A Response to Vivante, Gamel, and Dougher

I never really thought about personal voice theory until Judith P. Hallett and Thomas Van Nortwick asked me to be a respondent at the panel that they organized on the personal voice in classical scholarship at the 1995 meeting of the British Classical Association. What I had to say there, that is, my initial reaction to the theory and how it seems to shape scholarly discourse, can be read in the pages of their Compromising Traditions (Beye 1997). Today I am not yet sure that I understand the implications of the theory, exactly how it works, or what the value of it is. Yet each of these papers has been helpful in giving me a fuller insight into its potential. In essence, I guess, it's all about authority.

The argument for personal voice, it is often said, derives from the feminist movement as a defense against the male voice. This would be particularly true in a field such as classical studies. As a strenuously conventional and traditional discipline, it has long been a province assigned to elite males; moreover, what survives from antiquity as a subject for study is also emphatically masculine. But I would say that personal voice theory is immediately more attractive in the contemporary United States because of the profound dislocation of the traditional nominal common culture of this country and the concomitant alienation of so many Americans. We have nothing else to fall back upon save our own particular take on any given situation or idea.

Bella Vivante's paper seems to me an excellent illustration of this through her own personal story as someone with a very special and harrowing childhood experience who then discovers marginality as a Jew in the American South; the forbidden pleasure of contacts with southern African-Americans; the Jewish ghetto of Los Angeles's Fairfax district; and, finally, the peculiar and very special mix of ethnicity, class, and race in Manhattan. This is a very American story; it is a story that African-Americans, Asian-Americans, and Latinos can also tell in their own words. It is a history that, finally, the increasingly diminished and culturally marginalized upper-class WASPS are coming to discover is theirs as well. The failure of their authority as the makers of American culture is perfectly realized in their increasing discomfort with that perennial Christmas film, "It's a Wonderful Life," a cultural icon now incongruent if not glaringly false. In America's shifting cultural scene, where no one can really be sure where he or she belongs, there is nothing left to validate what any of us says other than the conviction of each of us of our own uniqueness.

Vivante's account of her discovery of the cultural force of menstruation was to me another highly significant element of her paper. Both sexes, I would argue, are empowered by acknowledging or, perhaps, insisting upon the essence of what they are. In the profession of classics, it has been males more often than not who have been in the position of defining, describing, and psychologizing women. Needless to say, I grew up in an era when menstruation was never mentioned; half a century ago, certainly, no woman classicist would lay claim to menstruation at a meeting of the American Philological Association, as Vivante did when presenting this paper.

The mention of menstruation, however, endows Vivante with authority over an aspect of the reproductive process forever alien to males, in some sense unknowable and scarcely to be understood. She is taking back something that rightfully belongs to women, that endows them with authority. On the other hand, I was immediately struck with the thought that the mention of menstruation liberates males to acknowledge their own special biological truth, which is the capacity of the penis for erection and detumescence beyond the control of human consciousness. (As must be clear to my audience, I hold to the now less than fashionable position that males and females are largely defined...