A Review of Helene Cixious's Feminist Discussion on Fairy Tales

Hélène Cixous' essay "Castration or Decapitation?" illuminates the binary aspect of sexuality and how the feminine is defined by the negative: a woman is not a man because she lacks a penis. It is this lacking that keeps the feminine in the definition of man, as it is seen that because they are the other (she is the negative, she lacks a penis and is therefore the other to the man), they are uninformed, and therefore it is the position of the man to inform the woman. This imposed silence is what metaphorically decapitates the feminine, keeping her from speaking anything of meaning.

Summary

Within the context of literature, the feminine is shown to be all that men want them to be. As Cixous points out, an example of this placement by men can be seen in the fairy tales, where a woman is placed in the exact position men want her to be. Such is the case with Sleeping Beauty, where she is in bed, "asleep," waiting for a man to awake her and bring her to the place that he wants. "[Sleeping Beauty] is lifted up by the man who will lay her in her next bed so that she may be confined to bed ever after, just as the fairy tales say." It is this movement from bed to bed, house to house (as in Little Red Riding Hood), that binds women. Women are groomed to go from their mother's house and the bed she made for her to the bed and house of the man who will awaken her to her new life, without speaking of her own wants or needs. She is merely to accept without questioning.

It is this silence that marks the defining movement of the feminine. "Silence: silence is the mark of hysteria. The great hysterics have lost speech, they are aphonic, and at times have lost more than speech: they are pushed to the point of choking, nothing gets through." This imposed silence is reinforces the notion that not only are women silent, literally and figuratively, but that the words they do say are just that, words, and have no meaning within them. They are then aphonic again, silent in meaning and context, despite the verbiage spilling from them. Denying meaning to a woman's words decapitates her metaphorically, reducing those words to nothing more than gibberish. Cixous goes on further to imply that feminine text can also be viewed as not feminine at all but merely a woman repeating a man's thoughts. "Most women are like this: they do someone else's-man's-writing, and in their innocence sustain it and give it voice, and end up producing writing that's in effect masculine." This exemplifies the notion that a woman is lacking, in that she cannot write her own thoughts or be meaningful in them, that they are merely implementing what has been ingrained in them since birth: that what a man says goes. However, Cixous denounces this thought, stressing that because of the mystery of the female, the uninformed, unpredictable way she goes about, allows a woman to be detached from ego and social ways, and in effect, creates a sense of loss for the man. Within this loss and within the margins of the logical, sensible mind of man, the man is "castrated," cut off from the very thing he created.

Interpretation

Cixous' essay is empowering, in the sense that by informing the feminine of the imposed definition of who we are as females is defined by males, so that knowledge can effectively be used to exploit the very exploitive nature we have been imprinted. Basically, we can use this knowledge to gain more knowledge in the strides of the feminine right. Yet it is the thought that (through the Oedipal/Electra complex) women merely want to fill the lack through means of pregnancy and that even with birth, there is a sense of missing within every children: either as a male child wanting to fill the lack within the mother or the female child wanting to have her lack filled by the father. Though I have serious doubts about this psychoanalysis, because it doesn't take into consideration the women (like myself) who have no sense of lacking, or the women who are overwhelmed with the sense of lack, and overly obsesses about children and pregnancy. How would Cixious address those ideas? Is it possible that a child can be born devoid of the Oedipal/Electra complex? Is it possible that-for those who believe in reincarnation-these lacks have been fulfilled in previous lives, to the point where in this life, there is no lack? What would Freud say about that?

However, within the confines of Freud and his psychoanalysis, Cixous limits her essay to the heterosexual, excluding all homosexual and transvestite persons. This other other cannot be denied, because it is hypocrisy of the thought itself. A man born with the defining penis but desires to lack that penis exposes the erroneous belief that the sexes is binary in nature. The other other has to be taken into account, as it is difficult to ignore. What does this make the other other? Are they self-defined? This oxymoronic situation must be tortuous within the individual, having to combat not only the issue of being theoretically born the wrong sex, but being engendered to a way of life that is (allegedly) innately foreign to them. The thought that a man would want to remove the very thing that supposedly defines him does place doubt in Cixous' criticism. The fairy tale references are great examples of how the feminine is put in her place by man, and a thought worthy of revisting.

Cixous, Hélène. "Castration or Decapitation?" Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 1981. Vol. 7, no. 1. Trans. Annette Kuhn. Chicago: University of Chicago. 36- 55.