Analyzing the Different Voice: Feminist Psychological Theory and Literary Texts (review)

Analyzing the Different Voice: Feminist Psychological Theory and Literary Texts. Edited by Jerilyn Fisher and Ellen S. Silber. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998.

Philosophy has always recognized that we test our theories against our lived experience. John Stuart Mill argued for utilitarianism by showing that it is consistent with deeply held intuitions about moral deliberation, such as that everyone's interests should count equally. This is not to suggest that we arrive at appropriate theories by merely describing our experience. Instead, we may argue for a philosophical view by showing that it is better able to explain more aspects of human experience, and our reactions to those experiences, than other available theories.

Literature, then, is essential to philosophy. For literature is able to repre-sent human experience so that we identify and give importance to complexities we might not otherwise recognize in our own lives. When we read literature, we become involved in a situation according to a perspective that is not our own and we are surprised by events or phenomena that we might otherwise take for granted. Because it requires that we be differently involved, literary engagement sometimes makes us aware of expectations of which we are not self-conscious. To the extent, then, that we strive for theories that do not assume that everyone is like us, we ought to consider our theories in relation to various, select sorts of good literature.

Analyzing the Different Voice uses literature to consider and develop recent theories about women's ways of approaching human development, morality, and knowledge. It draws on Carol Gilligan's "voice-centred psychology" (1982, xi) derived from Gilligan's recognition that women often speak differently about self, relationship, morality, adolescence, and other landmarks of human life. Women's voices, expressing new insights, resonances, and evidence, have, according to Gilligan, changed "the voice of human psychology" (1982, x). The book also draws on Women's Ways of Knowing (1986), which suggests that women are more inclined than men toward the "personal and political investedness of knowers and groups of knowers in what they know" (1986, 98). Analyzing the Different Voice aims at "matching the novelist's ear with a theoretical ear" (1998, xiii). It aims to use literature to build upon women's insights about voice in order to promote a different expression of human--not just women's--experience.

The novels discussed add useful new dimensions to the notion of a "different voice." Consider, for instance, the fascinating account by Betty Sasaki (117-40) of the role of silence in Joy Kogawa's Obasan (1981). Sasaki points out that while feminists have treated silence as an obstacle to self-expression and realization, silence is sometimes an appropriate response in situations in which there do not exist the recognition and conceptual resources that could promote understanding. Describing ways in which, for Kogawa's characters, silence is an "act of agency," Sasaki suggests that some feminist accounts misrepresent many women's struggle for meaningfulness by setting actual silence in opposition to the metaphorical "voice" of recent feminist theory. Sally Kitch's "Motherlands and Foremothers: African American Women's Texts and the Context of Relationships" is another paper which complicates the central notions of connectedness and relationship driving object relations models. Kitch points out that aspects of identity relevant to critical understanding are often explained not by connections to loved ones, or even people we know, but by historical traditions and the symbols to which they give rise. Thus, they are "larger than a personal development project" (1998, 162). The experiences of the characters of the novels Kitch discusses might suggest that relationships are not as significant to women's development and self understanding as are the means available to us for interpreting relations and giving them importance.

One frustrating feature of this book is precisely the inattention given to the theoretical resources available to us for situating and interpreting the intriguing examples...