I can resist everything except desire : revisiting <i>l'écriture féminine</i> with Oscar Wilde's <i>Salomé</i>

L’écriture féminine, also known as feminine writing, is a word coined by the French feminist and literary critic, Hélène Cixous. In Cixous’s pioneering essay, “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1976), she identifies that women’s writing has been confiscated by men over the years. In order to resist the patriarchal oppression, a woman must write about herself, and naturally her body will generate a female voice which is inaudible to most males. In other words, Cixous believes that male writers can hardly adopt l’écriture féminine as she writes: “I write woman: woman must write woman. And man, man” (Cixous 877). However, scholars have discovered the potential problems of l’écriture féminine, and Cixous has been criticised for being an essentialist, referring to Cixous’s presumption that there is a unified voice coming out of women’s bodies while ignoring the intersectionality of women. This project examines Oscar Wilde’s Salomé through the lens of Cixous’s theory of l’écriture féminine. I argue that the play does not only depict Salomé’s radical female desire that strikingly aligns with Cixous’s theoretical framework, but also that, by situating Salomé within Wilde’s biographical context, we can posit his sudden turn to l’écriture féminine as an attempt to probe for a coded outlet for his long repressed homosexual desire. The example of Wilde and Salomé encourages us to revisit the supposed essentialism of Cixous’s theory. By bridging Wilde and Cixous, this project illuminates and reinforces the theoretical significance of l’écriture féminine as it allows a sanctuary for marginalised writers to navigate through the heteropatriarchy.