privileged relationship with the voice? Because no woman stockpiles as many defenses for countering the drives as does a man. You don’t build walls around yourself, you don’t forego pleasure as “wisely” as he. […] There is always within her at least a little of that good mother’s milk. She writes in white ink.

Writing becomes a form of revolutionary praxis. It opens a path for self-expression that logocentrism had kept shut. It leads into the deep dark woods where the Medusa reigns supreme.

To write. An act which will not only “realize” the decensored relation of woman to her sexuality, to her womanly being, giving her access to her native strength; it will give her back her goods, her pleasures, her organs, her immense bodily territories which have been kept under seal.

In the gaze of the Medusa we come to see ourselves newborn.

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.