Gender and Sexuality in Language

Sexual Linguistics: Gender, Language, Sexuality
Author(s): Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar

Source: New Literary History, Vol. 16, No. 3, On Writing Histories of Literature (Spring,
1985), pp. 515-543
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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Sexual Linguistics: Gender,
Language, Sexuality*
Sandra M. Gilbertand Susan Gubar
PourquoiPa?
Jacqueline Nacal (1940)
IS ANATOMY linguistic destiny? Is a womb a metaphorical mouth,

a pen a metaphorical penis? From Freud to Lacan to Derrida
on the one hand, and from Woolf to Irigaray to Cixous on the
other, masculinist and feminist theorists alike have toyed with the
idea of a culturally determined body language which translates the
articulations of the body into that body of articulated terminology we
call language. Lately, in particular, linguistically-minded critics have
increasingly called attention to the artificialityand indeterminacy of
the terms through which we think we know the world, while psycho-
analytic theorists have increasingly emphasized the psychological
forces that determine the apparently logical terms in which we think
we think. Inevitably, therefore, schools of "phallologocentrists," anti-
"phallologocentrists," anti-"phallo-theo-logo-centrists," and what we
might call "vulvalogocentrists" have arisen to meditate on the sex-
uality of linguistics and the linguistics of sexuality. For if language is
a process of cultural artifice that both distances and defines nature,
then it would seem that its workings might well embody the bodily
* This
piece began as an essay writtenby Sandra Gilbert, entitled "Speaking in
Mother Tongues: Woman's Sentence and Women's Sentencing,"which was firstpre-
sented at the Wellesley International Women WritersConference in May 1981. It
evolved into a collaborativeproject,which has also resulted in an essay entitled"Cer-
emonies of the Alphabet: Female Grandmatologies and the Female Authorgraph,"
published in The New YorkLiterary Forum(Fall 1984). Along the way, as we struggled
to formulateour ideas in both pieces, we have received much valuable help frommany
friendsand colleagues, including GarrettStewart,Andrea Hammer, Elyse Blankley,
Susan Lurie, Nancy Miller, and Elliot Gilbert.We are gratefulto all of them but of
course we must note that all errors in conception and formulationare entirelyour
own. In addition, we want to thank the Unit for CriticalTheory at the Universityof
Illinois; the Center for Twentieth Century Studies at the Universityof Wisconsin,
Milwaukee; Illinois State University,Normal, Illinois; SmithCollege; Barnard College;
Brown University;and Hamilton College. We have delivered this paper at all these
places and received many helpfulresponses on everyoccasion. Finally,we are grateful
to the National Endowment for the Humanities,the RockefellerFoundation, and the
Guggenheim Foundation, all of whom helped support our work on thisessay.

516 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
differencesthroughwhicheach human being firstconfrontsthe fun-

damental sexualityof his or her own nature. It mightseem, in other
words, that as Julia Kristevaputs it, "Sexual difference-which is at
once biological, physiological,and relative to production-is trans-
lated by and translatesa differencein the relationshipof subjectsto
the symboliccontractwhich is the social contract;a difference,then,
in the relationshipto power, language, and meaning."1
In thisessay,attemptingto integratethe divergentforcesof power,
language, and meaning, we will examine this relationshipbetween
sexual differenceand the symboliccontractin an effortto place re-
cent feministquestionings of female linguisticdestinyin the larger
historicalcontextthathas not only produced the questionsof feminist
desire but has also reproduced the queasinesses of masculinistdoubt,
dread, and derision. For, as we shall tryto show, contemporaryfe-
male language theoristsparticipate in a long traditionof feminist
linguisticfantasy,while male language theoristsalso inherita long
traditionof masculinistlinguisticfantasy.That such traditionsde-
monstrablyexist, moreover, implies two points which we will also
consider fromboth a psychologicaland a historicalperspective.First,
their content suggests an intuition of the primacy of the mother
rather than the father in the process of language acquisition that
assimilatesthe child into what Kristevacalls the "symboliccontract."
Second, the very existence of a long-neglectedtraditionof female
writinginterrogatesthe widely accepted contemporaryassumption
that"the feminine"is what cannot be inscribedin common language.
Finally,then, questioning the identificationof the symboliccontract
with the social contract,we will argue that the female subject is not
necessarilyalienated fromthe words she writesand speaks.
For male thinkersin recent years,of course, considerationsof the
relationshipbetween the sexual and the symbolichave tended to issue
in elaborately constructed conceits of, for instance, the Phallus as
"transcendentalsignifier"and of the "hymen'sgraphic" inscribedby
the pen/penis.2By female thinkers,however, the concepts of body
language and, more specifically,of sexual linguisticsmustbe farmore
urgentlyengaged. Exiled from patriarchalhistory,feministtheorists
strugglewithideological fervorto untanglethe logical knotsand psy-
chological nots woven into the definitionof woman's plightthatLevi-
Strauss offered with such magisterialcarelessness at the end of The
Elementary StructuresofKinship:"But woman could never become just
a sign and nothing more, since even in a man's world she is stilla
person, and since insofar as she is defined as a sign she must be
recognized as a generator of signs."3But if thisis so, if she is both a
sign and a generator of signs,the woman thinkerneeds to know the

SEXUAL LINGUISTICS 517
nature and purpose of her own passive signification,her own active

signifying."Unhappy one [lament the women heroines of Monique
Wittig'sLes guerrilleres],men have expelled you from the world of
symbols and yet they have given you names, they have called you
slave, you unhappy slave. Masters,theyhave exercised theirrightas
master. They write,of their authorityto accord names, that it goes
back so far that the origin of language itselfmay be considered an
act of authorityemanating from those who dominate.... the lan-
guage you speak is made up of words that are killingyou."4
Wittig'simpassioned complaint implies most of the questions the
woman theoristof sexual linguisticsmust inevitablyask. Is her body
a linguistictermin (male) language? Does her body expressor repress
a (female) language of its own? When she organizes ideas, does she
organize, organicize, or even orgasmicize herself as a subordinate
clause in the syntax of patriarchy?Given such an organization of
thought,how can she come thoughtfullyto termswithher own ter-
minology?If the Phallus is the magic wand (or want) thatopens the
gates of language, if the Name-of-the-Father is the password into the
palace of rational discourse, what name, what wand (or want), what
password can safeguard her rites of passage? Neither metaphorical
nor metaphysical,her appraisal of sexual linguisticsis both personal
and political,founded not in experimentalspeculation but in expe-
rientialreality.For this reason, as Elaine Showalter has acutely ob-
served,"American,French,and Britishfeministcriticshave all [lately]
drawn attentionto the philosophical, linguistic,and practical prob-
lems of women's use of language, and the debate over language is
one of the most excitingareas" in recent feministtheory.5
To be sure, male speculationhas underwrittenthe linguisticdebate
among female theorists.By raisingeveryone'sconsciousnessthatlan-
guage is a phenomenon which itselfcreates the phenomenologyof
consciousness, male philologistsand philosophers from Saussure to
Lacan and Derrida have "interrogated"the authorityof language in
all itsaspects and made possible a closer,crosser,more feministcross-
examination of the hierarchyof syntax,the vocabularyof authority,
and the authorityof vocabulary.Such cross-examinationshave so far
taken two forms: on the one hand, a priori (and usually French)
speculations on the possibilityof a feministlanguage, a vocabulary
and syntax of woman's jouissance which would translate a long-si-
lenced female realityinto a new linguisticdestinyand, in doing so,
elaborate upon what Mary Jacobus calls "the dream of a language
freed from the Freudian notion of castration"6to create-in Elaine
Showalter'swords-"a revolutionarylinguism,an oral break fromthe
dictatorshipof patriarchalspeech";7 on the other hand, an a poste-

riori(and usually American or British)formof investigationthathas

given rise to a good deal of practicalresearch into quantifiableques-
tionsof vocabulary,inflection,syntax,rhetoricalstyle,conversational
strategy,and so forth.
Among poetic psychoanalyticthinkers,the firstof these cross-ex-
aminationshas produced a body of semi-mystical theoryabout body
language in which the womb does, indeed, become a mouth and
nipples inkwells,at the same time that the female subject maintains
a resonant silence that,in its deploymentof "blank pages, gaps, bor-
ders, spaces . . . holes in discourse," speaks (to initiated listeners)
louder than words.8 Because "womanhas sex organsjust aboutevery-
where,"declares Luce Irigaray, "her language ... goes off in all di-
rections in which 'he' is unable to discern the coherence of any
meaning."9 Similarly,Julia Kristeva associates woman with "the re-
pressed space . . . called 'the semiotic'(le semiotique)
[thatis] opposed
to the symbolic,"a space that is "pre-Oedipal," and "in adult dis-
course" associated with "rhythm,prosody, non-sense, pun."10 Thus
"thislanguage, although it is mine, is foreignto me," says Madeleine
Gagnon, explaining thatfor her learning to writemeant "learningto
exchange blood, milk,tears, in the loss of the body," while Helene
Cixous defines the truly"feminine"textas "an outpouring... a fan-
tasyof blood [or] vomiting,throwingup, 'disgorging.'"l
Both body language and resonant silence, however,seek to over-
throw (or, in the Derridean sense, renverser) the "hierarchized"sets
of binaryoppositions which thinkerslike Cixous and Irigaraysee as
the basic structuresof patriarchal psycholinguistics-"Superior/In-
ferior, Activity/Passivity, Culture/Nature, Father/Mother,"all of
which signify"Man/Woman" and all of which, therefore,degrade
woman while, by identifyingher with the other (the inferior,the
passive, the unconscious, the material,the earth), theydeprive her
of linguisticauthority.No wonder, then, that Cixous and a number
of her contemporaries struggle to be free of such an order by re-
versing these hierarchies.12No wonder, either, that in such a ren-
versement silence becomes speech, and body, complementarily,be-
comes speechifier. Silence, exile, and cunning: James Joyce's pass-
words become key terms for these theorists,who often also believe
that,as Cixous (who wrotea doctoraldissertationon TheExileofJames
Joyce)puts it, Molly Bloom carries "Ulyssesoffbeyond any book and
toward the new writing."13These women seem to affirmwhat the
figure of Molly Bloom seems to confirm: that the Cartesian di-
chotomyis essentiallypatriarchal;hence the only female solution to
what one learned in school as the "mind/body"problem is an opting
for matter over mind. It is not insignificant,however, that their

dream of a female language thathas a mysteriously multiplefluency,

togetherwith their antitheticalimaginingof eloquent silence, unites
them with the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centurymale
avant-garde.
Perhaps for this reason, though, both in France and in America a
number of feministthinkersremain uneasy withwhat we mightcall
feminologistre-Joycings;a number refuse to be Mollified. Women
associated withthe Questions Feministesgroup, like ChristineFaure and
Monique Wittig,argue that "men give us too willinglythe exclusive
use of visceral cries and intuition."14In America, GayatriSpivak ex-
presses her "dissatisfactionwith the presuppositionof the necessarily
revolutionarypotentialof the avant-garde,literaryor philosophical,"
adding that "there is something even faintlycomical about Joyce
rising above sexual identitiesand bequeathing the proper mind-set
to the women's movement."15 Even the feminologiststhemselves,
moreover,worryabout the efficacyof the disruptivestrategiesthey
propose. As long as women remain silentor speak in a body language
of freelyfluentmultiplereferentiality, "theywillbe," as Xaviere Gau-
thier comments, summarizing the problem, "outside the historical
process. But if they begin to speak and write as men do, they will
enter historysubdued and alienated; it is a historythat, logically
speaking, their speech should disrupt."16
For some feminist thinkers, of course-notably American
women-empiricism in the largest sense provides a way out of this
dilemma. From Casey Miller and Kate Swift to Mary Hiatt, Dale
Spender, Cheris Kramarae, and Sally McConnell-Ginet, these re-
searchers screen real words in an effortnot so much to overthrow
the logic of language itselfas to reshape language so that it works
for,ratherthan against,women. Analyzingracial,historical,and geo-
graphic influences on fluency and literacy,feministlinguists like
McConnell-Ginet study the relationship between gender and lan-
guage even as theyadmit that"the assumptionthatsexual difference
outweighs all other factors, ignores and devalues the differences
among women and perpetuates the male-centeredview of women as
homogeneous."17At the same time, uncoveringthe male monopoly
of language that reinforcesa more general male cultural primacy,
theycriticizethe way in which "he/man"usages filterout recognition
of female existence; indeed, as if corroboratingthe French emphasis
on blanks, gaps, silences, Dale Spender commentson the semantic
practicesthat assume the masculine as a universal formby claiming
that "for females,the only semanticspace in English is negative."'8
Similarly,countering the claim of the Harvard linguisticsfaculty
thatwomen sufferfrom"pronoun envy,"Cheris Kramarae welcomes

the redefinitionsproposed in A Women'sNew WorldDictionarythat

would dislodge man from the center of the androcentric-linguistic
geographyhe has mapped.19Again, exploringthe marginalizationof
women recorded in the exclusionarylexicon of English,Casey Miller
and Kate Swiftdocument the lingeringassociationsof masculinityin
phrases like "the brotherhoodof man," while Mary RitchieKey iden-
tifies the predominance of apology in female discourse and the
preeminence of obscenityin male discourse,and Barrie Thorne and
Nancy Henley demonstratehow the divisionof conversationallabor
contributesto linguisticdifferencethat devalues women's tradition-
ally domestic sphere.20 Such linguistsexamine lexical asymmetries
thatreifysexiststereotypes-for instance,the trivializationof female
forms("poetess," "suffragette")and the absence of words thattestify
to patriarchalblindspots(female "hysteria"and male ? one writer
suggests"testeria").21
More specifically,speculating on the possibilityof a distinctively
female speech, writerslike Mary Ritchie Key and Robin Lakoff pos-
tulateinferiorizedwaysin whichwomen speak and inferiorizing ways
in whichwomen are perceived to speak. Lakoff's Languageand Wom-
an's Place, for instance, describes women's language in terms of a
preponderance of hedging or disclaimingstatements,hypercorrect
grammar,superpolite pronunciation,weak expletives(dear me), and
a specialized vocabulary related to women's traditionallydomestic
sphere (fashion, cooking, decorating).22 Even among feministlin-
guists,however,the reactionto Lakoff's workhas been mixed: while
Cheris Kramarae presentsthe explicitclaimsof contemporaryAmer-
ican women that they simply do not speak this anachronisticlan-
guage, William M. O'Barr and Bowman K. Atkinsclaim that some
men do.23 As for those who accept Lakoff's genderlect,some, like
Dale Spender, argue that women's marginalization bequeaths a
double vision which actually empowers them to protectmen "from
the inadequacies of theirown definitions"even as it helps make con-
versationpossible.24Still,even if Spender's women are linguistically
superior to men in the use of collaborativestrategies,because their
language has been systematically ridiculed theyare perceived as less
linguisticallypowerful than men. Thus even as many linguistsques-
tion Lakoff's concept of a woman's language, all agree that women
are heard to speak a language less forcefulthanthatspoken bymen.25
Basically,then,Frenchspeculationsand Americaninvestigations ap-
pear radicallydifferent,a fact that may well reflectthe differences
between the French language and the English language: where
French is grammaticallygender marked and (comparatively)highly
inflected,Englishis onlylexicallygender markedand (comparatively)

uninflected; where French induces anxietiesabout politesse, distance,

and objectificationthroughits deploymentof stylizationslike the tu-
toyer,English--especially American English-is more consistently
casual in its "high" as well as "low" culturalusages. Still,despite these
differingprovenances, given the charisma of the French feminist
discourse that has latelybeen translatedin this country,one cannot
help wondering if one is encountering a kind of intellectualhaute
couture,an Yves St. Laurent of the mind which glows withglamour
when set against the dowdiness of America's "garmentdistrict"em-
piricism.After all, whether Americans are interpretersof Parisian
stylefor the Woman'sWear Daily of Women's Studies professorsor
empiricistsgamboling in the Gimbel's basement of factuality,their
data seems, by comparison with the Derridata of the French, like a
schmata.
What may also reinforcethis American sense of French glamour
is the fact that theoristslike Cixous seem to be evolving a utopian
vision of woman's language, while linguistslike Lakoff offer what
appears to be a dystopian version of woman's sentence. In other
words,while French feminologistssee women'slanguage as ajoyously
emetic emission from a communitybased on the commonality of
women, Americans tend to perceive it as a sedate commoditywomen
have been forced to produce for male consumption.While the pace
of the parlerfemmeis associated with the rhythmof an exotic dark
continent,the place of the American genderlectis a confiningparlor
thatproduces a linguisticpallor. While the exuberance of the French
women's language is prophetic in its anticipationof a new time of
sexual liberation,the prophylacticspeech associated with American
women guards themagainst the vulgarityof reality.While the French
feminologistssing the praises of the fineforeignobscurityof women's
language, the Americans seem for the most part convinced that"if a
woman learns and uses women's language, she is necessarilyconsid-
ered less than a real, full person," but "if she doesn't learn to speak
women's language .. . she is ostracized as unfeminine."26
To be sure, despite the radical differenceswe have been defining,
the French feminologistsand the American empiricists,Derridaugh-
ters and Derridoubters alike, seem to be united in their recognition
of the double bind Lakofflaments,forher words surprisinglyparallel
Gauthier's remark that "as long as women remain silent"-that is, as
long as women remain linguistically"female"-"they will be outside
the historicalprocess. But if they begin to speak and writeas men
do, theywill enter historysubdued and alienated." Given the other-
wise consistentdisagreementsamong these thinkers,what would ac-
count for their virtual unanimityon this one point? It seems to us

that what both sets of feministlinguistsfinallyhave in common is a

deep conviction that women have notyetenteredhistory, that is, an
assumption that women have not yet used in
language waysempow-
ering enough to affecthistory."With a few rare exceptions," says
Cixous speaking for the French, "there has not yetbeen any writing
thatinscribesfemininity," and Cora Kaplan, representingthe Anglo-
American empiricists,argues that women's "way of referringto ex-
perience" has been "suppressed in public discourse."27Significantly,
in otherwords,none seem to take seriouslythe possibilitythatwomen
have already entered history,the possibility,even, that their own
theoriesare as historicallydeterminedas any of the poetics that dis-
tinguishthe relativelylong traditionof ecriture femininewhich, sur-
prisinglyenough, theyignore.
Yet so major a feministprecursor as Virginia Woolf founded her
most famous linguisticspeculation preciselyon a recognitionof the
existence of women's literarypast and its subversiverelationshipto
the supposed hegemonyof patriarchalculture. "Towards the end of
the eighteenth century,"she declared in A Room of One's Own, "a
change came about which, if I were rewritinghistory,I should de-
scribe more fullyand thinkof greaterimportancethan the Crusades
or the War of the Roses. The middle-classwoman began to write."28
Although the self-consciouslyliterarywritingsof such a woman do
not necessarilyoffera complete model of female language, neither
should theybe largelyignored by language theorists.Woolf herself,
afterall, may be said to be in some sense the motherof all contem-
poraryfeministlinguistictheory,since her latercall in A Roomfor "a
woman's sentence" is the clearest expression of the "middle-class
woman's" hunger for words of her own.
Observing that "we think back through our mothers if we are
women," Woolf remarks that the early eighteenth-century woman
novelist found that "there was no common sentence ready for her
use," since the "man's sentence"was as alien to her mind as "the older
formsof literaturewere to her imagination."29Such a claim would
in factseem to lead directlyto the workof both the schoolsof feminist
linguisticsthat we have been discussinghere. Yet curiouslyenough,
Woolf's concept of a "woman's sentence" seems to evade the for-
mulationsof the French on the one hand, and the investigationsof
the Americanson the other. For where the claimsof, say,Lakoffand
Spender are both too moderate and too empiricalto reveal the theo-
reticalfullnessher passage seems to promise,the meditationsof, say,
Cixous and Irigaray often,as we have seen, seem almost immoder-
ately theoreticaland ahistorical.
Provisionally,therefore,we want to suggest that Woolf used what

was essentiallyafantasyabout a utopian linguisticstructure-a "wom-

an's sentence"-to define (and perhaps disguise) her desire to revise
notwoman'slanguagebutwoman'srelationto language.In fact,we want
to argue that when she elaborates upon her dream of the woman
writerMary Carmichael Woolf at least half-consciouslymeans that
her fictiveMary has triumphed not by creating a new sentence-as-
grammatical-unitbut by overturning the sentence-as-"definitive-
judgment," the sentence-as-decree-or-interdiction, by which woman
has been kept from feelingthat she can be in full command of lan-
guage. The utopian concept of woman's grammaticalsentenceis thus
for Woolf, as also perhaps for contemporaryAmerican and French
linguists,a veil thatconceals the more practicalidea of woman's legal
sentence. More, the ambiguityof the phrase "woman's sentence"-
for who is being sentenced? and who is sentencingwhom?-is a veil
behind which Woolf may be imaginingfeatsof epic prestidigitation:
woman, who has been sentenced by man, willnow sentenceman; and
woman, who has been sentenced to confinementand dispossession,
willnow sentenceherselfto freedomand fivehundred pounds a year.
Finally,we want to suggest that in articulatingthisvisionaryrevision
of the "common" English sentence,Woolf was workingin a mode of
female linguisticfantasythat has been increasinglyimportantsince
the turn of the century.
Before we consider such female fantasiesin detail, however, we

should observe that they are part of a larger historicaldialectic, a
battle of the sexes for linguisticprimacy.There is, after all, a long
masculinisttraditionthatidentifiesfemale anatomywitha degrading
linguisticdestiny.But once the middle-classwoman began to write,
male defenses against female speech became particularlyvirulent.
Among modernists,William Faulkner makes explicitthe implicitas-
sumptionbehind attackson woman's garrulousnessfromSpenser to
Swiftto Dickens when one of his fictionalsurrogates,celebratingthe
feminineideal as "a virginwith no legs to leave me, no arms to hold
me, no head to talk to me," defines woman genericallyas "merely
[an] articulatedgenital organ."30Whether,likeJoyce'sfluidlyfluent
Anna Livia Plurabelle, woman ceaselesslyburbles and babbles on her
wayto her "cold mad fearyfather,"or whether,like his fluentlyfluid
MollyBloom, she dribblesand drivelsas she dreams of malejinglings,
her artlessjingles are secondary and asyntactic.Despite the valori-
zation of Joyce by feministslike Cixous, it seems that his heroine's
scatteredlogos is a scatologos,for it is at bottoma Swiftianlanguage
thatissues fromthe many obscene mouthsof the femalebody. When
she speaks as Molly in Joyce'spassages, she passes blood and water;

when Joyce implores her to write,as he does Nora in 1909, she is

begged to express a calligraphyof shit.31Furthermore,when like
Joyce's Gertie she attemptsto etherealize herself,the author wants
his readers to realize thatshe can onlyascend to sentimentality.Thus
while Gertie's female bloomers titillateBloom as Nora's did Joyce,
her girls'school language simultaneouslyrevoltsand titillatesher cre-
ator, who gets to transcribenot only her voice but the vices of what
Hawthorne called "the damned mob of scribblingwomen" who pro-
duced her prototypein bestsellerslike The Lamplighter.32
Significantly,the contrastbetween Molly-Nora'smellowysmellowy
crapping and the commercialcrap of Gertie's genteel Victoriandic-
tion symbolizesa larger historicalphenomenon-namely, the reac-
tion-formation of intensified misogyny with which male writers
greeted the entranceof women intothe literarymarketplace.Perhaps
Georges de Feure's 1895 oil painting,The VoiceofEvil, most usefully
condenses fin de sieclemale fantasiesabout women's newlyachieved
linguisticpower into a single narrativetableau (fig. 1).33Produced by
a leading designer of "L'ArtNouveau," The VoiceofEvil seems at first
to be littlemore than a misogynisticpiece of exotic eroticathatmight
not be out of place in the later chapters of The RomanticAgony.Pale
and Byronic,a woman sits facing a blank sheet of paper and a quill
pen. She seems to have discarded her jewels (or is she about to put
them on?), and a tall, hermaphroditic-looking fleurdu mal rises sur-
realisticallyto one side of her, framingher and (in itsemblematizing
of forbidden desire) framing her up. In the background toward
which her dreaming gaze is turned, a dark-skinned, red-haired,
horned woman makes love to a pale women who seems certainlyto
figure this dreaming foreground woman. And both the woman in
the fantasyand the woman in the no less fantasticrealityare at-
tending, it appears, to "the voice of evil," a titlethat expresses the
male artist'sanxiety about the voice of woman's linguisticdesire as
well as about the speech of her alien and autonomous sexual desire.
De Feure, for instance,fears that,as the horned muse-womanin the
dream whispers and touches her troubled rapt desirous friend,the
musing woman in the foregroundmay sweep away the mind-forged
manacles of her rings and bracelets and begin to writeher woman's
words. Possessed by passion, she will usurp and possess language,
both the voice of evil and the pen of power. Clearly,when she writes,
her language will be other.Autonomous and opaque, it will be the
speech of evil. So Georges de Feure has elegantlyindicted and sen-
tenced her before she can indite the sentence of her own freedom.
Like Basil Ransom in James's The Bostonians,a number of male
modernistsreact against the similarvoices of evil theyassociate with

Fig. 1. Georges de Feure. The Voice of Evil. 1895. Courtesy of Collection Robert
Walker, Paris (Photograph: Cooper Bridgeman Library).
a contaminatingfeminizationof culture,fortheyfearthat"the whole

generation is womanized; the masculine tone is passing out of the
world; it's a feminine, a nervous, hysterical,chattering, canting
age."34Such an entrance of hysteriainto historyis even more vividly
dramatized by the young T. S. Eliot, James's Bostonian successor.
The speaker of the prose poem "Hysteria,"for instance,staringinto

the deep throatof a laughing woman, surelysuffersfroma hysteria

he has caught from her, a hysteriaabout her hyster, her womb and
its mysterious"hystery."Contaminated by the female, he has been
feminizedand paralyzed in just the way Eliot's indecisivepersona is
in the poem called "PrufrockAmong the Women," a draft of the
"Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"in which this balding modern
Hamlet wanders woefullythroughwhat is clearlya red-lightdistrict,
a sleazy cityof women thatparallels the equally sinistercityof women
fromwhichJames's Ransom rescues his Verena in The Bostoniansas
well as the lesbian countryof women impliedbyde Feure's painting.35
"Blood,mucus,discharge, purulentoffensive discharge":withthislitany
of words, underlined on a page torn fromTheMidwives'Gazette,Eliot
responded to Conrad Aiken's praise of an earlyvolume of his poems,
as if to suggestthatthe lettersof literarymen had been permanently
polluted by the effusionsof the hyster.36 It is no wonder, then, that
the wastingsof The WasteLand are epitomizedbythe hystericalspeech
of women who can "connect nothingwithnothing."From the quer-
ulous questions of the neurastheniclady in "A Game of Chess," to
the abortion-hauntedmonologue of toothlessLil's faithlessfriend,to
the fragmentarycomplaintsof the ruined Thames daughtersin "The
Fire Sermon," the "Shakespeherian Rag" intoned by Mrs. Porterand
her daughter, and the evil "whisper-music"that the vampirewoman
fiddles on the stringsof her hair in "What the Thunder Said," the
language of these women embodies "the horror,the horror"thatthe
poet spells froman impotentsibyl'sleaves and leavings.Indeed, amid
the wasted No Man's Land of "a feminine,a nervous,hysterical,chat-
tering,canting age," the only good woman is a silent woman-the
hyacinthgirl whose mute armful of flowersinspiresthe speaker to
"look into the heart of light,the silence." For whetherhe celebrates
female silence or castigates female cacophony, Eliot transcribesfe-
male language in order to transcend it, thusjustifyingJoyce'sclaim
that The WasteLand "ended the idea of poetryfor ladies."37
Even, moreover,when women artistsare less obviouslysinisterthan
Eliot's female speakers, modernistmales seem to blame them for the
destructionof (male) culture and defensivelytry to destroy them
along with their (female) culture. Ernest Hemingway,for instance,
vilifiesthe voracious mouths and wombs of would-be literaryladies
in a sardonic poem called "The Lady Poets With Foot Notes":38
One ladypoetwas a nymphomaniac and wroteforVanityFair.1

One ladypoet'shusbandwas killedin thewar.2
One ladypoetwantedherlover,butwas afraidof havinga baby.
Whenshe finallygotmarried,she foundshe couldn'thavea baby.3

One ladypoet sleptwithBill Reedygotfatterand fatterand made

halfa milliondollarswriting
bumplays.4
One ladypoet neverhad enoughto eat.5
One ladypoetwas big and fatand no fool.6
a novel about the feelingsthatfuel such

Similarly,in Miss Lonelyhearts,
satire,Nathanael West helps his newspaper reportersrevenge them-
selves against their own nihilismby lettingthem savor storiesabout
lady writerswith three names: "Mary Roberts Wilcox, Ella Wheeler
Catheter"-"what they all needed was a good rape"-and records
theirspecial pleasure in the beating of a "hard-boiled"woman writer
in a bar frequented by mugs: "They got her into the back room to
teach her a new word and put the boots to her. They didn't let her
out for three days. On the last day theysold ticketsto niggers."39
It is againstsuch fantasiesas those of West'sreporters,Hemingway,

and Eliot that the "new words" of women's linguisticfictionshad to
contend, in a dialectic of the sexes that centered on the crucial issue
of woman's command of language as against language's command of
woman, a dialecticthat now directsour attentionto women's historic
effortsto come to terms with the urgent need for female literary
authoritythroughfantasiesabout the possession of a mothertongue.
As is so often the case, EmilyDickinson is the foremotherwho artic-
ulates a fantasyabout female linguisticpower thatempowersnot only
her verse but-magically-the voices of both her precursorsand her
successors. In the poem about Elizabeth Barrett Browning that be-
gins, "I thinkI was enchanted / When firsta sombre Girl- / I read
thatForeign Lady," Dickinson responds to Romney'scharge in Aurora
Leigh that his cousin Aurora's poetry is merely "witchcraft."40 Per-
a
forming proto-Derridean renversement, this American artistsubver-
sivelycelebrates the "Divine Insanity" produced by Barrett Brown-
ing's "tomes of solid Witchcraft."In particular,she valorizes such
madness as the source of magical incantationsby which"thatForeign
Lady" the woman poet transformseven the most ordinaryobjects,
metamorphosingbees to butterfliesand quotidian nature into "Ti-
tanic Opera" (no. 593).
For Dickinson, moreover, such "Witchcrafthas not a Pedigree /
'Tis earlyas our Breath" (no. 1708), the breathof a new lifeof female
speech that she associates with the life breathed into her by Barrett
Browning's enchanting chants. At the same time, significantly, she
shows that,even withoutthe authorityof a recorded pedigree, such
witchcraftestablishes a secret ancestryoutside the lines of any ge-
nealogical tree in "known" history,so thatit servesas an empowering

linguistic/literarymodel throughwhich the woman poet can express

a sense of the primacyof her own words and theircommonalitywith
the words of otherwomen writers.Thus even whileshe concedes that
"witchcraft was hung, in History,"Dickinson not onlyemphasizes the
historicalsacrificeof the female associated with (illegitimate)speech
and (illicit)sexuality,she also neatly turns the screw by identifying
herselfwith(an implicitlyalternative)historyas she predictsthe con-
tinuing triumphsof this underground poetic communitydedicated
to "conversionsof the Mind."
That women like Dickinson should feel the need foran alternative
speech is not of course surprisingin lightof the differenteducational
opportunitiesaccorded the two sexes until the late nineteenthcen-
tury. Specifically,such literary"daughters of educated men" knew
thatthe education in the classicswhichtheirbrothersreceived-that
is, education in Latin and Greek-functioned, in the wayWalterOng
has shown, as a crucial step in gender demarcation.41Justas impor-
tantly,as Ong also notes, in boys' schools such a classical education
instilledmasculinistvalues througha rhetoricaltrainingin "agonistic"
oral competition,which represented a pubertyrite that furtherde-
veloped male identity.These men and boys, in other words, had
access to a privilegedpriestlylanguage, whatOng would call a patrius
sermo,whichwomen could onlycounter withthe vocabularyof witch-
craft,the male Mass masked as a female Black Mass. Thus like Vir-
ginia Woolf, who fantasized in moments of madness that the birds
were speaking Greek to her, women writersfrom Fanny Burney to
ChristinaStead have long been obsessed withthe exclusivenessof a
(masculinist)linguisticcode they both refuse to speak and seek to
crack.42In one way or another, too, many adopt strategiescompa-
rable to the one invented by Louie Pollit, the heroine of Christina
Stead's Kunstlerroman, The Man Who Loved Children,who creates a
witchlikeprivatelanguage thatsounds suspiciouslylikea parodic mix-
ture of Latin and Greek. TRAGOS: HERPES ROM. JOST 1, which
means TRAGEDY: THE SNAKEMAN. ACT 1, is the play she pro-
duces in it, and when her fatherreacts in annoyance at his depen-
dence on her translations-"Why couldn't it be in English?"-she en-
lightens him: "Did Euripides write in English?" Even as she ambi-
tiously models herself on a classical playwright,however, she also
believes that a "secret language" allows her "to write what she
[wishes], she [can] invent an extensive language to express every
shade of her ideas."43 In other words, like Dickinson, she believes
that she can find illegitimatewords in which to inscribethe history
of her own consciousness.
While women like Dickinsonand Stead's Louie Pollitproduce terms

they associate with female sorcery,their female cohorts from Edith

Wharton to Willa Gather develop the female dream of linguistic
witchcraftinto other visionsof female verbal power. In a shortstory
called "Xingu," for instance,Wharton hintsat the existenceof a lan-
guage with Amazonian connections and Eleusinian connotations.44
Renee Vivien, writing in the same period, learns Greek to read
Sappho in the original, translatesSappho's lyricsinto French, and
writesher own "sapphistries,"poems about her love of women,which
she composed and published in a French as foreign to her native
English as her homosexuality was to the hegemonic heterosexual
idiom.45 Distancing herself chronologicallyrather than geographi-
cally fromthe sentencesof patriarchy,Djuna Barnes composes in an
English that predates the emergence of women writers,as if to re-
claim lost dictionsfor her sex in workslike Ryder,Nightwood, and The
In
Antiphon. addition, as if teasing out the intertextual
significanceof
The Voice of Evil and The Bostonians,she symbolizes her desire to
speak in tongues throughexplorativefantasiesof the eroticismof the
tongue.46
But perhaps most famously,Gertrude Stein remakes English itself
intoa foreignlanguage when she seems to speak in tongues,testifying
to the authorityof her own experience. For as most of her bemused
readers realize, many of Stein's books are fantasticexperimentsin
alternativetongues: in her TenderButtons,for instance,she provides
a new lexicon of old words; in ThreeLives,she experimentswiththe
continuous present; in The Making of Americans,she exchanges the
sentence for the paragraph as the unit of meaning. Throughout her
canon, clearly,she is attemptingto follow her own advice to "only,
only excreate, only excreate a no since" in order to excrete a "non-
sense" language which would attack the causality of "since" at the
same time that it would X out those male definitionsof female "ex-
crescence" which led to Joyce's demand for a female expression of
pure excrement.47 Furthermore, writing in France, happily sur-
rounded by "people who know no english,"48she dramatizesher own
(sexual) differencein poems like "LiftingBelly," "As a Wife Has a
Cow," and "Pink Melon Joy,"where she creates an elaborate private
code to describe the delights of an erotic linguisticsthat translates
sacred cows into sexual "cows." Not surprisingly,then,even William
Carlos Williams,who met her in Paris withsome suspicion,observed
that she had disentangled words from the weight of history,from
"the burden science, philosophy, and every higgledy-piggledyfig-
ment of law and order have been laying upon them in the past."49
By undertaking such a task, moreover, she, like Emily Dickinson,
recovered the numinous names of an alternativehistory,for in plays

like Four Saintsin ThreeActsand TheMotherofUs All, she endows the

voices of such heroines as Saint Theresa and Susan B. Anthonywith
fantasticexuberance.
A few decades later,in a verydifferentmode but withwhat seems
to have been the same purpose, Zora Neale Hurston createsa female
protagonistnicknamed "Alphabet," who recoversthe black magic of
whatshe calls "de maiden language" over and over again, whileElinor
Wylie proclaims that she was nurtured"in the immaculatebosom of
the mother tongue."50But perhaps most strikingly,H.D. develops
Dickinson's idea of witchcraftinto an "echoing spell" of what Robert
Duncan has called her "motheringlanguage."51In particular,at the
center of her book-lengthmeditativepoem Trilogy, she reconstitutes
a new language througha magical,alchemical process. By recovering
the "candle and scriptand bell" that"the new churchspat upon," she
translatesa word like "venereous" into "venerate" to resanctifythe
lost goddess Venus. Seasoning holy words fora liturgythathas gone
misnamedor unnamed (she translatesthe Hebrew word marah,bitter,
into "Mother,"forexample), she whips up a batchof medicinalherbs
fromthe poison she has etymologicallyuprooted. For H.D., a word
is a jewel in ajar, incense in a bowl, a pearl in a shell,a sortof mystic
egg that can "hatch" multiple meanings. Therefore, she is multiply,
almost endlessly inspired in Tributeto Freud by pictographicwriting
on a wall, and thereforeshe punninglyreviseswords to turn"ruins,"
say,into"runes." Indeed, all words,as she meditateson them,become
palimpsests: in their palpable ambiguity,her hermeticredefinitions
convert"translation"into "transubstantiation," "fever"into"fervour,"
"savor" into "saviour," and "haven" into a "heaven" of her own
devising.52
Similarechoes and ambiguitieshaunt VirginiaWoolfherself,a nov-
elist who, even while she cried out for a new "woman's sentence,"
continually interpolated female linguistic fantasies into her revi-
sionary narratives of women's histories. From The VoyageOut, in
which Rachel Vinrace hears her lover reading the words of Comus
and thinksthat "they sounded strange; theymeant differentthings
from what they usually meant,"53to Mrs. Dalloway,in which a sky-
writingairplane produces an ambiguous trailof smoke whichmight
mean "Glaxo," "Kreemo," "toffee"or "K E Y," to BetweentheActs,in
which the mysterious Miss La Trobe imagines "words without
meaning" risingfrommud-"wonderful words"-Woolf's heroines,
and sometimeseven her heroes, experience themselvesas alienated
fromthe "ordinary"sense of language.54At the same time,however,
Woolf offersher heroines, and a few heroes, the amazing grace of
fantasticnew languages. In Nightand Day, for instance, Katharine

Hilbery articulatesher feelings through enigmatic visions of "alge-

braic symbols."55Similarly,in Mrs. Dalloway the shell-shockedSep-
timusexpresses his strongemotions in pictographic"writings,"while
an ancient woman "opposite Regents Park Tube Station" sings a fa-
mously enigmatic song that goes "ee um fah um so / foo swee too
eem oo."56 Again, in Orlando Woolf's androgynous hero/heroine
wires her husband a comicallyencoded commenton the meaning of
literaryachievement: "'Rattigan Glumphoboo,' which summed it up
precisely,"while in The Years the two "children of the caretaker"-
descendants of the Tube Station crone-provide a fittingclimax to
the Pargiters' familyreunion with a shrill dittythat begins: "Etho
passo tanno hai, / Fai donk to tu do, / Mai to, kai to, lai to see /Toh
dom to tuh do-."57
Finally,throughouther oeuvreWoolf emphasizes the factthatboth
the alienation fromlanguage her books describe and the revisionof
lexicographyher books detail are functionsof the dispossession of
women, as well as of women's natural resources in the face of this
dispossession,and she does this by presentinga dramaticsuccession
of female figureswhose ancient voices seem to endure froma time
before the neat categories of culture restrainedfemale energy.The
most notable of these figuresis, of course, the Tube Stationcrone in
Mrs. Dalloway.But clearlythe ancestorof thiswoman is the "old blind
woman" who, in Jacob'sRoom,sits long past sunset "singingout loud
... from the depths of her gay wild heart."58And her descendants
appear in To theLighthouseas the force that lurches through Mrs.
McNab's groaning and Mrs. Bast's creaking as theystaythe corrup-
tion at work on the Ramsays' onetime summer house. Speaking of a
primal regeneration,these ancient voices also resemblethe source of
voice that empowers female singersin some of Willa Cather's stories
and novels. Thea Kronborg in The Song oftheLark,forinstance,finds
her true soprano technique by visitinga "cleftin the world" called
PantherCanyon, where the relicsof an archaic civilizationstillremain
intact.59
But to the fatherlypriestswhojourney throughCather's late Death
ComesfortheArchbishop, the earthyorificethat sanctifiesThea's art is
franklyterrifying. The Bishop, forinstance,who findshimselftaking
refuge from a snowstorm inside "two rounded ledges ... with a
mouthlikeopening between,"is revoltednot only by a "fetidodour"
but also by "a hole" between two "stone lips" inside the cave, through
whichhe hears "an extraordinaryvibration."60 To thisEuropean man
of God, the speech of what was once an Indian oracle conveys no
more than the horror of its own enigmaticexistence. How, Cather
seems to ask, can a "civilized"adult male come to termswiththe terms

Wallace Stevens once called "words of the fragrantportals ... /And

of ourselves and of our origins"?61Her implicitquestion remindsus
once again of the male modernistanxietyabout femaleBabel to which
so many of the women of letters we've discussed here were re-
sponding through their constructionof fantasylanguages. Perhaps
more importantly,however,her awareness of the Bishop's dilemma
as he listensto the speech of (Mother) earthalso remindsus thatmale
artists have long contended with their own linguistic anxieties
through the inventionof fantasylanguages not just for women but
for themselves-languages, thatis, whichdid not primarilydiminish
femalenessbut principallyaggrandized maleness.
Of course, the historicalrange of male linguisticfantasiessuggests

that not all such variations on the theme of language functionto
confirm (masculinist) sexual self-definitions.However, as Walter
Ong's recentaccount of the relationshipbetweenthecommonmaterna
lingua (or mother tongue) and the "civilized"patriussermo(or father
speech) implies,European male writershave, since the High Middle
Ages, been deeply involved in a struggleinto the vernacular which
has continuallyforced them to usurp and transformthe daily speech
of women and children so as to make it into a suitable instrument
for (cultivated) male art. "Our firsttongue," writesOng, "is called
our 'mothertongue' in Englishand in manyotherlanguages,"adding
thatthe only"fatherspeech" is a language such as, forexample, Latin
or Greek, "inheritedas land is, an external possession [which]refers
to a [legalistic]line of conveyance,not to personal origins."62(By such
a distinction,we should note, we take him to mean that the mother
tongue, far frombeing a unique women's language, is whatwe would
ordinarilymean by the phrase "ordinarylanguage.") Certainlywhen,
meditatingon reading and writingin Walden,Henry David Thoreau
contrasted the "brutish... mother tongue" with the "reserved and
select" expression of the "fathertongue," he implied thatthe spoken
vernacular is as far below the writtenclassics as dialect is below di-
alectic or as the literateis below the literary.63If men were anxious
about the vernacular that their mothers,wives, and daughters also
fluentlyspoke, however,it becomes necessaryto speculate thatsince
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries male writers may have
thoughtlinguisticculture to be holding linguisticanarchyat bay be-
cause theyhave had to translatethe "high themes"of the classicsinto
what theyfear is a low language whose veryaccessibilitymightseem
to vulgarize theirnoble subjects.
Still,although male intellectuals,fromDante and Chaucer on, com-
posed their verses in a vernacular theydefined as "maternal,"their

possession of the "classics" diminished anxiety. Virgil was Dante's

guide. Chaucer (as Pound approvinglyobserves) "was more compen-
dious than Dante" because he "wrote while England was stilla part
of Europe," and thus his language was still,if only metaphorically,a
branch of a larger "fatherspeech" whichconstitutedthe (father)state
rather than the (mother) nation. In fact, Pound goes on to say,
Chaucer is "Le GrandTranslateur"-thatis, he is the man who brings
over thepatriussermoof the Latin Middle Ages into the maternalingua
of the vernacular Renaissance: "He had found a new language, he
had it largelyto himself,withthe grand opportunity.Nothing spoiled,
nothing worn out."64 Similarly,says Pound, Milton, "chock a block
withLatin," bringsover thatpatriussermointo English.That one turns
to Pound's commentarieson these major male translateurs of classical
culture into the vulgar vernacular, however, suggests the historical
intensityof the linguisticissue that has haunted male writerssince
the nineteenthcentury,elicitinglinguisticfantasiesat least as forceful
as those that many French feministsattributeuniquely to women.
For, as Walter Ong has also noted, the teachingof Latin and Greek
as part of the standard curriculumthatfunctionedas a male initiation
ritual had begun to die out by the end of the nineteenthcentury
because, he speculates, of the entrance of women into higher edu-
cation.65In addition, as Harold Bloom has argued, nineteenth-cen-
turymen of lettersincreasinglyexperienced themselvesas belated in
relation to their great male precursors-and, we would add, threat-
ened by their great female precursorsand contemporaries.66
It is with special passion, therefore,that male writersfrom Ten-
nyson to Joyce to Derrida and Hartman speculate on the linguistic
possibilitiesavailable to them.To a man, theyseem to feel themselves
to be in the unenviable position of Tennyson's Merlin,who explains
to Vivien in Book VI of The IdyllsoftheKing thathis magical powers
derive froman ancient volume whose "everysquare of text [has] an
awful charm," but then goes on to confess the secondary, belated
characterof his relationshipto this paradigmaticbook of patriarchal
authority.It is, he notes,
Writin a languagethathas longgoneby....
And everymarginscribbled, crost,and crammed
Withcomment, densestcondensation,hard....
And nonecan read thetext,notevenI,
And none can read thecommentbutmyself,
And in thecommentdid I findthecharm.67
Tennyson's message is clear: even if he no longer knows the "lan-

guage that has long gone by," the (male) magician must at all costs

retain the charm that resides in the comment on the sacred text of
power. Thus the transformationof the maternalingua into a new
patriussermo-that is, the occultingof common language, the trans-
formationof the comment into the charm-seems to offera defini-
tive cure of the male linguisticwound.
Such a transformationis most notablyaccomplished in a number
of differentways by even avant-garde fantasistsof language, men
who repossess the ancient strengthof the patriussermothrough the
creation of a literatureof "comment,densest condensation, hard."
The signatoriesof Eugene Jolas's "Manifesto:The Revolutionof the
Word," for instance, rebel against "the spectacle of [literature]still
under the hegemonyof the banal word" withthe assertionthat"the
literarycreator has the right to disintegratethe primal matter of
words imposed on him.... He has the rightto use words of his own
fashioning."68In just about everycase, therefore,these linguisticrev-
olutionariesbecame latter-dayMerlinsseeking,through"densestcon-
densation,"to (re)gain the masterylostwhen male artistswere forced
by historyto operate withinthe degrading confinesof the vernacular
mothertongue. But of course, if we have space to consider only one
example, the twentiethcentury'sgreatestmaster of linguistictrans-
formation-the man who definitivelyconverted the comment into
the charm-was James Joyce,whose "densest condensation, hard,"
withits proliferationof puns and parodies, transformswhat Helene
Cixous calls "the old single-groovedmothertongue"69into what we
are calling a patriussermoonly comprehensible by those who, like
Merlin and likeJoycehimself,can translatewhathas been "scribbled,
crost,and cramm'd"on the marginsof literatureintoa spell of power.
Finnegans Wake, after all, condensed numerous Indo-European
tongues into a neologistic language whose Viconian loops form a
perfectMobius stripof what we mightcall patrilinguistic history,but
even beforeJoyce imagined thatextravagantfeat,Ulyssesperformed
a similartask,transforminga commenton Homer's epic intoa charm
that inaugurated a new patrilinguisticepoch.
It would be impossible here to review all the strategiesby which
Joyceperformedthis feat of legerdemain. Perhaps for our purposes
the most strikingexamples of his linguisticprestidigitationare the
dazzling parodies of English style,from Anglo-Saxon alliterationto
American slang, that he incorporatesinto the scene at the Lying-In
Hospital and the dizzying puns he increasinglyinventsthroughout
his oeuvre.The so-called "Oxen of the Sun" chapter,afterall, records
the conception,incubation,and birth-"Hoopsa Boyaboy Hoopsa"-
of a magical-soundingboy througha seriesof stylisticmetamorphoses
which seem to prove that (male) linguistic ontogeny recapitulates

(male) linguisticphylogeny.The borning "Boyaboy" is his language,

a patriarchalword made flesh in the extended patriussermoof his-
tory,and though he is undoubtedlytornout of the prostratematerna
lingua represented by silent Mrs. Purefoy,he is triumphantlyflung,
in a Carlylean birthpassage, into "God's air, the Allfather'sair."70
If the "Oxen of the Sun" presentsus witha wrestingof patriarchal
power from the mother tongue, moreover, Joyce's constantlyex-
panding puns offermore instancesof the waysin whichmale writers
can transformthe maternalingua into a patriussermo.For, containing
the powerfulcharm of etymologicalcommentarywithinthemselves,
such multipleusages suggest notjust a linguisticpleasure disrupting
the decorum of the text, but also a linguisticpower fortifying the
writer'ssentences with "densest condensation, hard." Provisionally,
tentatively, we would suggest that a similarmaneuver may be at the
heart of what GeoffreyHartman calls Derridadaism. Certainly,even
while Hartman speculates that,for instance,Glas may be "a fashion-
able meditationin the graveyardof Westernculture,"he admitsthat
though "it may seem ingenious to characterizeDerrida as a conser-
vativethinker,"it is neverthelessthe case that in Glas's radical weave
of radically unravelled significations"the 'Monuments of unageingin-
tellect'are notpulleddown.... the deconstructiveactivitybecomes part
of their structure."71Exactly so, and exactly as in Ulyssesor in the
Wake.Mourning and wakinga lostpatriussermo,male modernistsand
postmodernists transform the maternal vernacular into a new
morningof patriarchyin which theycan wake the old powers of the
"Allfather's"Word. The motto"Hoopsa Boyaboy Hoopsa" is thus the
(necessary) charm they consistentlyfind in the commentary they
ceaselesslystudy.
It hardlyseems necessaryto ask, therefore,what distinguishesthe

male linguisticfantasieswe have reviewedhere fromthe female fan-
tasies we discussed earlier. By now it should be clear that women's
imaginarylanguages arise out of a desire for linguisticprimacyand
are often founded on a celebration of the primacyof the mother
tongue. For men, however, the case is different."Sexism in lan-
guage," as ChristianeOlivier has pointed out, "[may be] the resultof
man's fear of using the same words as women, his fear of finding
himselfin the same place as the mother."72Thus most male writers
are eitherreactingagainst or appropriatingthe verbal fertilityof the
mother,and they are doing so preciselybecause, as Ong observes,
"thereare no fathertongues-a truththatcalls fordeeper reflection
than it commonlycommands."73Clearly,it is this"deeper reflection"
that is reflected in the incongruentlinguisticfantasiesof male and

femalewriters.For whethertheyare misogynistic deridingsof female

babble or self-valorizingdemands for "the Allfather'sair," male vin-
dicationsof the Name of the Father seem ultimatelyto be vilifications
of the gnosis of the Mother.
Perhaps, too, we see the culminationof this traditionof male dis-
creditingof female originatingin the extraordinaryswerveJacques
Lacan has to performas part of his attemptto make the momentof
the child's accession to language coincide with the moment of the
Oedipus complex, so thatwomen can be defined "as excluded by the
nature of things which is the nature of words." For as both Anika
Lemaire and C. Stein observe,"At the timeof [the Oedipus] complex
... linguisticcommunicationhas already been established,and logi-
cally, therefore,the complex itselfcannot bring about the primal
repressionwhich establisheslanguage."74It is possible,then,thatthe
Oedipal moment functionsas a repetitiverevisionof an earlier mo-
ment,and thatthe power of the father,while obviouslyrepresenting
the law of patriarchy,need not be inextricablybound to the power
of language. Indeed, the fact that the fatheris a supreme fictionin
this now widely disseminated French Freudian theorypoints, para-
doxicallyenough, to the primordialsupremacyof the mother,forif,
as language acquisition researchershave demonstrated,and as most
mothersknow, it is in most cultures the motherwho feeds the child
words even as she furnishesher or him with food, then, as Freud
himself observed, the birth into language delivers the child from
helplessness at the goings and the comings, the "oo" and the "ah,"
the "Fort" and the "Da," of the mother.75
In that case, if the primarymomentof symbolizationoccurs when
the child identifiesdifferencewithdistance fromthe mother,it is not
only the presence of the mother'swords thatteaches the child words,
but also the absence of the mother'sflesh that requires the child to
acquire words. As for the supposedly mediatingand essential term
of the father-the "Nomdu Pere"-we are suggestingthatwhatmakes
this name secondary is preciselythe fact that it symbolizesno more
than the autonomyof the mother-the "Aplombdu Mere." Moreover,
if,as Levi-Straussconcedes, a woman is not "just a sign" but "a gen-
erator of signs,"then it is the example of her self-possessedlinguistic
generationsthat impressesthe child withthe possibilitythat,because
mom is not mum, one mightbridge the grievous gulf of absence by
expressing desire in language and reconstitutinga lost presence
throughsymbolization.
Is it possible, then, that the idea that language is in its essence or
nature patriarchal is a reaction-formationagainst the linguistic(as
well as the biological) primacyof the mother?As long ago as 1954,

after all, Bruno Bettelheimobserved in Symbolic Woundsthat "penis

in
envy girls and castration in
anxiety boys have been overempha-
sized, and a possibly much deeper psychologicallayer in boys has
been relatively neglected.... a complex of desires and emotions
which ... might be called 'vagina envy' [but which includes] ... in
addition, envy of and fascinationwith female breasts and lactation,
withpregnancyand childbearing."76Ten years earlier,too, Gregory
Zilboorg had begun to call for furtherstudies of "the fundamental
envy with which man treatswoman."77Suppose we followout such
insightsby speculating that the biblical storyof creation,withits lin-
guisticallypowerfulAdam and its anxious, tongue-tiedEve, is just a
male fantasydevised to soothe men's feelingsof secondariness,sexual
dread, womb and breast envy. Suppose that instead of postulatinga
necessary linguisticconnection between a lass and a lack we follow
out Susan Lurie's speculation that "the sight of woman as castrated
is [a] mature male wish-fulfillment fantasy,designed to counter the
real terrorthe sightof woman inspires: thatsheis notcastrated despite
the fact that she has 'no penis,' and does inspire male fear for his
castration."In thatcase, as Lurie observes,"Psychoanalyticdiscourse
participatesin a broad cultural project ... of constructingwoman
as castrated preciselybecause the sight of her does not signifyher
castration."78
In The GreatMother,a useful text that has lately been too often
ignored in favor of more fatherlyworksby Freud and Lacan, Erich
Neumann points out that "the positive femininityof the womb ap-
pears as a mouth . . . and on the basis of thispositivesymbolicequa-
tion the mouth, as 'upper womb,' is the birthplaceof the breath and
the word, the Logos."79 But the very fact that one can metaphorize
the mouth as a womb, the Word as the child of femalepower,implies
thatwomen need not experience any ontologicalalienation fromthe
idea of language as we know it. If the female does have a crucial
linguisticrole, moreover,isn'tit also possible thatthe primordialself/
othercouple fromwhom we learn the couplings,doublings,splittings
of "hierarchy"is the couple called "mother/child" ratherthan the one
called "man/woman"?If this is so, isn't it also possible that verbal
significationarises not froma confrontationwiththe law of the father
but froma consciousness of the lure and the lore of the mother?In
other words, since boy and girl babies have the same relationshipto
the mother (as opposed to their relationshipto the father),it may
not be necessaryto postulate (as Julia Kristevadoes) that sexual dif-
ferenceissues in different(male/female)relationshipsto the symbolic
contract.Indeed, it may be importantto see that,since the symbolic
contract is "signed" before the social contractwhich in patriarchal

culture constructsgender difference,these two contractsare notably

differenttreatieswith the world. The veryfact that throughoutthis
paper we have had to maneuver between theoryand history,to con-
template the timeless questions of psychoanalysis while also con-
frontingthe time-boundconstructionsof literaryhistory,would seem
to reinforcethis point, namely,the discontinuitybetween what has to
be (thatis, what is psychicallyessential)and whathas been(thatis, what
is culturallydetermined). For if any of our speculations have any
validity,we must also ask whether the whole structureof "hierar-
chized" oppositions that some of us have thoughtessentiallypatriar-
chal has been historicallyerected as a massive defense against the
deep throat of the mother and the astonishing autonomy of that
mother tongue which is common to both genders.
In "Thoughts on Writing," the American feministpoet Susan
Griffinexpresses the exhilarationthat such an intimationof female
linguisticpower has already begun to fosterin some women writers:
"And now the words 'mother tongue,' language, widen out to me as
I see that our relationshipto the one who has given us birth,and to
thatuniversewhichengendered our being, mightbe the same as our
relationship to language; we must trust words and the coming of
words."80 A century ago, moreover, Dickinson affirmedthe same
intuitionof the mother tongue's nurturingprimacy,declaring that
"a word made Flesh" can be "tasted" with"ecstasiesof stealth"when
"the veryfood debated" is matched "to our specificstrength-." For
women writersin general, then, it may be this "consentof language"
(our italics)thatconstitutesa "loved Philology"(no. 1651), a philology
whose implicationseven some male thinkersalready understand.
To carrysuch an empoweringintuitionone step furtherand match
it with Griffin'sinsight: Can it be that feministtheoristsmust look
beyond the traditionalalphabetizingsof history,withits masculinist
syntaxof subordination,to discover and recover the ways in which,
as we have seen here, women have sometimesstealthilyand some-
times ecstaticallyclaimed the alphabet to capitalize (on) their own
initialsand theirown initiatives?Can itbe that,like the contemporary
Spanish writerMaria Teresa Leon, women need only gaze into the
common sustenance of our communal lives-a bowl, say,of alphabet
soup-to create defiant and self-defininglinguisticfantasies?Leon
exuberantlyrecords such a dream: "Lettersthatfloat pursued by the
spoon where theywere going to die. Did theyever compose myname
in the bowl? 'Femme de lettres.'I have never feltmore reverencefor
the state of my uneasiness, for this daily itch withinmy flesh which
writinggives me."81 The male reaction to such a vision may, as we
have seen, be one of intensifiedmisogyny.Yet at the same time,the

very possibilitythat women mightachieve such a vision implies that

the relationship between anatomy and linguistic destiny,between
sexual differenceand the symboliccontract,may promise not just
femalejouissancebut feministpuissance.For at last,in spiteof feminist
doubt and masculinistdread, we can affirmthatwoman has not been
sentenced to transcribemale penmanship; rather,she commands sen-
tences which inscribeher own powerfulcharacter.
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, DAVIS

INDIANA UNIVERSITY
NOTES
1 Julia Kristeva,"Women's Time," Signs,7, No. 1 (Autumn 1981), 21.

2 See, e.g., Jacques Lacan, "The Significationof the Phallus," in Ecrits:A Selection, tr.
Alan Sheridan (New York, 1977), pp. 281-91; also, Jacques Derrida, Spurs:Nietzsche's
Styles,introd. Stephano Agosti,tr. Barbara Harlow (Chicago, 1979), passim.
3 Claude Levi-Strauss,TheElementary StructuresofKinship,tr.James Harle Bell, John
Richard von Sturmer,and Rodney Needham, ed. Rodney Needham, rev. ed. (Boston,
1969), p. 496.
4 Monique Wittig,Les guerrilleres, tr. Donald Le Vay (New York, 1973), p. 112.
5 Elaine Showalter,"FeministCriticismin the Wilderness,"CriticalInquiry,8, No. 2
(Winter 1981), 190. See also Kristeva,p. 21.
6 Mary Jacobus, "The Difference of View," in WomenWritingand WritingAbout
Women,ed. MaryJacobus (London, 1979), p. 12.
7 Showalter,p. 191.
8 Xaviere Gauthier, "Existe-t-ilune 6criturede femme?" [Is there such a thing as
women's writing?],tr. MarilynA. August, in New FrenchFeminisms, ed. Elaine Marks
and Isabelle de Courtivron(Amherst,Mass., 1980), p. 164.
9 Luce Irigaray,"Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un" [This sex whichis not one], tr.Claudia
Reeder, in New FrenchFeminisms, p. 103 (her italics); thisis an excerpt fromIrigaray's
Ce sexequi n'en estpas un (Paris, 1977).
10 Julia Kristeva, from "Oscillation du 'pouvoir' au 'refus'" [Oscillation between
power and denial], tr. Marilyn A. August, in New FrenchFeminisms, p. 166. Also see
Marianne Hirsch, "Mothers and Daughters: A Review Essay,"Signs,7, No. 1 (Autumn
1981), 210.
11 Madelein Gagnon, "Body I," in New FrenchFeminisms, p. 179; Chantal Chawaf,
"LinguisticFlesh," in New FrenchFeminisms, pp. 177-78; and Helene Cixous, "Castra-
tion or Decapitation?" tr. Annette Kuhn, Signs,7, No. 1 (Autumn 1981), 54.
12 Helene Cixous, "Sorties,"tr. Ann Liddle, in New FrenchFeminisms, p. 91.
13 Helene Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa," tr. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen,
in New FrenchFeminisms, p. 255.
14 Editorial Collective of Questions feministes,"Variations on Common Themes," tr.
Yvonne Rochette-Ozzello,in New FrenchFeminisms, p. 221. See also ChristineFaure,
"The Twilight of the Goddesses, or The IntellectualCrisis of French Feminism,"tr.
Lillian S. Robinson, Signs,7, No. 1 (Autumn 1981), 86.
15 GayatriChakravortySpivak, "French Feminismin an InternationalFrame," Yale
FrenchStudies,No. 62 (1981), 169, 172.
16 Gauthier,"Existe-t-ilune ecriturede femme?"pp. 162-63.

17 Sally McConnell-Ginet,"Differenceand Language: A Linguist'sPerspective,"in

TheFutureofDifference, ed. Hester Eisensteinand AliceJardine (Boston, 1980), p. 164.
18 Dale Spender, Man Made Language (London, 1980), p. 161.
19 Cheris Kramarae, "Proprietorsof Language," in Womenand Languagein Literature
and Society,ed. Sally McConnell-Ginet,Ruth Borker, and Nelly Furman (New York,
1980), p. 63.
20 Casey Miller and Kate Swift,Wordsand Women:New Language in New Times(New
York, 1977), pp. 17-35; Mary Ritchie Key, Male/FemaleLanguage (Metuchen, N.J.,
1975), passim; "Introduction,"Language and Sex: Difference and Dominance,ed. Barrie
Thorne and Nancy Henley (Rowley,Mass., 1975).
21 Julia Loesch, "Testeria and Penisolence-A Scourge to Humankind," Aphra,4,
No. 1 (Winter 1972); Jessie Bernard, responding to John Beatty'sassertion in "Sex,
Role, and Sex Role" thatthere is no word for female sexuality,proposes "orgasmicity"
as a female equivalent to "virility."See Jessie Bernard, "Discussion,"in Language,Sex,
and Gender:Does "La Difference" Make a Difference? ed. Judith Orasanu, Mariam K.
Slater, and Leonore Loeb Adler (New York, 1979).
22 Robin Lakoff,Language and Woman'sPlace (New York, 1975).
23 Cheris Kramarae, "Folklinguistics,"Psychology Today,June 1974, pp. 82-85; Wil-
liam M. O'Barr and Bowman K. Atkins, "'Women's Language' or 'Powerless Lan-
guage'?" in Womenand Language in Literature and Society,pp. 93-110.
24 Spender, Man Made Language,p. 91; Pamela Fishman argues thatwomen do the
support work in conversation: "InteractionalShitwork,"Heresies,2 (May 1977), 99-
101; see also Ruth Borker, "Anthropology: Social and Cultural Perspectives,"and
Marjorie Harness Goodwin, "Directive-ResponseSpeech Sequences in Girls'and Boys'
Task Activities,"both in Womenand Language in Literature and Society,pp. 26-44 and
157-73, respectively.
25 Cheris Kramarae summarizes the issue of the devaluation of women's speech in
Womenand Men Speaking(Rowley,Mass., 1981), pp. 95-97.
26 Lakoff,Language and Woman'sPlace, p. 61.
27 Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa," in New FrenchFeminisms, p. 248; Cora Kap-
lan, "Language and Gender," in Papers on Patriarchy (Lewes, Sussex, 1976), p. 36. See
Kramarae's discussion of Kaplan in Womenand Men Speaking,p. 69.
28 Virginia Woolf,A RoomofOne's Own (New York, 1928), p. 68. In "ThinkingBack
Through Our Mothers,"Jane Marcus discusses how and whyWoolf wanted to "untie
the mother tongue" from patriarchy:New FeministEssayson VirginiaWoolf,ed. Jane
Marcus (Lincoln, Neb., 1981), p. 1 and pp. 2-4, 16-19.
29 Woolf,A Roomof One's Own, p. 79.
30 William Faulkner, Mosquitoes(New York, 1927), p. 26. See also the cruciallyim-
portantchapter on the twentiethcenturyin Katharine Rogers's The Troublesome Help-
mate:A HistoryofMisogyny in Literature(Seattle, 1966), pp. 226-64.
31 James Joyce,FinnegansWake (New York, 1939), p. 628; see, for instance,James
Joyce, SelectedLetters,ed. Richard Ellmann (New York, 1975), p. 186, in which the
author-to-beof Ulyssesadmonishes his sweetheartto "writethe dirtywords big and
underline them and kiss them and hold them for a moment to your sweet hot cunt,
darling,and also pull up your dress a momentand hold themin under yourdear little
fartingbum."
32 See James Joyce, Ulysses(New York, 1961), pp. 346-83. Hawthorne'scomments
on Fanny Fern are quoted in Caroline Tucknor, Hawthorneand His Publishers(Boston,
1913), p. 142. As AnthonyBurgess observes, Gertie has read Marie Cummins's sen-
timentalbestsellerTheLamplighter (1854), whose styleis closelyakin to thatof her own
stream of consciousness and whose heroine, significantly, is named Gertie(Joyceprick:
An Introduction to theLanguage ofJamesJoyce[New York, 1973], p. 103).

33 Georges de Feure, The VoiceofEvil, in PatrickBade's FemmeFatale: ImagesofEvil

and FascinatingWomen(New York, 1979), pl. 12, discussion on p. 122.
34 Henry James, The Bostonians,ed. Alfred Habegger (Indianapolis, 1976), p. 318.
35 T. S. Eliot, "Hysteria,"in The CollectedPoemsofT. S. Eliot,1909-1961 (New York,
1970), p. 24; the original draft of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,"entitled
"PrufrockAmong the Women," is held in the Berg Collection of the New York City
Public Library.
36 See Conrad Aiken, Ushant(New York and Boston, 1952), p. 233. See also Ezra
Pound, "Hugh SelwynMauberley"and "Portraitd'une Femme," in SelectedPoems(New
York, 1957), pp. 64 and 16-17, in whichcivilizationis an "old bitchgone in the teeth"
and woman ("your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea") is herselfbotched.
37 See Richard Ellmann,JamesJoyce(New York, 1959), p. 510. For a more extended
discussion of the sexual anxiety implicitin The WasteLand, see Sandra M. Gilbert,
"Costumes of the Mind: Transvestism as Metaphor in Modern Literature,"Critical
Inquiry,7, No. 2 (Winter 1980).
38 Ernest Hemingway,"The Lady Poets With Foot Notes," in 88 Poems,ed. Nicholas
Gerogiannis (New York, 1979), p. 77. (To add real footnotes,we might note that
behind the misogynyof this catalog lurk Edna St. Vincent Millay,Alice Kilmer,Sara
Teasdale, Zoe Atkins,Lola Ridge, and Amy Lowell.) We are indebted to Cara Chell
for bringingthis poem to our attention.
39 Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of theLocust(New York, 1962), pp.
13-14.
40 Emily Dickinson, The CompletePoemsof EmilyDickinson,ed. Thomas H. Johnson
(Boston, 1960), no. 593. Subsequent Johnson numbers are cited in the text.
41 The phrase "daughters of educated men" is continuallyused by Virginia Woolf
in ThreeGuineas (New York, 1938). Walter Ong's Fightingfor Life (Ithaca, 1981) is
crucial for an understandingof masculine competitionand sexual anxietyin general
and fora discussionof the mothertongue (as opposed to thepatriussermo)in particular
(see esp. pp. 36-37). Also importantfor an analysisof the functionof the classics in
male education is Ong's The Presenceof the Word: Some Prolegomena for Culturaland
ReligiousHistory(New Haven, 1967), esp. pp. 249-50.
42 Virginia Woolf, "On Not Knowing Greek," in The CommonReader (New York,
1925), p. 24. See also Sandra M. Gilbertand Susan Gubar, The Madwomanin theAttic
(New Haven, 1979), pp. 133-34, 215, and MaryJacobus,"The Question of Language:
Men of Maxims and The Mill on theFloss," CriticalInquiry,7, No. 2 (Winter 1981),
207-22. Significantly,in The Mill on theFloss (1860; rpt. Boston, 1961), Eliot praises
"the mother tongue of our imagination,the language that is laden withall the subtle
inextricableassociationsthe fleetinghours of our childhood leftbehind them" (p. 38).
43 ChristinaStead, TheMan WhoLovedChildren(1940; rpt. New York, 1966), p. 360.
44 Edith Wharton,"Xingu," in Xingu (New York, 1916).
45 Renee Vivien's volumes include the novel Une Femmem'apparut(1904) and the
verse collection A l'heuredes mainsjointes(1906), which have been reprintedrecently
by The Naiad Press as A WomanAppearedto Me, tr.JeannetteH. Foster (Reno, Nev.,
1976), and At theSweetHour ofHand in Hand, tr. Sandia Belgrade (Reno, Nev., 1979).
See also Susan Gubar, "Sapphistries,"Signs,10, No. 1 (Autumn 1984), 43-62.
46 See Susan Sniader Lanser, "Speaking in Tongues: Ladies Almanackand the Lan-
guage of Celebration," Frontiers,4, No. 3 (Fall 1979), 39-46; also Carolyn Allen,
"'Dressing the Unknowable in the Garments of the Known': The Style of Djuna
Barnes' Nightwood,"in Women'sLanguage and Style,Studiesin Contemporary Language,
No. 1, ed. Douglas Buttierff and Edmund L. Epstein (Akron, Ohio, 1976), pp.
106-18.

47 Gertrude Stein, TenderButtons,in SelectedWritings of GertrudeStein,ed. Carl Van

Vechten (1914; rpt. New York, 1962), p. 496.
48 Stein, The Autobiography ofAliceB. Toklas,in SelectedWritings of Gertrude Stein,p.
66. See Catharine Stimpson, "The Mind, the Body, and Gertrude Stein," CriticalIn-
quiry,3, No. 3 (Spring 1977), 491-96, and Elizabeth Fifer,"Is Flesh Advisable? The
InteriorTheater of Gertrude Stein," Signs,4, No. 3 (Spring 1979), 472-83.
49 William Carlos Williams,"The Work of Gertrude Stein," in SelectedEssaysof Wil-
liam Carlos Williams(New York, 1954), p. 116.
50 Zora Neale Hurston'sJanie is nicknamed "Alphabet" in TheirEyesWereWatching
God (1937; rpt. Urbana, Ill., 1979), p. 21; Elinor Wylie,"Dedication,"in CollectedPoems
(New York, 1932), pp. 109-10.
51 Robert Duncan, "The H.D. Book, Part Two: Nightsand Days, Chapter 9," Chicago
Review,30, No. 3 (Winter 1979), 88.
52 H.D. describes her vision of "the writingon the wall" in Tributeto Freud (1945-
46; rpt. New York, 1974), pp. 44-56; her alchemical redefinitionof words appears in
Tributeto theAngels,the middle book of Trilogy(1944; rpt. New York, 1973), pp. 63,
71, and 75; revisionaryspellings also appear in H.D.'s Hermetic Definition(New York,
1972), pp. 12, 14, and 36. See also Susan Gubar, "The Echoing Spell of H.D.'s Trilogy,"
in Shakespeare's Sisters:Feminist
Essayson WomenPoets,ed. Sandra M. Gilbertand Susan
Gubar (Bloomington, 1979), pp. 200-218.
53 Virginia Woolf, The VoyageOut (New York, 1920), p. 326.
54 Virginia Woolf,Mrs. Dalloway(New York, 1925), pp. 29-32; BetweentheActs(New
York, 1941), p. 212.
55 Virginia Woolf, Nightand Day (New York, 1919), p. 300.
56 Woolf,Mrs. Dalloway,p. 122.
57 Virginia Woolf, Orlando(New York, 1928), p. 282; The Years(New York, 1937),
p. 429.
58 Virginia Woolf,Jacob'sRoom(New York, 1978), p. 67.
59 Willa Cather, The Song oftheLark (1915; rpt. Lincoln, Neb., 1978), p. 301.
60 Willa Cather, Death Comesfor theArchbishop (1927; rpt. New York, 1971), pp.
125-28.
61 Wallace Stevens,"The Idea of Order at Key West,"in TheCollected PoemsofWallace
Stevens(New York, 1955), p. 130.
62 Ong, Fighting forLife,p. 37.
63 Henry David Thoreau, "Reading," in Waldenand SelectedEssays(1854; rpt. New
York, 1973), p. 95.
64 Ezra Pound, TheABC ofReading(1934; rpt. New York, 1960), p. 101; our italics.
65 See Ong, The PresenceoftheWord,pp. 250-55.
66 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety ofInfluence(New York, 1973), passim.
67 Alfred,Lord Tennyson, "Merlin and Vivien,"in PoemsofTennyson, ed. Jerome H.
Buckley (Boston, 1958), p. 381. We are gratefulto Elliot Gilbert for bringing this
passage to our attention;for a differentbut related analysisof its implications,see his
"The Female King: Tennyson's Arthurian Apocalypse," PMLA, 98, No. 5 (October
1983), 863-78.
68 "Manifesto:The Revolutionof the Word," in Transition Workshop, ed. Eugene Jolas
(New York, 1949), p. 174.
69 Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa," in New FrenchFeminisms, p. 256.
70 Joyce,Ulysses,p. 416.
71 GeoffreyHartman,SavingtheText:Literature, Derrida,Philosophy(Baltimore,1981),
pp. 9, 24; our italics.
72 ChristianeOlivier,Les EnfantsdeJocaste(Paris, 1980), p. 143; translationby Elyse
Blankley,to whom we are gratefulfor calling this passage to our attention.

73 Ong, FightingforLife,p. 36.

74 Anika Rifflet-Lemaire, JacquesLacan, tr. David Macey (London, 1980), p. 89.
75 Sigmund Freud, BeyondthePleasurePrinciple(1920; rpt. New York, 1963), esp.
pp. 32-36.
76 Bruno Bettelheim,Symbolic Wounds(Glencoe, Ill., 1954), p. 20.
77 Cited by Bettelheim,p. 22, but see also GregoryZilboorg,"Masculine and Femi-
7 (1944), 257-96, and Ralph Greenson, "The Mother Tongue and
nine," Psychiatry,
the Mother,"InternationalJournalofPsychoanalysis,31 (1950), 22.
78 Susan Lurie, "Pornography and the Dread of Women: The Male Sexual Di-
lemma," in TakeBack theNight,ed. Laura Lederer (New York, 1980), pp. 159-78, and
Susan Lurie, "The Construction of the 'Castrated Woman' in Psychoanalysis and
Cinema," Discourse,4 (Winter 1981-82), 53.
79 Erich Neumann, The GreatMother,tr. Ralph Manheim (Princeton,1963), p. 168.
80 Susan Griffin,"Thoughts on Writing,"in The Writer On Her Work,ed. JanetStern-
burg (New York, 1980), p. 110.
81 Maria Teresa Leon, Memoriade la melancolia(Barcelona, 1977), p. 308.


Gender and Sexuality in Language

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Sexual Linguistics: Gender, Language, Sexuality

Author(s): Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar

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IS ANATOMY linguistic destiny? Is a womb a metaphorical mouth,

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differencesthroughwhicheach human being firstconfrontsthe fun-

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nature and purpose of her own passive signification,her own active

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riori(and usually American or British)formof investigationthathas

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dream of a female language thathas a mysteriously multiplefluency,

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the redefinitionsproposed in A Women'sNew WorldDictionarythat

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uninflected; where French induces anxietiesabout politesse, distance,

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that what both sets of feministlinguistsfinallyhave in common is a

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was essentiallyafantasyabout a utopian linguisticstructure-a "wom-

Before we consider such female fantasiesin detail, however, we

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when Joyce implores her to write,as he does Nora in 1909, she is

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a contaminatingfeminizationof culture,fortheyfearthat"the whole

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the deep throatof a laughing woman, surelysuffersfroma hysteria

One ladypoetwas a nymphomaniac and wroteforVanityFair.1

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One ladypoet sleptwithBill Reedygotfatterand fatterand made

a novel about the feelingsthatfuel such

It is againstsuch fantasiesas those of West'sreporters,Hemingway,

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linguistic/literarymodel throughwhich the woman poet can express

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they associate with female sorcery,their female cohorts from Edith

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like Four Saintsin ThreeActsand TheMotherofUs All, she endows the

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Hilbery articulatesher feelings through enigmatic visions of "alge-

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Wallace Stevens once called "words of the fragrantportals ... /And

Of course, the historicalrange of male linguisticfantasiessuggests

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possession of the "classics" diminished anxiety. Virgil was Dante's

Tennyson's message is clear: even if he no longer knows the "lan-

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(male) linguisticphylogeny.The borning "Boyaboy" is his language,

It hardlyseems necessaryto ask, therefore,what distinguishesthe

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femalewriters.For whethertheyare misogynistic deridingsof female

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after all, Bruno Bettelheimobserved in Symbolic Woundsthat "penis

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culture constructsgender difference,these two contractsare notably

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very possibilitythat women mightachieve such a vision implies that

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, DAVIS

1 Julia Kristeva,"Women's Time," Signs,7, No. 1 (Autumn 1981), 21.

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17 Sally McConnell-Ginet,"Differenceand Language: A Linguist'sPerspective,"in

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