From dlupher@ups.edu Sun Feb 6 02:16:01 2000 Received: from mxu4.u.washington.edu (mxu4.u.washington.edu [140.142.33.8]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW99.09/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id CAA50958 for ; Sun, 6 Feb 2000 02:16:00 -0800 Received: from mail.ups.edu (mail.ups.edu [192.124.98.111]) by mxu4.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW99.09/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id CAA13623 for ; Sun, 6 Feb 2000 02:16:00 -0800 Received: from [10.80.1.53] (howarthdhcp53.ups.edu [10.80.1.53]) by mail.ups.edu (8.9.1/8.9.1) with ESMTP id CAA10965 for ; Sun, 6 Feb 2000 02:16:00 -0800 (PST) Message-Id: In-Reply-To: References: <01JLK7AN4D4200061E@APSU01.APSU.EDU> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2000 03:18:54 +0800 To: classics@u.washington.edu From: David Lupher Subject: Aspasia among the rhetoricians A friend in the School of Education here has drawn my attention to an intriguing controversy which has most recently surfaced in the pages of the January 2000 issue of "College English," though it has apparently been going on for some years in other fora. It is a controversy which gives us some hint of how a classical subject can engage---and enrage---non-classicists. The subject of the squabble is our old friend Aspasia of Miletus, and the disputants are professors of English and rhetoric. In her article "Historical Studies and Postmodernism: Rereading Aspasia of Miletus," Xin Liu Gale, ass't prof. of writing and rhetoric at Syracuse Univ., assesses examinations of Aspasia's career and significance by four scholars (two of them collaborators): Cheryl Glenn, Assoc. Prof. of English at Penn State; Susan C. Jarratt, Prof. of English at Miami Univ. (Ohio) and her collaborator Rory Ong (I don't known his/her affiliation); and Madeleine Henry, Assoc. Prof. of Classics at Iowa State, author of "Prisoner of History: Aspasia of Miletus and her Biographical Tradition" (OUP, 1995). Gale's article in the current issue of "College English" (pp. 361-86) is followed by rebuttals by Glenn ("Truth, Lies, and Method: Revisiting Feminist Historiography," 387-9) and Jarratt ("Rhetoric and Feminism: Together Again," 390-93). Xin Liu Gale's main aim is to raise questions about "truth and evidence" in the way postmodernists and feminists approach the distant past, and an impressive corollary of this is her plea that feminist historians of rhetoric "welcome members from other communities to debate our theories and methods and question our findings and conclusions" (p383). Among these "other communities," you may be cheered to know, are we classicists. I have not been able to lay my hands on Jarratt and Ong's article "Aspasia: Rhetoric, Gender and Colonial Ideology" in Andrea Lunsford, ed., "Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition" (U. of Pitts. Press, 1995), though I have looked at Jarratt's "Rereading the Sophists" (SIUP, 1991), to which Gale also refers. Jarrett protests that Ong's and her account of Aspasia is more subtle and informed than Gale lets on, and she also claims that Gale has taken comments out of context, suppressed "perhapses," etc. Beyond that, Jarratt objects that Gale cannot be trusted as a critic because she "seems in general averse to rhetoric," and thus cannot be trusted to assess an historian of rhetoric who believes, as does Jarratt, that from now on histories of rhetoric "will be evaluated by rhetorical criteria." Gale's main target is Cheryl Glenn's attempt to "write Aspasia into the history of rhetoric," and I have had a look at Glenn's studies: "Rereading Aspasia: The Palimpsest of Her Thoughts," in John Frederick Reynolds, ed., "Rhetoric, Cultural Studies, and Literacy" (Erlbaum, 1995, 35-44); "sex, lies, and manuscript: Refiguring Aspasia in the History of Rhetoric," in "College Composition and Communication" 45 (1994): 180-99; and "Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity through the Renaissance" (SIUP, 1997). Glenn's aim, in a nutshell, is to project--or "inscribe"--Aspasia into a key position in the history of Greek rhetoric and philosophy. After having migrated to Athens from Miletus, which Glenn calls "a cultivated, far-eastern [sic], Greek [i.e. Athenian] subject-ally" ("Rereading Aspasia," 36; "sex, lies," 181; "Rhetoric Retold," 36---Are there *no* outside readers for this stuff?!), "Aspasia opened an academy for young women of good families (or a school for hetaerae, according to some sources) that soon became a salon for the most influential men of the day: Socrates, Plato, Anaxagoras, Sophocles, Phidias, and Pericles" ("Rereading Aspasia," 37). Glenn asserts that Aspasia composed Pericles' Funeral Oration (presumably that of 431/430), for Plato's "Menexenus" says so (236b), but she also seems to assume, somehow, that the epitaphios which Socrates in the "Menexenus" claims to have heard Aspasia recite to him (in 386, when both were long dead!) was, somehow, that same funeral speech of Pericles. Also, Glenn assures us that the eminent classicist Josiah Ober declares, on p. 89 of "Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens," that Aspasia was Pericles' "power behind the throne." [What does Ober really say? "...Aspasia, whom Plato makes the speaker of his pseudo-Funeral Oration (Menexenus) and whom Pericles' enemies said was the power behind the throne."] Given her commanding political and intellectual position, Glenn asserts, Aspasia influenced all the great male thinkers, doers, and speakers of her day---including, one may be surprised to learn, "Plato and his concept of rhetoric." For the details of this remarkable claim, see "Reading Aspasia," 40; "sex, lies," 191; "Rhetoric Retold," 43. As most classicists reading this will suspect, Glenn's account of Aspasia is a mixture of free-associative speculation (what Gale labels "feminist fiction") and a cheerfully uncritical gluing together of ancient allusions to Aspasia with no consideration of the aims or reliability of the sources in question. It is this latter point that Gale zeroes in on with most telling effect. What is especially interesting in Gale's attack is that it is launched not from the perspective of a classical scholar but from that of a rhetorician sympathetic to postmodern and feminist suspicion of written (male) sources: "Reading the use of evidence in Glenn's version of Aspasia's story from a postmodern vantage point, one could argue that it ignores the contingency of the historical sources on their purpose, context, cultural and social milieu, and their relationships to other historical documents or artifacts" (386). That is, for an avowed postmodernist feminist, Glenn is naively trusting of the trustworthiness of written assertions about Aspasia's career and influence composed by dead white males with various agendas (none of them plausbily feminist agendas). The hero of Gale's article is the classicist Madleine Henry, whose book on Aspasia Gale compares to Pomeroy's "Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves" as being successful as a feminist text precisely because it uses the methods of traditional scholarship. A major theme of Henry's book is that we cannot really know much about the "real" Aspasia, because the evidence we have (bits of which Glenn embraces so eagerly) was the product of highly biased males (e.g. comic poets, Roman-period pornographers---in the literal sense of the word---etc.). Consequently, Aspasia is Henry's book's eponymous "Prisoner of History"---at best a composite artifact of a wide array of writers using her (or "her") for their own diverse purposes. (By the way, much of Henry's book is devoted to post-classical appropriations of Aspasia, beginning with Heloise's reference to her in her first letter to Abelard. Heloise, Henry notes, "is the first woman known to have considered Aspasia as an authority and example for the way she wanted to live her own life," 83. I would just like to add that another nun and intellectual who cited Aspasia as a model was the great Mexican poet Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, who appealed "a una Aspasia Milesia que ensen~o filosofia y retorica y fue maestra del filosofo Pericles" in her "Respuesta a Sor Filotea," 1690. Henry's survey of postclassical allusions to Aspasia does not mention this. And, yes, Sor Juana cited Hypatia too.) What interests me here is that it is a classicist (a feminist classicist, it is true) plying the traditional tools of our trade who emerges in Gale's study as the genuine "postmodernist." That is, Henry's skepticism about the sources we have on Aspasia's life and importance is profondly "antifoundational," to use a favorite term of Gale's. Meanwhile, a supposed postmodernist feminist like Glenn is revealed as quaintly eager to construct a "positivist" historical account of the life and doings of a relatively obscure person who has been dead for two and a half millennnia. (By the way, Glenn's rebuttal does not answer a single one of Gale's specific charges. Rather, she declares her determination "to decouple the link between 'objectivity' and 'truth'," and then proceeds to switch onto automatic pilot as she rambles on about how all "writing and history are suspect," so why shouldn't she "attempt to bring a fuller, richer--different--picture into focus"?) It has long struck me that years---centuries---before Stanley Fish's student asked his colleague that irritating question, "Is there a text in this class?," we classicists have been accustomed to not really being sure that we do have a text in this class. Any decent app. crit. is a stimulus to that heady doubt. (I'm teaching Aeschylus these days, and this point comes home to me with considerable regularity.) Similarly, we have long been aware that it is deucedly difficult to say exactly who or what, say, Aspasia was, or what her significance may have been. Of course, we are "postivists" to the extent that we like to think that *our* article will shed some "real" light on one little corner of, say, Aspasia's career. But we are also accustomed to a kind of scholarly "negative capability," an ability to live amidst an epistemic uncertainty which, if not "antifoundational," is at least "dysfoundational." It is my contention, in fact, that when it comes to many of the ideas our friends in English, rhetoric, etc. are throwing around with the most delicious excitement, we classicists were there long ago. Thus, it does not really surprise me that Xin Liu Gale has discovered that the scholar who has the most radically "postmodern" things to say about Aspasia is, in fact, a classicist who tells us, in Gale's paraphrase of Henry's argument, that "the 'truth' about Aspasia is discourse-relative, perspective-dependent, and historically contingent, depending on whose story we take up as true." David Lupher Classics Dept. Univ. of Puget Sound .