INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ADVANCE RESEARCH
IN MULTIDISCIPLINARY

Radical women have questioned how women are portrayed by male authors since the emergence of feminist philosophy in the 20th century. In her 1949 book The Second Sex, French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir outlines the myth of the woman that has been created over time by patriarchal society and used as a justification for explaining women rather than attempting to comprehend them. The attempt to depict "mysterious" women in literature and the media is unsuccessful; they can only be introduced as strange, enigmatic characters at the start of a book, but unless the plot is resolved, they ultimately reveal their secret and become ordinary, transparent people. Women have traditionally been portrayed in literature in binary roles. She is either the wayward virgin or the angelic maiden, the princess or the evil stepmother. In her groundbreaking essay The Laugh of the Medusa, published in 1975, Helene Cixous urged women to write with their bodies and to transcend the constraints that patriarchy and language imposed on them. Women can create their own stories and break out from the inflexible frameworks that the androcentric world has imposed on them through writing. According to Virginia Woolf's theory in A Room of One's Own, a woman can only fully express herself if she is free from patriarchy in every way imaginable. This allows her to provide truthful portrayals of herself rather than the romanticized, idealized ones that male authors present.