Making Silence Speak: Women's Voices in Greek Literature and Society

Argumentation and Advocacy, Spring, 2002 by Ekaterina Haskins

Making Silence Speak: Women's Voices in Greek Literature and Society. Edited by Andre Lardinois and Laura McClure. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001; pp. xiii 296. $55.00; paper $ 17.95.

The revision of women's place in the history of rhetoric and literature has become, in recent years, an interdisciplinary project. In Making Silence Speak, Andre Larclinois and Laura McClure aim to present a comprehensive account of women's voices from Greek antiquity by bringing together studies of both familiar and lesser-known ancient texts from diverse historical periods. The contribution of this collection is not only its scope--it ranges from Homeric epics to letter writing in the late second century C.E.--but also its willingness to entertain theoretical and critical issues facing scholars across the humanities.

Traditional histories have habitually excluded or ignored women as speaking subjects, and those that did mention women's contributions focused mainly on exceptional women who transcended their gender through education and creativity. Rhetorical and literary accounts of Classical Greek antiquity have typically valorized poet Sappho and rhetorician Aspasia, but paid little attention to a diverse range of women's discursive practices in their historical context, as well as to the dynamics of representation of women's speech in male-authored texts. Such a focus is due, in part, to an internalized dichotomy "woman-silent-private: man-vocal-public," which has long dominated scholarly accounts of women's role in ancient Greece (Cohen 1991). Consequently, the issue of women's power and powerlessness has been cast in terms of this seemingly strict separation between the private and the public. Over and against this approach, the essays in the volume suggest that the association of social influence with public performa nce obscures a whole range of women's discursive practices that contributed, however obliquely, to the political and social life of the Greeks. The book's scope--it addresses both surviving textual traces of actual women's "voices" as well as representations of women's speech in traditionally "male" genres (epic, drama, oratory, and epistolary practice)--is intended to broaden the discussion of what it meant to speak (or write) like a woman in ancient Greece and later, in Greek-educated Rome. The essays pursue this general theme with a dual goal of recovering (to the extent possible) authentic women's expression and determining "whether women's verbal patterns and expressive genres reinforce or subvert the dominant discourse" (11).

The volume's thirteen chapters are arranged chronologically: after Laura McClure's "Introduction," the reader proceeds from the "Archaic Period" to the "Classical Period" to the "Late Classical Period and Beyond." This arrangement, while traditional in classical scholarship, does not weave together the various threads of the authors' ambitious argument. If their intention is to shed light on the performative peculiarity and social meaning of women's "speech genres" on the one hand, and to question the imitation of women's "voices" by composers of epic, tragedians, and logographers, on the other, chronology does not adequately serve this goal. In addition, chronological progression implies a historical teleology seemingly independent from the writer's presence, and thus obscures the critical thrust of the volume as a whole. Therefore, having read the collection from start to finish, I was compelled to go back and regroup my comments in accordance with a different pattern--the one based on a distinction between women's discourse composed and enacted by women and women's "voices" represented in traditionally "male" genres.

The twelve essays beyond the Introduction are split almost evenly between these two categories. Chapters addressing women's discursive practices range from the prophetic ambiguity of the Pythias and Sappho's poetry to women's letter writing in Roman Egypt. Many of the contributors rely on the notion of "speech genre" to account for both "primary" genres and their literary appropriation by female authors (Bakhtin 1986). Maurizio's essay on the Pythias (Chapter 3) insists that priestesses of Apollo were composers of prophetic speech, although the legitimacy and truth of their utterances were circumscribed by the ritual (the Pythias' status as consorts of Apollo) and the interpretive community of colonists and tyrants. Maurizio argues that, "the Pythias wrote themselves into their oracles by refusing a masculine economy of one meaning per word--an economy that male interpreters insist upon in their treatment of oracles" (53). In his study of Sappho (Chapter 5), Lardinois shows how the poet exercised her interpre tive and compositional authority by weaving into her lyric poetry the public speech genres of women--prayers of women goddesses, laments, and the praise of young brides. Lardinois explains that these performances are part of rituals of controlled ambiguity, in which the rules of ordinary society are temporarily suspended in order to expose the underlying tensions on which it is founded" (92). In an essay on Erinna's famous poem Distaff (Chapter 10), Stehle makes a point similar to that of Lardinois--that female poets can appropriate socially conservative genres for criticizing the mechanism of women's socialization into virtuous daughters and wives. Formally a lament for a childhood friend who died shortly after marriage, Distaff (circa mid-fourth century BCE) borrows its stylistic tenor from epitaphs (gravestone inscriptions). However, Erinna re-accentuates this conservative genre by shaping her poem "as a revelation of the hidden perceptions and feelings of women who are forced into outward conformity" (199 ).