The
Idea of Woman and Writing
In Literature
Gilbert
and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic constructs the idea of women’s
incapability to present their selves to society through literature. Women lost
their power of defining their selves as a subject of authority, in this case
when she turned to be a writer or a poet.
“Thus the "anxiety of influence" that a male
poet experiences is. felt by a female poet as an even
more primary "anxiety of authorship"-a radical fear that she
cannot create, that because she can never become a "precursor" the
act of writing will isolate or destroy. “Literature in a history of
western was never authorized to a ‘second sex’ – by what Mitchell calls "the inferiorized and 'alternative' (second sex) psychology of
women under patriarchy.", and the
literature itself was a very male-dominated. The power of men in the western
literature had erased woman’s equality as what Cixous’s “writing is at once too high,
too great for you, it's reserved for the great-that is, for "great
men" , that woman loses her right to be equally viewed as great as men in
writing. The difference class of sexuality, woman
as what is quoted as ‘second sex’, loses the acclaim value of being the
authentic writer for her authentic work linked to the dominant authority of
male. The literary authority has never been adressed to the female sex, as
critics Gibert and Gubart give the idea of how impossible it is, “the woman writer substitutes what we have called an "anxiety
of authorship," an anxiety.built from complex and often only barely
conscious fears of that authority which seems to the female Ilrtist .to . be by
definition· inappropriate., to her sex.” It indicates
that to act as a writter or to write something, woman seemed to have been
mistaken herself as a woman, referring to what is inappropriate to her. Woman
has been fundamentally built to be likely committing herself for a dishonor
manner while she writes, as feminist Helene Cixous on her most influential work
The Laugh of the Medusa (1976), had
been sexually analogized writing is equally as shameful as masturbating to
woman, “...Because you punished yourself for writing, because you didn't go all the
way; or because you wrote, irresistibly, as when we would masturbate in secret...” that writing is “it's
"silly." However if writing is as similar
as “silly”, why do woman still need to do thing which has been called “silly” ?
In her arguments, Cixous had been pointed out so clearly that, “By writing herself, woman will return to the
body.” She needs, as a living creature, to own her power, that, for
instance, not to write means to own a power and be selfless. Not writing means
that woman does not belong to her body, which to Judith Butler the body is, “a set of boundaries, individual, and
social, politically signified and maintained”( Gender Trouble – 1990 ),
because her body has been taken by the “great” and if not writing, woman would
not experiencing to live in her “real” existence as a woman.
However, if woman needs to write to speak up her
voices for taking back her existence again over the man, it is bounded with a
question of how is it possible to be as simple as that while the action of
writing itself has never been addressed to woman, reminds our memory back to
what Gibert & Gubar argued about the 18th-19th century woman’s “anxiety of authorship” in defining the
idea of woman as a writer, that there is none of a person who deserves the
title of author/writer but only to the man, as if there is woman who writes,
her action will be defined as an imitation, to imitates a man, to be as what is shown by Homi Bhabha on his Of Mimicry and
Man, that woman is, “almost the same, but not quite” with the man whose
power is a dominant power of the society,
since the past time of western’s literature history.
Monicha Nelis
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