From willett@suac.ac.jp Mon Nov 12 02:53:50 2001 Received: from mailscan6.cac.washington.edu (mailscan6.cac.washington.edu [140.142.33.14]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.11.6+UW01.08/8.11.6+UW01.10) with SMTP id fACArkn42158 for ; Mon, 12 Nov 2001 02:53:46 -0800 Received: FROM mxu4.u.washington.edu BY mailscan6.cac.washington.edu ; Mon Nov 12 02:53:42 2001 -0800 Received: from somail.suac.ac.jp (somail.suac.ac.jp [202.223.132.34]) by mxu4.u.washington.edu (8.11.6+UW01.08/8.11.6+UW01.10) with ESMTP id fACArf905497 for ; Mon, 12 Nov 2001 02:53:42 -0800 Received: from sfw ([202.223.132.33]) by somail.suac.ac.jp (8.9.3+3.2W/3.7W) with SMTP id TAA23088 for ; Mon, 12 Nov 2001 19:53:35 +0900 (JST) Received: from simail2.ist.suac.ac.jp ([172.16.8.81]) by sfw.suac.ac.jp; Mon, 12 Nov 2001 19:53:34 +0000 (JST) Received: from c0604 ([172.16.65.182]) by simail2.ist.suac.ac.jp (Mirapoint) with ESMTP id AGZ03641 (AUTH k0194002); Mon, 12 Nov 2001 19:54:56 +0900 (JST) From: "Steven J. Willett" To: classics@u.washington.edu Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2001 20:06:53 +0900 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Subject: Woman sited in privileged experience Message-ID: <3BF02BDD.7767.105F4041@localhost> X-pmrqc: 1 X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v3.12c) In the clutch of BMCRs that just appeared on my computer, Tim Whitmarsh has a review of Lardinois & McClure, _Making Silence Speak: Women's Voices in Greek Literature and Society_ (01.11.10). While browsing through its predictably curdled language, I came across the following assertion: It is at least a defensible position that there was no exact equivalent in the ancient world to 'woman', in the marked, post- 1960s sense of a site of privileged experience that unites all members of the biological sex. This emerges clearly from Griffith's piece on 'Antigone and her sisters', where he observes that despite the large number of female speakers in tragedy, there is no set of characteristics that defines the voice as female (passim, esp. p. 121). This amounts to the claim that post-1960s woman is a distinct psychological species formed from a series of "privileged" experiences that unite and define them in a more powerful way than mere biology. Needless to say, men are debarred from the experiences if "privileged" is taken in its normal denotative meaning here of an experience that (a) cannot be divulged by law or force, (b) is exempt from testimony or (c) hedged by privacy. That is, these are experiences comprehensible to women but incomprehensible to men. The statement is not attributed to the individual authors of the collection; it is Whitmarsh's own little apophthegm. This claim is supposed to emerge clearly from the fact that, according to Griffith, there is no "set of characteristics that defines the voice as female." There are three very serious flaws here, flaws that reflect on much that is wrong with gender studies of this sort. The first is the blatant--though "defensible"--assumption that ancient women could not, in default of evidence from contemporary literature, have been a site for privileged experience of some local kind that rendered them a collective "woman." The claim essentially degenders them. The second is that it confuses the content of literary texts with sociological evidence or, more properly, the absence of sociological evidence. The third is that it draws a positive conclusion from negative data. I don't have the details of Griffith's argument, but it seems to me highly suspect. Perhaps some damping in the adjustment of my literary hearing aid is needed, since I hear a kind of feminine voice, though filtered through the conventions and conventional language of drama, in the Agamemnon, Alcestis, Antigone, Bacchae, Andromache, Hecuba and several plays of Aristophanes to name just a few. Whitmarsh discounts the Medea and Trachiniae because "such evocations of female nature are provisional and strategic, overdetermined by their context: born of the breakdown of normative social roles; and in Medea's case, at least, an irony- laden deception." The cant word "overdetermined" is simply a way to evade the clear tenor of the evidence: it is precisely in the crisis of social and ethical breakdown that I should expect to hear a feminine voice, Clytemnestra's above all. Whitmarsh himself is a sceptic about the ability of a biologically- neutral intellectual praxis to wrest the nature of ancient feminine nature from the silence of the texts. Coercing silence into speech is, as he says, a little like confessing under torture. And we all know where postmodern knowledge "extorqued" from its recalcitrant-- might one not say womb-like?--hiding place leads: "The gendering of the secret as female all too easily reciprocates, troping the acquisition of knowledge as intellectual rape." Which just goes to show that what Classical genderists really need is a Hannibal Lector to help them hear the silence of the texts. It follows that Whitmarsh prefers those sections of the book that take woman as a constructed (and self-deconstructing) category, probing the rhetorical rather than evidentiary testimony of ancient texts. Whatever the authors of the book may do, Whitmarsh's consistent habit of viewing woman as topography or catalogue heading reduces her to a textual stream that simply poses problems: " Women are metaphorised into 'problems', aporetic and intractable, long before Freud arrives on the scene." The preference to see the literary heritage not as potential evidence but as rhetorical trope comes easily to critics like Whitmarsh who like to preface the phrase "direct evidence" with a parenthetical "(whatever that means)." So we have a group of feminist scholars who want to torture confessions from silence, and another in the Whitmarsh mold who insist that such a goal is impossible given the unreliable, kaleidoscopic nature of literature and prefer to interrogate a reified "woman" in the shape of mobile, trope-clad aporias. Both strategies are futile and, to my mind, sterile. Both approaches are reductionist and occlude not only the poetry but the ethical, political and spiritual issues that give the works any possible meaning that could appeal to us. Even if we accept the proposition that all of drama is devoid of a woman's voice as defined by Whitmarsh, why would that matter? The dramatic evocation of Andromache's or Hecuba's or Medea's crisis transcends the peculiarities of gendered inflection, which are after all just an epiphenomenon. Criticism of this wizened sort reminds me of something Virginia Woolf wrote early in her career about a worthless novel: "You can draw from it that sense of instruction in unimportant matters which you get by looking from the train window at a flat stretch of countryside." ====================================== Steven J. Willett Shizuoka University of Art and Culture Dept. of International Culture, Faculty of Cultural Policy 1794-1 Noguchi Hamamatsu City, Japan 430-8533 Tel/Autofax: (53) 457-6142 Japan email: willett@suac.ac.jp US email: sjwillett@earthlink.net .