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 ...