CRITICAL VIEWS - FEMININE GOSPELS

Women want something more than my husband and

my children and my home (the feminine mystique)

you can’t talk about a female sexuality, uniform, homogeneous,

classifiable into codes any more than you can talk about one unconscious resembling another- Helen Cixous

writing has been run by a libidinal and cultural -

hence political, typically masculine economy - Helen Ciseaux

must write through their bodies, they must invent the language

that will wreck partitions, classes and rhetorics - Helen Cixous

inevitable struggle against

conventional man (Helen Cixous)

Beauty will no longer

be forbidden (Helen Cixous)

Who, feeling a funny desire stirring inside her…

hasn’t thought she was sick? (Helen Cixous)

Writing is for you, you are for you;

your body is yours, take it (Helen Cixous)

But isn’t that

fear convienent for them? (helen Cixous)

You only have to look at the

Medusa straight on to see her (Helen Cixous)

Why so few texts?

Because so few women have as yet won back their bodies (Helen Cixous)

SDB - the right of man to relieve his sexual desire is more or less openly

recognised whereas woman is confined within marriage

Betty Friedan -I’ve tried everything

women are supposed to do

Betty Friedan - They learned that truly feminine

women do not want careers

Betty Friedan - I seem to sleep so much

I don’t know why i should be so tired

SDB - One is not born but rather

becomes a woman

Randolph -”Failure, loneliness, isolation

and emptiness haunt her poems"

O'Reilly -(Feminine Gospels) has a strong sense of

magic and fairytale discourse"

Hornbacher - “We turn skeletons into goddesses

and look to them as if they might teach us how not to need