The Scene of Writing: The Representation of Poetic Identity in Cixous's Recent Theatre

Abstract

Much critical engagement with the work of Hélène Cixous has tended to foreground her early writings and the discourses of écriture féminine, whilst overlooking the importance of theatre to the development of her aesthetics. This continued focus has contributed to a perception of her work as divided into distinct, chronologically or generically defined sets and has consequently hampered the exploration of common threads and evolving representations of issues central to her work. This study aims to identify a consistent concern behind Cixous's strategic use of the theatrical form: the desire to construct and project representations of poetic identity, a theme which I will argue has become increasingly explicit in her work in the theatre, and which is essential to a reading of Cixous's writings as a coherent body of work. After a brief contextualization of the representation of the poet figure in her early theatre, I will focus on her most recent plays: Voile noire voile blanche (Black sail white sail, 1988), La Ville par jure ou le réveil des Erinyes (The Perjured City or the Awakening of the Erinyes) and L'Histoire (qu'on ne connaîtra jamais) (The Story (which we will never know)), both published in 1994. This play constitutes an explicit staging of the scène de l'écriture.