While I was battling a nameless but tenacious virus, my throat was sore on and off for a month. Bronchitis caused me a partial loss of voice. These maladies, as well as some interactions that occurred in the midst of them, got me thinking again about the meaning of “voice,” about the significance of the throat, about the words I’ve had stuck back there for a while. I found myself returning to Carol Gilligan’s book The Birth of Pleasure, a favorite of mine that I talked about briefly in this post.
The Birth of Pleasure brings to light the experience of young boys and adolescent girls who, in adapting to the rigid and rationalistic framework of patriarchy, are effectively silenced about what they “see, feel and know” through those supposedly more “feminine” capacities of intuition, empathy, and emotional attunement. When I first read the book, I wept; it was like reading the history of my struggle with my father, many, many men, and in some ways the whole world.
So much of what I perceive filters in through these unofficial channels, unsupported by fact, “indefensible.” Confronted with my Harvard-educated, emotionally disconnected father’s capital-K Knowing, I frequently came off as weak, foolish, or hopelessly fanciful; my information was illegitimate, received through a faulty and “irrational” navigational system that often contradicted the Official Story. To compensate, I strove to become a master of the rational, strove to become legitimate, even going so far as to get a degree in philosophy at a school populated and run by more atheistic versions of my father. I tried very hard to belong there, but it always felt as if I were…well, an alien, forced to communicate in a dry, poetry-free language that didn’t even admit concepts central to my experience.
Something in me always resisted, however, always felt there was a baby in the scornfully discarded bathwater.
**
Carol Gilligan weaves her stories of couples in therapy and children in the classroom together with the ancient myth of Psyche and Cupid. It’s a tale that comes very close to tragedy, with a heroine who has to make her way through confusion, fear, the fear-based stories of others, abandonment, suicidal impulses, and seemingly insurmountable obstacles. She is beaten by Venus’s handmaidens, Sadness, Habit, and Trouble, until she is unable to speak. All because she refuses to adhere to a role others have chosen for her, and because she insists on seeing Cupid in the light. (I don’t think it’s such a stretch to say that this is what can happen to women within patriarchal culture who violate the rules by trusting themselves and saying what they see, feel, and know.) Seeing Cupid is what is not allowed; he leaves her crying in the dust when she violates his rule and lights the lamp to look at him.
The author introduces us to Eileen, a client in her private practice who feels crazy for picking up on an intensity of feeling between herself and the husband who is thinking of separating from her. Initially she says “He’s no more right than I am about it…it’s his reality, and then my reality.” Gilligan, asking further questions that aim to access Eileen’s non-rational knowing regarding the situation, concludes “If he is saying that your relationship lacks intensity and intimacy and you are picking up the vibes of fire and chemistry between you, then it’s not his reality and your reality, but reality and not-reality.” Eileen sits up and becomes animated; she proceeds to voice her feeling that the opposite of what her husband is saying is true. The intensity is precisely why he is withdrawing from her.
“I don’t know how to talk about this kind of knowing,” says Gilligan, “since it so readily seems suspect. It is the way animals know. Through vibrations. Something that passes between people. We pore over novels and poems because this is what writers put into words. Truths that have until recently escaped the nets put out by science.” A recent article in Salon by Laura Miller (about C.S. Lewis’s Narnia, of all things) actually touched upon this same phenomenon by comparing the world of pre-verbal infants and toddlers with that of our animal friends.
**
It’s frankly heartbreaking to read Gilligan’s accounts of four-year-old boys — who have not yet been initiated into the stoic silences of traditional masculinity — and their vociferous intimacy with their preschool friends and their parents. They say things to their mothers like “Mommy, you have a happy voice, but I also hear a little worried voice.” They are tremendously tuned in emotionally, contrary to the popular belief about boys’ obtuseness. They like to talk about their “buddies” with their daddies, and the fathers, in a particularly poignant passage in the book, worry about what will happen to their sons’ “spunk” and their “sensitive side.” They seem to be at a loss as to what to do; their sons bring up in them the uncomfortable memory of their own dissociation, their own tragic narrative.
Adolescent girls, at least, have the advantage of having acquired greater language skills; they are better able to speak about and remember having to choose between being in relationship (being their authentic selves) and having relationships (fitting an image of womanhood that won’t challenge the status quo). “If I were to say what I was feeling and thinking,” says seventeen-year-old Iris, “no one would want to be with me, my voice would be too loud. But you have to have relationships.” And as thirteen-year-old Tracy puts it, “When we were nine, we were stupid…we were honest.”
This developmental difference is perhaps why the greater burden of speaking about these unspeakable things, of restoring love, authentic connection, and the lost pieces of our humanness, falls upon women — much as Rilke predicted it would in his Letters to a Young Poet:
This humanity of woman, carried in her womb through all her suffering and humiliation, will come to light when she has stripped off the conventions of mere femaleness in the transformations of her outward status, and those men who do not yet feel it approaching will be astonished by it…This advance…will transform the love experience, which is now filled with error, will change it from the ground up, and reshape it into a relationship that is meant to be between one human being and another, no longer one that flows from man to woman.
Over and over again Gilligan hears from women how insane and out of touch they feel when they are abruptly dropped like a hot potato, following what they felt as shared joy, connection, and chemistry with a man. “While she may have seemed crazy or pathetic,” Gilligan says of one client, “like Psyche holding on to Cupid, in danger of losing herself, she was holding onto a core sense of self, her ability to register her experience.” Equally distressing as the loss of love itself is the self-doubt it engenders, the fear that one’s inner compass is hopelessly broken. “It’s a fight,” says Eileen, “at the foundation, in the arenas that are most important to me, my relationships with other people…how I read people and how I read where we are in terms of intimacy. I value that more than anything…to fight there, I mean, it’s fighting for your life.”
For the men’s part, as Gilligan writes in a section about the Michael Ondaatje novel The English Patient — whose protagonist is quite literally a man burned beyond recognition — “The pattern of men turning away from love, leaving without saying a word, suggests that they have already been burned. It is a history that bears the hallmarks of trauma: a heightened vigilance, a loss of voice, the inability to tell one’s story.”
**
Sitting at the dinner table adjacent to my father, I often felt a profound and nameless frustration that ended in despair. I know now that it was precisely my own loss of voice, my inability to tell my own story, that sank me into many hopeless and resentful silences. I would probably have never have worked so hard on my writing if I had felt in any way understood and honored by this all-important man. Later I would feel crazy, shamed, and devastated when, time and again, men would either cut me off completely or tell me my reading of their feelings was flat-out wrong. That is not what I meant at all, as the T.S. Eliot poem goes, that is not it, at all…
This is probably why Max Vujevic’s undeniably thunderous heartbeat (mentioned in my last post) was so validating. The body, at least, doesn’t lie. Although I’ve actually been told an erection was nothing personal. No, the violence with which Max pushed me away matched the violence with which he embraced me. There was definitely more going on there than I’ll ever fully know. But something was clearly going on.
In recent weeks I’ve found myself lapsing into crestfallen silence at the table of a surrogate father figure, and struggling once more to translate my experience into the foreign language of my Dead White Men’s college with a former classmate. Like Psyche allowed a visit with her sisters, I’ve listened to another woman’s fearful story about reality that challenged my self-trust, and I’ve wondered about my own sanity, reviewing my experiences of being left crying in the dust. The feelings aroused are the same frustration and despair the young girl sitting beside her father experienced thirty years ago, that mute hopeless surrender to a louder and more powerful voice.
**
How does the story end? You may ask. What happens to Psyche? After completing several seemingly impossible labors with the intervention of a helpful natural world, she is required by Venus (the goddess of love) to travel to Hades, and to ask a favor of Persephone, queen of the underworld. Like the heroes of patriarchal civilization, Odysseus and Aeneas, she has to find the courage to make her way through the land of the dead while alive. Existential psychotherapist and Renaissance man Rollo May once wrote in The Cry for Myth that one has to go through hell to get to heaven, and this is no less true for Psyche. It’s only after she has completed this tricky journey (and nearly been killed by her own curiosity) that Cupid returns to her. Granted immortality by Jupiter, Psyche gives birth to a daughter named Pleasure.
I have to admit, it’s kind of nice to read about a Hero’s Journey for chicks.
What I suppose I take from all that is this: Keep walking through fear. Do the thing, as Eleanor Roosevelt said, that you think you cannot do. If you refuse to be silenced and defeated, the forces of nature will find gentle ways to support you.
**
Gilligan begins her book with the image of water, likening it to love. It is the softest thing in the world, but it can wear through stone. Vulnerability, in a world built on power politics and competition, is viewed as a fatal weakness; emotional sensitivity is a liability. Yet we can see every day where the paradigm of power politics, the values of a patriarchal culture, have left us. It may be that the transformation of the world begins with women — and men — who dare to recover their lost voices, the voices of those tuned-in girls and boys who knew instinctively how to read the vibrations of interrelatedness, how to be authentic in relationship, how to love.
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