The Birth of Pleasure (review)

Twenty years ago, Carol Gilligan published her landmark book In a Different Voice, a text that revolutionized moral development theory and which remains an oft-cited text, especially in the fields of psychology and education. Given Gilligan's successes, it is somewhat surprising that The Birth of Pleasure has failed to garner a similarly enthusiastic response. The lack of critical acclaim may rest in the fact that Gilligan's newest book is less a radical departure from her previous scholarship than a rearticulation of it. The Birth of Pleasure returns to familiar territory, the landscape of girlhood and the geography of voice. Children's and adolescent literature scholars seeking new insights about psychological development or a reworking of familiar heterosexual romance plots will be disappointed. What The Birth of Pleasure does provide is a glimpse into how Gilligan's work leans on a conflictual theorization of adolescent girlhood. Gilligan's own voice consistently infuses the text in a way that suggests The Birth of Pleasure exists as less a scholarly study than an ode to one woman's girlhood. This review provides a brief overview of Gilligan's project and focuses in particular on the tensions that surround the theorization of adolescent girlhood within The Birth of Pleasure.

Gilligan separates The Birth of Pleasure into three overlapping sections, which are never explicitly distinguished from each other and seem tied together solely by the author's own reflections about heterosexual romance. For example, Gilligan fills the book with musings such as, "Maybe love is like rain. Sometimes gentle, sometimes torrential, flooding, eroding, joyful, steady, filling the earth, collecting in underground springs. When it rains when we love, life grows" (235). One of the recurrent themes in the book centers around the notion that patriarchal society demands subjects to enact gendered roles that ultimately lead men and women to replay tragic heterosexual scripts. In The Birth of Pleasure Gilligan concerns herself with the induction of subjects into the confines of patriarchy as a way to expose and rewrite familiar scripts.

Using the language of loss and recovery, Gilligan searches for evidence of a self before pain, a time before patriarchy when pleasure ran unfettered. She writes that in her work she was searching for "a washed-out road. Picking up the voice of pleasure in men's and women's stories about love and also among adolescent girls and young boys, I came to the places where this voice drops off and a tragic story takes over" (5). In a "boys are from Mars, girls are from Venus"-styled argument, Gilligan posits that males experience the pain of initiation in early childhood (around the age of five), while females wait until adolescence for induction into patriarchy.

To substantiate her claims, Gilligan relies on her previous observations of adolescent girls, snippets from young boys and their fathers in daycare, tidbits from couples' therapy, and a variety of literary narratives. In particular, Gilligan weaves the myth of Cupid and Psyche and the birth of their daughter, Pleasure, into her observations about contemporary subjects and romance. Gilligan writes, "Piecing together an ancient love with the findings of contemporary research, I found myself led into the heart of a mystery and then to a new mapping of love" (5). However, as Gilligan jumps from authors such as Sophocles to quotations from her own clients, she often glosses over the context and form of the narratives. For instance, in an attempt to make a link between the Oedipus myth and one of her clients, she writes: "Sam, like Oedipus, had a problem with his feet" (191). Gilligan makes similarly awkward connections between her interpretations of her patients' "voices" and literary texts. Her broad scope, coupled with an absence of deep and systematic analysis of either anecdotal evidence or literature, make it difficult to puzzle out just what landscape Gilligan hopes to chart. That is, the "new mapping of love" that Gilligan...