"Beauty will no longer be forbidden."

Ok so Virginia Woolf wrote about there being two parts of our minds: the man and the woman. I found this whole concept slightly ridiculous because I believe that we only have one mind and it is fully woman or fully man. We can be aware of the way the opposite sex functions, the way they write and think. But this doesn't mean we have this "male (or woman) mind" that can be turned on and off. When one writes they need to be aware of their audience and for me, if there is going to be men reading it, then one must take into consideration the way the male mind functions in order to reach those audience members. There should be a balance because male and female writing is very different, but that is what makes the world of literature so rich. Anyway...my point is that I found Helene Cixous's essay, The Laugh of the Medusa, to be completely opposite of Woolf's essay on this particular point. Cixous states that, "I write woman: woman must write woman. And man, man." She places a huge emphasis on woman writing themselves, using words and stories to express who they are and not to fear this form of expression but rather to embrace it and allow it to flow forward.

"Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it. 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'; and it's silly. Besides you've written a little, but in secret. And it wasn't good because it was in secret..."

Cixous words are full of passion. She is fighting for the woman, saying that it is time to move away from the past and look into the future and change. Her entire essay is her battling for the need for women to speak up and overcome this fear of language. This is good and all but I found a lot of her essay to be confusing and filled with sexual context. I wasn't sure what to make of it and was trying to figure out her boldness in the area of sexuality and body. The last half of her essay is filled with these types of connections.

Inspiration. That seems to be the feeling Cixous is going for here. And it works. My question is how would the women of that time have reacted to such strong words and opinions? Because obviously it isn't a shock to me, a 21st century woman, to hear her encouraging women to write openly. Women today write and it's accepted and even praised and honored. But how would they have seen these ideas? Would they have been shocked and embarrassed? Or would they have rallied up with Cixous and journeyed forward? Most likely there would have been a mix of both...but it's something I'm definitely going to look into further.