A reader opens Hélène Cixous’s essay expecting Medusa to turn someone to stone. Instead, she laughs. That change is small enough to fit in a sentence and large enough to rearrange the scene. The figure usually introduced through someone else’s fear has an expression and a presence of her own. To see what Cixous does with the myth, it helps to read it beside Freud’s brief essay Medusa’s Head.
What does Freud see in Medusa’s head?
Freud wrote his note in 1922, and it was published posthumously in 1940. He interprets the severed head as a figure of castration anxiety. In his account the snakes are substitutes that also offer reassurance, and the onlooker’s petrification combines terror with a sign of erection. The note is a psychoanalytic interpretation of the myth. Its organizing question is what the sight means to a spectator whose anxiety it provokes.
What changes when Medusa laughs?
In The Laugh of the Medusa, Cixous asks the reader to look directly at Medusa. The encounter yields beauty and laughter where the inherited account had led the reader to expect danger. Cixous gives us a different relation to the scene. We can attend to Medusa herself and ask how the story came to be told primarily through the fear she supposedly causes.
The laughter matters because it has no obligation to reassure the spectator. We cannot tell from it exactly what Medusa thinks. We can hear a response that exceeds the meanings already assigned to her. The essay asks what women could say or write if the terms in which they have been described ceased to determine the limits of what they could express.
Why the scene belongs in an essay about writing
Cixous’s invitation to look is also an invitation to reread. She keeps a familiar figure in view and changes the relation among figure, spectator and reader. That is one way to approach écriture féminine. A writer can work with inherited language while changing who speaks and what the language makes possible. The essay does some of that work through its own sudden changes of address, rhythm and image.
A comparison with Freud leaves a question for the reader. When a story tells us who is frightening or unknowable, whose position makes that judgment seem natural? Reading the two essays together gives us a way to ask how the answer can change when someone else gets to take up the scene.
Further reading · Hélène Cixous: ideas and works · Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Popular Culture · Freud’s Medusa’s Head · Cixous’s essay in Signs
