ABSTRACT
This world is a fantasy one, where only characters die, not people, and where the oppressors are punished by the oppressed. This is the world of Fried Green Tomatoes. The "Woman's Film", that genre Hollywood aimed at female audiences, in which women's desire and often her self-sacrifice are at the center of the narrative. French theorist Helene Cixous proposes the liberatory potential of laughter for women, or at least for women's writing, and the inability of women to mourn, in what are perhaps her two essays best known on this side of the Atlantic. "The Laugh of the Medusa" takes up the problem of how the feminine can speak itself, and Cixous finds it is laughter that breaks the sentence, the regulation of masculine and masculinist language. Elsewhere she argues that women "take up the challenge of loss" not by a process of mourning; rather they continually reexperience loss, never laying the lost object fully to rest.
