Ventriloquized Voices

Feminist Theory and English Renaissance Texts

Elizabeth D. Harvey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134918010
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Collections littéraires

First published in 1992. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

1

Travesties of Voice

Cross-Dressing the Tongue

Nick Greene, I thought, remembering the story I had made about Shakespeare’s sister, said that a woman acting put him in mind of a dog dancing. Johnson repeated the phrase two hundred years later of women preaching.

(Virginia Woolf, 1929: 56)

In the introduction to their ground-breaking study of the woman writer in the nineteenth century, The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue that culture, literary history, and literary theory have combined to exclude women, to make them passive and merely represented rather than active participants in literary creativity. They cite Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s famous remark that, if women had written stories instead of men, literature would have been very different, for then wickedness would have been seen to be at least as much a masculine as a feminine characteristic. They compare the Wife of Bath to Anne Elliot in Jane Austen’s Persuasion, suggesting that both demonstrate “our culture’s historical confusion of literary authorship with patriarchal authority” (1979: 11). Later on in their analysis, despite references to Chaucer, the Wife of Bath seems to take on a life of her own, for, unlike other represented feminine characters, she has her own “voice,” and repeatedly utters memorable and quotable feminist maxims. Chaucer is described as giving her “a tale of her own,” which projects “her subversive version of patriarchal institutions into the story of a furious hag” (1979: 79). “Five centuries later,” we are told, “the threat of the hag… still lurks behind the compliant paragon of women’s stories”; in the next paragraph, Gilbert and Gubar seamlessly emend “women’s stories” to “women writers” (1979: 79), making the conflation between feminine voice and female author complete. Even though they claim both explicitly and implicitly that male literary experience is fundamentally different from female literary experience, the Wife of Bath appears to transcend these categories, paired as she repeatedly is with female characters created by female authors who similarly articulate their wish to escape from an oppressive system.

What are we to make of this and similar slippages between characterological and authorial voices (Molly Bloom is another instance of a female character who in the writings of some other theorists – such as Hélène Cixous (1980) – comes to stand for the irrepressible female spirit), especially in a feminist criticism that seems increasingly to privilege and take for granted the female voice? To address these and related questions, I want in this book to extend and complexify the relationship between voice and gender by examining in detail the common but largely unremarked phenomenon of what I call transvestite ventriloquism, which the Wife of Bath exemplifies: the use of the feminine voice by a male author in a way that appears to efface originary marks of gender. Is there necessarily a difference between a feminine voice constructed by a female as opposed to a male author? If so, where – or in what – does that difference reside? Is there an essential distinguishing mark (a recognizably distinct female language), or is the difference signalled in its reception by the reader? What difference does it make who is speaking and who fashions a literary “voice”? What are the theoretical and political implications of male authors ventriloquizing the female voice? To start to answer some of these questions, I focus my study on the intersection between ventriloquized texts of the English Renaissance and twentieth-century theoretical works that treat the linkage between gender and voice. This intersection of concerns is possible because of the historical doubling or convergence of attention to gender, language, and essentialism in both historical frames. Just as the Renaissance was preoccupied with clothing as an indicator of sexuality (as well as class), with the relationship between gender and speech, and with the crossing of genders, so, too, is late twentieth-century western culture concerned with issues of essentialism, transvestism, and the link between gender and authorship. The implications of these intersections are complex, engaging as they do the connection between gender and subjectivity, and the connection between language and alterity. The issues they raise are not only epistemological (can one know or speak of experiences of otherness?) but also methodological, ethical, and political.

In this chapter I will address these questions by pairing a series of texts that examine transvestism: I begin by analysing four essays by Elaine Showalter, two of which study transvestism as a trope in critical and theoretical writing. I juxtapose her two earlier essays on gynocritics, “Toward a Feminist Poetics” and “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness,” with these essays on transvestism, “Critical Cross-Dressing: Male Feminists and the Woman of the Year” and her introduction to Speaking of Gender, “The Rise of Gender,” because I am interested not only in the question of essentialism, but also in the fundamental implications of that question for understanding historical constructions of gender and feminist methodology. I am particularly concerned to explore the efficacy of a gynocritical model for Renaissance studies, and I thus examine the presuppositions subtending gynocritics and its methodological limitations. The Renaissance texts I set against gynocritics are preoccupied with transvestism: the Hic Mulier/Haec-Vir (1620) pamphlets, the Radigund episode in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and its Ovidian subtext, Deianira’s epistle to Hercules in the Heroides. All of these works represent cross-dressing and its relationship to speech, and, in their ventriloquistic dimensions, they thematize issues central to this book: the link between signature and authorial voice and the way this connection is complicated by gender. The male poet’s transvestism of voice is, I argue, at once a strategy for confronting the narrowness of the imprisoning bounds of gender definitions, and also (paradoxically) a way of coping with the anxiety generated by the radical instability of gender difference within a particular cultural context. The final section moves from Renaissance figures of the transvestite to Sarah Kofman’s (1985) French feminist rereading of Freud’s theories of bisexuality, a text in which she repeatedly ventriloquizes Freud’s voice as a strategy for illuminating and rebalancing the asymmetry of Freudian bisexuality.

I

Elaine Showalter’s 1979 essay “Toward a Feminist Poetics” propounds the binarity that was to shape a decade of Anglo-American feminist criticism and that remains influential in Renaissance studies;¹ on the one hand, she defines a mode of feminist analysis that she calls “feminist critique,” which is concerned with woman as reader, and, on the other, a critical mode that centers on woman as writer, which, borrowing from the French, she christens “gynocritics” (1979: 128). Citing a metaphor originally invoked in a dialogue between Carolyn Heilbrun and Catharine Stimpson, Showalter describes the relationship as typological: feminist critique is aligned with the Old Testament and gynocritics is affiliated with the New Testament. Her gloss on the analogy is that just as feminist critique is focused on “‘the sins and errors of the past,’” so, too, is feminist critique intent on revealing the omissions of attention to women or the propagation of stereotypes about them in literature and criticism produced by men. Gynocritics, in contradistinction, is, like the New Testament, “seeking ‘the grace of the imagination,” and it is suffused with the celebratory possibility of arriving in the “promised land of the feminist vision” (1979: 129). Where Heilbrun and Stimpson had insisted on the necessity for both types of feminist criticism, on the interdependence of the righteous, ideologically oriented feminist critique and the liberating “disinterestedness” of gynocritics, Showalter, relying on the evolutionary trajectory that subtends so much of her early criticism, tends to see gynocritics as the promised land. This is especially evident in “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness,” where she spends less than a page on feminist critique, while the rest of the essay is devoted to establishing an impressive taxonomy of four “schools” of gynocentric feminist criticism. Her metaphors are equally revealing; while all of theory is a wilderness in which feminist “theoretical pioneers” must make their home, feminist criticism without theory was an “empirical orphan in the theoretical storm” (1981: 244). The “firm theoretical ground” that she claims for feminism is gynocritical: it is “genuinely woman centered” and “independent,” it relies on female “experience,” it avoids androcentric models in favor of gynocentric ones, and it seeks to discover “its own subject, its own system, its own theory, and its own voice” (1981: 247).

Yet as compelling a theoretical model as this was in 1981, as urgently necessary as it was in that political climate, and as alluring as this vision of stable theoretical domesticity is, there are nevertheless difficulties both with Showalter’s vision and with the gynocritical model she has bequeathed to so many feminist critics. One of the most disconcerting and disabling features of her theory is her desire for theoretical and ontological stability (evidenced most clearly in her recurrent references to a “permanent home” (1979: 142)). In her dismissal of feminist critique, for example, she expands what had been a latent metaphor; feminist critique, she tells us, concerns the woman as reader or “consumer of male-produced literature” (1979: 128), whereas gynocritics is a more active enterprise, involved as it is with woman as producer. In “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness,” she spins out the dangers of the consumer side of this capitalist equation, arguing that “in the free play of the interpretive field, the feminist critique can only compete with alternative readings, all of which have the built-in obsolescence of Buicks, cast away as newer readings take their place” (1981: 246).² Not only is feminist critique relegated to the “passive” side of the dichotomy (which would seem, then, to align gynocritics with the active – or masculine – half of this binarism), but its major handicap is the ephemeral nature of its work. It cannot effect real change, because in a market economy that thrives on novelty, it will always be displaced by another, newer reading. The vision of competition that Showalter displays is a kind of nightmare of endless change where neither judgment nor political (or moral) imperatives have any force in arresting an endless succession of readings that exist only to be displaced.

The antidote to this pluralistic world is, in Showalter’s view, the establishing of a basic model, making definition out of the plethora of competing visions, arriving at a consensus (1981: 246). The problem is for her chaos, change, multiplicity; the solution must then be stabilizing, unitary, and coherent. The basis becomes female experience, which, unified under the embracing rubric of gynocritics, seems to disarm the threat of change and division. At the end of “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness,” she proclaims that the goal some feminists had foreseen in which gender would lose its specificity and texts would become as sexless as angels was a “misperceived” “destination” (1981: 266); instead, we now understand that “the specificity of women’s writing” is not “a transient by-product of sexism” but “a fundamental and continually determining reality” (1981: 266). The promised land turns out not to be the “serenely undifferentiated universality of texts,” but is instead “the tumultuous and intriguing wilderness of difference itself” (1981: 267). Despite the rhetoric, however, this wilderness and tumult is in fact the theoretical home for which Showalter ardently longs, one that she is prepared to defend against interlopers and unwanted houseguests. Yet its foundations and its walls are even from the beginning infiltrated with complications and intimations of change that will ultimately force Showalter to take refuge in another, more expansive theoretical shelter.

We can see the difficulties in embryonic form in Showalter’s early essay, “Toward a Feminist Poetics.” There she summarizes her argument from A Literature of Their Own, which outlines the historical emergence of a female voice that is the cornerstone of gynocritics. It is a tripartite evolution, with each stage designated by the label that corresponds to a particular phase of development. The trajectory of change begins in 1840 and extends to the present, but Showalter makes no reference to earlier historical periods, which seem either to be non-existent or to be subsumed into the first category. The first two stages are neatly divided into forty year chunks: the “feminine,” which extends from 1840 to 1880, and the “feminist,” which covers the decades between 1880 and 1920. The phase from 1920 to the present is called “female,” and, like the notion of the promised land or the home, seems to signify arrival, where women no longer depend or protest, but turn rather “to female experience as the source of an autonomous art” (1979: 139). As Showalter herself notes, however, this new-found autonomy can become imprisoning, and, citing Woolf’s description of life as a “‘semi-transparent envelope,’” she strikes an admonitory note about the danger of converting the space of liberation into a claustrophobically enclosed “Room of One’s Own,” or, indeed, since she sees the Woolfian envelope as a uterine metaphor, a womb of one’s own. No such cautionary tone attends her triumphant evolutionary schema, which is a kind of feminist bildungsroman, a narrative of progressive independence, in which women detach themselves from their dependence on and imitation of men, becoming artistically united finally with their biological selves and female experience.

Most telling is her discussion of the so-called “feminine” phase, which is distinguished by women striving to equal male achievement (1979: 137). The characteristic mark of this stage, Showalter tells us, is the use of the male pseudonym, a trend that is so prevalent that Showalter wittily claims to have considered calling feminist criticism concerned with the female writer “georgics” instead of gynocritics (1979: 129). She sees the male pseudonym as a way of coping with “a double literary standard,” (1979: 138), but the strategy is much more than practical. Its “disguise” “exerts an irregular pressure on the narrative, affecting tone, diction, structure, characterization” (1979: 138). The nature of this disguise – which is, after all, a kind of literary transvestism – produces a literature that is oblique and subversive, and that requires a particular skill in reading, an ability to look for gaps, silences, a capacity to read between the lines (1979: 138). Although Showalter recognizes the use of the male pseudonym as a historically necessary phenomenon, she is eager to see it supplanted by the authenticity of the female voice that emerges in later phases, a judgment that is registered in her designations of “feminine” and “female” as differentially evolved historical stages. “Feminine,” for Showalter (and other feminist critics) is taken to signify the cultural construction of femininity in relation to masculinity, whereas “female” has been used to describe innate, biological difference. In the relegation of each term to a particular historical slot within a teleological paradigm, the “female” category gets invested with particular value. Showalter elsewhere disparages the method of reading that the feminine “disguise” necessitates, arguing that the “holes in discourse, the blanks and gaps and silences, are not the spaces where female consciousness reveals itself but the blinds of a ‘prison-house of language’” (1981: 256). In other words, she privileges female language or voice over the disguised “feminine” voice, which is in turn valorized in relation to silence. The value these designations carry is assigned within a specific historic range, and the privileging of authorial voice is made possible by the historical phenomenon of a burgeoning of female writers and the publication of their works, an historically specific circumstance that is not shared by writers in the early modern period.

Before turning to the issue of transvestism in more detail, I want to digress briefly to consider Showalter’s conception of the author, a factor that, I will argue, compromises the value of the gynocritical model for Renaissance studies. In Sexual/Textual Politics, Toril Moi offers a critique of Showalter’s reading of Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own that reveals Showalter’s dependence on traditional humanism. Showalter’s chastisement of Woolf’s so-called flight into androgyny – her avoidance of her own female experience – reflects a view of history in which “the text become(s) nothing but the ‘expression’ of this unique individual: all art becomes autobiography, a mere window on the self and the world, with no reality of its own” (Moi 1985: 8). Showalter’s reliance on a “seamlessly unified self” (Moi 1985: 8) is evident in her irritation at Woolf’s use of multiple perspectives in A Room of One’s Own, as Moi astutely points out, because the shifting personae frustrate Showalter’s search for the authentic “voice” she claims Woolf wants to find (Showalter 1977: 281). While I would certainly agree that Room is preoccupied with voice, it is less concerned with the discovery of Woolf’s personal artistic voice than it is with the thematization of the historical silencing or disguising of women’s writing in general. Showalter’s emphasis on the revelation of the female humanist self means that she cannot focus on Woolf’s complex and subtle dramatization of this fragmentation of voice. For example, the figures of “Mary Beton,” “Mary Seton,” and “Mary Carmichael” are never treated by Showalter as anything more than signifiers that stand for particular people, and she is eager to peel away the masks that obscure their identities. “Mary Beton” becomes the persona of the author (which Showalter rapidly conflates with Woolf herself), and Showalter struggles valiantly to assign a determinate identity to the other Marys, making “Mary Seton” Woolf’s cousin, Katharine Stephen, while “Mary Carmichael,” she says, is probably a “parody or a composite figure” (1977: 283). In fact, “composite” is the very word Woolf uses to describe the representation of woman in fiction, where woman’s imaginative importance in literature is inversely correlated to her insignificance in life (Woolf 1929: 45–6). It is thus not surprising that what “identities” we can ascribe to the Marys of A Room of One’s Own are precisely not reflections of “real” women at all, or at least, their origins are multiplicitous and complicatedly mediated by anonymity and history.

The fragmentation and scattering of the Marys and their voices throughout Room, and the way each name gathers specific reference at particular junctures only to emerge later on in different guises, signals the intertextual origin of the Marys and elaborates the parable that lies at the heart of Woolf’s essay. Mary Beton, Mary Seton, and Mary Carmichael are three of the four Marys of the eighteenth-century Scottish ballad, “Mary Hamilton” (Child 1965: No. 173), a ballad that seems to have been inspired by an incident in the court of Mary, Queen of Scots (Child 1965: III; 386). The narrative, which, significantly, recapitulates the plot of Shakespeare’s sister’s story, tells of a young woman, living in the court, who became pregnant, murdered her illegitimate child, and was condemned to die for the offense. The refrain in one variant encapsulates the relationship among the Marys:

Yestreen Queen Mary had four Maries,

This night she’ll hae but three;

She had Mary Seaton, and Mary Beaton,

And Mary Carmichael, and me.

(Child 1965: 386)

The ballad as a form is, of course, closely associated with multiple voicing, since its origins are obscure, since its relationship to myth and history are both rich and unclear, and since it exists in multiple variants, for it was transmitted orally and was not codified in writing until the eighteenth century. It stands as the ideal vehicle for Woolf’s argument about women writers, because it encodes an anonymous narrative about female social destiny in a form that is oral and that is as transmittable or as suppressible as rumor itself (and rumor is, after all, one of the main agents of Mary Hamilton’s demise). The “voice” that narrates the ballad in many of the variants is that of Mary Hamilton herself, a voice that will be silenced by execution (and in the Russian variants, torture as well), but that continues to propagate itself after death in the fictional “voice” of the ballad. Fittingly, Mary Hamilton is the name that is excised from Room, but its absence informs the essay and is its subject. The specificity of her name is subverted by her association with the other Marys, for the repetition of the first name accentuates the interchangeability of the four maids-of-honor (and the queen); Mary Hamilton’s fate could as easily have been theirs. Mary Hamilton’s narrative functions, then, as A Room of One’s Own’s mute subtext, whose silence is at once amplified and displaced into the narrative of Shakespeare’s sister. The hypothetical narrative that Woolf offers of what might have happened if Shakespeare had had a sister is itself a mute ventriloquism,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Voice of Gender
• 1. Travesties of Voice: Cross-Dressing the Tongue
• 2. Folly and Hysteria: Duplicities of Speech
• 3. Matrix as Metaphor: Midwifery and the Conception of Voice
• 4. Ventriloquizing Sappho, or The Lesbian Muse
• Coda
• Notes
• References
• Index