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in the tone of her early argumentative texts, as exemplified most powerfully by ‘Sorties’ and ‘The Laugh of the
Medusa,’ when compared to the more reflective and discursive style of Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing.
Furthermore, it is significant to note that the ‘The School of Dreams,’ unlike the first three essays analysed in
this article, does not assume that the majority of its readers will be women. Dreams are, after all, a
phenomenon which occurs in the beds of both men and women alike. Indeed, it is whilst dreaming that we
encounter the rare opportunity to experiment with the bodies, sexualities, and identities that define our
existence in our waking lives. Perhaps the most persuasive way to account for the differing representations of
the bed in Cixous’ writing would therefore be to see this symbolic object as the locus of an incessant process of
experimentation in which our understanding of sexuality, creativity, and the act of writing itself is continually
being challenged.
References / Notes
1 One notable study of the bed in Cixous’ writing does exist, yet it focuses on her fictional work The Third
Body rather than on her essays. See: Marilyn Manners, ‘The Vagaries of Flight in Hélène Cixous’ Le
Troisième Coprs,’ French Forum, 23.1 (1998), 101-14.
2 Hélène Cixous, ‘Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays,’ in The Newly Born Woman, trans. by
Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 64.
3 For a discussion of myth and fairy tale in Cixous’ fictions as well as in her essays see: Susan Sellers, Myth
and Fairy Tale in Contemporary Women’s Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001).
4 Sigmund Freud, ‘Medusa’s Head,’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. by James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, 24 vols. (London:
The Hogarth Press, 1955), XXI (1940), pp. 273-74.
5 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Question of Lay Analysis,’ in The Standard Edition, XX (1926), p. 212. A fuller
analysis of the figure of Medusa within feminist critiques of psychoanalysis can be found in: Vanda
Zajko and Miriam Leonard, eds., Laughing with Medusa: Classical Myth and Feminist Thought (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2006).
6 Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa,’ in The Norton Anthology of Criticism and Theory, ed. by
Vincent B. Leitch and others, trans. by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen (New York: W. W. Norton &
Company, 2001), p. 2040.
7 Hélène Cixous, ‘Coming to Writing,’ in Coming to Writing and Other Essays, ed. by Deborah Jenson, trans.
by Sarah Cornell and others (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 6.
8 Ian Blyth with Susan Sellers, Hélène Cixous: Live Theory (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 12.
9 Hélène Cixous, ‘The School of Dreams,’ in Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, trans. by Sarah Cornell
and Susan Sellers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 79.
10 Hélène Cixous, ‘The School of the Dead,’ in Three Steps, p. 7.
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