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143  10 Medusa Laughs Birds, Thieves, and Other Unruly Women Andrew M. Butler There is a moment in a chapter of Joanna Russ’s What Are We Fighting For? that threatens to sink this contribution before it even gets going: “A combination of Freud, Chodorow, and Cixous is not enough equipment for the study of anything” (Russ 1998c, 64) As it is my intention to offer a reading of some of Russ’s fiction using the ideas of Sigmund Freud and Hélène Cixous without even progressing so far as Nancy Chodorow—although I would trade her for the possibly more ambivalent figure of Jacques Lacan—it might appear that I am on a fast track to nowhere from the outset. Russ is right to be suspicious about psychoanalysis, given its deeply problematic situating of women within Freud’s sexual and psychic schemes, not to mention the damage a wrongheaded psychotherapist could inflict upon a patient. She is right, also, to be suspicious of the academic paper that grabs at theorist X as a too blunt tool to excavate the meaning of Y or Z; I am sure that I am as guilty of this kind of thing as any other academic. But the narratives of psychoanalysis are very seductive. This is the path that I am navigating here, and I take comfort from the knowledge that Russ does not necessarily dismiss Cixous as much as the use made of her by some critics. Indeed, she acknowledges: “I find Hélène Cixous’s ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ . . . moving and at times even inspiring” (in Russ 1998c, 77). In this chapter I offer a sort of chiasmatic reading1 of Russ’s work, suggesting congruences between it and Cixous’s, in particular “The Laugh of the Medusa.” (Cixous 1981). I find the echoes between “Laugh” and, especially, The Female Man (Russ 1975b) to be interesting, although the coincidence of publication dates mean that no actual influence is possible in either direction, aside from the unlikely chance that Cixous read the novel in manuscript between its completion in 1969 and eventual publication in 1975. The most I can suggest is that both are coming out of the same cultural epoch , albeit on opposite sides of the Atlantic. I wish to trace the figure of the Medusa and the role of laughter through a number of works by Russ, taking in a close cousin to the Medusa woman, the unruly woman—identified by 144 Fiction Natalie Zemon Davis (1975)—along the way. I shall also draw upon three models for the purposes of laughter, and note how it has been suggested that they might be put to feminist use. The discussion of Russ’s work will be somewhat skeletal and suggestive, as it is necessary to outline the theoretical frameworks first. In order to situate Cixous’s ideas, it is necessary to go back to Freud and Lacan, although it needs to be noted that Cixous does not take their ideas onboard uncritically.2 Freud’s notorious theories of gendered identity produced through differing responses to castration anxieties is specifically linked to the figure of the Medusa in a short piece called “The Medusa’s Head”: “The terror of Medusa is thus a terror of castration that is linked to the sight of something. Numerous analyses have made us familiar with the occasion for this: it occurs when a boy, who has hitherto been unwilling to believe the threat of castration, catches sight of the female genitals, probably those of an adult, surrounded by hair, and essentially those of his mother” (1995b, 273). The hair, particularly hair in the form of snakes, symbolizes phalluses, indeed , a multitude of phalluses and an excess of phallic power. The Medusan figure is thus paradoxical; she is both castrated and castrator, both evidence that someone can be castrated and a figure of power to be feared as castrator .3 The male spectator has in turn a paradoxical response to the sight: “The sight of Medusa’s head makes the spectator stiff with terror, turns him to stone. . . . [B]ecoming stiff means an erection. Thus in the original situation it offers consolation to the spectator: he is still in possession of a penis, and the stiffening reassures him of the fact” (275). At the moment of absolute terror this emotion is apparently disavowed by the reassuring reappearance of the threatened organ, as yet undamaged. Lacan (1977) places importance on the power structures between the participants of...

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