A Critical Understanding of Helen Cixous’s Concept of ‘Ecriture Feminine’

                 

“Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies— for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text— as into the world and into history—by her own movement.”— Helen Cixous.

If perceived from a cursory glance, unlike materialist feminist thinkers like Virginia Woolf, Mary Wollstonecraft and Simone de Beauvoir who all recited a litany of complaints on the basis of how women were socially and economically oppressed by the patriarchal society, French Feminist Psychoanalytic theory is interested in the latter’s influence on women’s psychological experience and creativity. This theory focuses largely on the individual psyche, and not on group existence. And for many French psychoanalytic feminists like Helen Cixous, the possibilities for women’s psychological liberation must be invested at the site at which most, if not all, of their psychological subjugation occurs— language— because it is within language that detrimental patriarchal notions of sexual difference have been defined.

For women’s acquisition of power within the existing socio-political system would not adequately change the system. Indeed, the result would be that women would become more like patriarchal men because they would learn to think as patriarchal men have been trained to think. Instead as Helen Cixous argues, as the source of life women are themselves the source of power, of energy. Therefore, women need a new, feminine language that undermines or eliminates the patriarchal binary thinking that oppresses and silences women. This kind of language which Cixous believes best expresses itself in writing, is called “Ecriture feminine” or female-mode of writing.

For centuries women have been indiscriminately considered as the “other” and expected to be submissive to their male counterparts who always claim themselves as the “self” in almost every social, political, economic, cultural and Institutional domain as in language or more precisely in the domain of writing. Practically speaking, there is no gender inherently attached to language to make sure whether the males or the females should own this domain. But in order for the male centred society to enjoy supremacy in every sphere of activities or interests, male gender roles have been tagged to the realm of language. Cixous argues that language reveals what she calls patriarchal ‘binary thought’, which might be defined as seeing the world in terms of ‘polar opposites’, one of which is considered superior to the other. Clearly, according to patriarchal thinking, the woman occupies the ‘right’ side of each of these oppositions, the side that patriarchy considers ‘inferior’, while it is assumed that the male is defined by the ‘left’ side of each opposition, the side that patriarchy considers ‘superior’. Kamala Das as a Third World Feminist pejoratively voices against this complex social matrix in which women lived their lives by merging her subjected self into collectivism— “I am sinner,/I am saint, I am the beloved and the/ Betrayed.”

During the early period of French Feminism, women were kept aloof from the sphere of writing owing to their lack of male sex organ— phallus— as the field of writing was primarily deemed to be a man-like act. Women were not given the authority to write until the 1920s which resulted in their using multiple pseudonyms in writings as Mary Evans took the pseudonym of George Eliot in order to get her write-ups published. Put another way, the women writers in order to produce and publish their writings had to count on male writers. They had to provide the manuscripts or drafts of their own writings to the male writers and the male writers would then publish their works accordingly. But in this process, the immediacy and exactness of experiences that was present in women’s writings somehow became nebulous and less prominent after these writings were published by the male writers. This was because of the penchant of the male writers for straining too hard to achieve an impressive effect in their writings by means of pigeonholing their writings into various moulds and categories, thereby using various literary devices and bombastic words— a piece of writing which in Horatian terminology is called “Purple Patch”.

The male writers gave an unfairly prejudiced explanation in order to get their point of dominion over language across. They averred that the pen very much resembles the phallus and the ink it emits is like an ounce of semen and this is why the occupation of writing should be limited to males only. Finally, a uniquely feminine style of writing is introduced by the rebellious hands of Helene Cixous that is called “Écriture féminine”. In her essay “The Laugh of the Medusa”, Cixous talks about the importance of female mode of writing or ecriture feminine and eloquently expresses that women should write on their own. Rejecting the preconceived notion of the male writers claiming authorship in their possession, Cixous vividly points out that the task of writing has feminine traits too. As a woman is known for her welcoming nature a writer while penning something also has to welcome certain thoughts, experiences and emotions from the outside world into his mind, that is to say, writing is unequivocally an act of accumulating or storing influences into the internal vacuum of the mind which ultimately results in giving birth to a piece of literature. Similarly, a woman begets a child by welcoming the phallus into her womb.

Ecriture feminine or feminine writing is fluidly organized and freely associative. It resists patriarchal modes of thinking and writing, which generally require prescribed “correct” methods of organization, rationalist rules of logic and linear reasoning. Cixous sees ecriture feminine as a way to spontaneously connect to the unfettered, joyous vitality of the female body, which she emphasizes as the source of life. Thus, for her, writing can be an enactment of liberation.

Unlike the declared motto of George Bernard Shaw : “No conflict, no drama”, the principle of this new mode of writing i.e. ecriture feminine as Cixous has elucidated, is to break away from any kind of conflict or discrimination between masculine writing and female mode of writing. It is conspicuously observed that the “I” of a male is considered “I” by the society while the “I” or self of a female is considered “You” or other. This egregious example of social bias reminds us of Kamala Das’s poem “An Introduction” where defying the unfavourable prevailing social conservatism, Das states: “I too call myself I” to escalate her protest for female subjectivity. Keeping the stereotypical nature of the society in mind, Cixous also holds the view that as language itself is considered phallocentric, women writers need to pick out the “We” or “semiotic language” as Julia Kristeva has coined, in their writings to avoid such discriminations. As the notion of ecriture feminine conveys that although there will be differences between male and female mode of writings but there should not be any point of discrimination between them. There is no point of saying that a male produced writing is superior and if the same is written by a woman writer then it is of lower merit.

To conclude, it can rightly be said that the two phenomena—gender and authorship— were at first inextricably linked to each other but Cixous’s contribution to the concept of ecriture feminine or “women’s writing” in her landmark manifesto “The Laugh of the Medusa” in 1975 and subsequently the feminist writers’ interventions, rectifications and reformations of the prevalent social anomalies gradually made it possible for the women writers to ameliorate their position in the world of literature and enjoy certified authorships.