Table Of ContentA Dialogue of Voices
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Karen Hohne and
Helen Wussow, editors
A
Dialogue
of Voices
Feminist
Literary Theory
and Bakhtin
University of Minnesota Press • Minneapolis • London
Copyright 1994 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written
permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
2037 University Avenue Southeast, Minneapolis, MN 55455-3092
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A Dialogue of voices : feminist literary theory and Bakhtin / edited
by Karen Hohne and Helen Wussow.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8166-2295-7 (alk. paper). - ISBN 0-8166-2296-5 (pbk. :
alk. paper)
1. Feminist literary criticism. 2. Bakhtin, M. M. (Mikhail
Mikhailovich), 1895-1975—Criticism and interpretation. I. Hohne,
Karen Ann. II. Wussow, Helen.
PN98.W64D49 1994
801'.95-dc20 93-8711
CIP
The University of Minnesota is an
equal-opportunity educator and employer.
Contents
Introduction
Karen Hohne and Helen Wussow vii
"The Locus for the Other": Cixous, Bakhtin, and
Women's Writing
Lisa Gasbarrone 1
The Historical Poetics of Excrement: Yeats's Crazy Jane
and the Irish Bishops
Elizabeth Butler Cullingford 20
ideological becoming: mikhail bakhtin, feminine écriture,
and julia kristeva
Virginia I. purvis-smith 42
Voicing Another Nature
Patrick D. Murphy 59
Monstrous Dialogues: Erotic Discourse and the Dialogic
Constitution of the Subject in Frankenstein
Siobhan Craig 83
Desire and Temptation: Dialogism and the Carnivalesque
in Category Romances
Eleanor Ty 97
Is Bakhtin a Feminist or Just Another Dead White Male?
A Celebration of Possibilities in Manuel Puig's
Kiss of the Spider Woman
Denise Heikinen 114
The Ideological Intervention of Ambiguities in the Marriage Plot:
Who Fails Marianne in Austen's Sense and Sensibility'?
Julie A. Schaff 12
V
vi Contents
The Chronotope of the Asylum: Jane Eyre, Feminism,
and Bakhtinian Theory
Suzanne Rosenthal Shumway 152
On veult responce avoir: Pernette du Guillet's Dialogic
Poetics
Karen Simroth James 171
Contributors 199
Index 201
Introduction
Karen Hohne and Helen Wussow
A verbal-ideological decentering will occur only when a national culture
loses its sealed-off and self-sufficient character, when it becomes conscious
of itself as only one among other cultures and languages . . . there will arise
an acute feeling for language boundaries (social, national and semantic),
and only then will language reveal its essential human character; from
behind its words, forms, styles, nationally characteristic and socially typical
faces begin to emerge, the images of speaking human beings. . . . Language
(or more precisely, languages) will itself become an artistically complete
image of a characteristic human way of sensing and seeing the world.1
In this hope we are as optimistic as Bakhtin. A period of interchange, of
dialogue between many voices and many forms of criticism, is approach-
ing or, some would argue, has already arrived. This development may be
the predecessor to the period Bakhtin describes above, a state of "decen-
tering" in which a number of voices, "social, national, semantic," and
gendered (we would emphasize), will speak simultaneously. One of the
ways this state of affairs is moving toward a reality is through the grow-
ing dialogue between Bakhtin's writings and the various points of view
that fall under the rubric of "feminist."
Such a dialogue does, of course, have its problems. In any verbal in-
terchange, one may speak with the other's words, but such an appropri-
ation is fraught with dangers. Bakhtin himself was aware of the difficul-
ties inherent in appropriating the voices (and thus views) of an/other and
vii
viii Introduction
the additional problems of having one's own voice appropriated for an
end one finds abhorrent.2 Several feminist critics point to the dangers of
taking on the voice or the theory of any male critic, including Bakhtin;
they argue that in doing so feminist critics risk finding their own voices
drowned out by patriarchal theories and languages developed by men to
write about literature written by men. But as Bakhtin would argue, all
languages are influenced by one another. There cannot be a 100 percent
pure feminist criticism, just as there is no unalloyed Bakhtinian reading of
literature. The importance is the simultaneous reaction, a lively dialogue
between the heteroglossic languages of Bakhtin and feminist theory.
The argument that Bakhtin is not useful for (or perhaps should not be
used for) solving problems raised by feminist analysis of cultural texts on
account of (1) his being male and/or (2) the absence of a treatment of
gender in his philosophy does not seem valid. To reject him on the basis of
his gender not only is to act as if gender determines all that one is (other
aspects of oneself are excluded or irrelevant) but also is to decide that ex-
perience is pure —purely masculine or purely feminine —and thus mono-
logic, closed, dead, a question of static being instead of a process, a be-
coming, a movement Bakhtin himself would insist on. Rejecting him
because he does not treat gender as a determining factor in language/
ideology would be like rejecting any and all literature written by straight
white men. There are indeed literatures written by that group that are
well worthy of rejection, and these are characterized by their refusal to
have truck with any other viewpoints or voices except as objects. But Ba-
khtin is accessible and valuable to feminism not only in terms of his phi-
losophy, which is specifically directed at celebrating, highlighting, bring-
ing to the fore the vitalizing force of dialogism —that is, the incorporation
and interweaving of various voices to create a sum far greater and more
generative than the parts —but even in terms of his form. Certainly Ba-
khtin has never been criticized for being too linear; in fact, many have
bemoaned his lack of order. Even in his language his rule-breaking word
inventions give voice to his essentially otherly philosophy. In short, al-
though he nowhere openly discusses gendrified language, he certainly ex-
emplifies it. The only real danger in using Bakhtin's philosophy is the one
we encounter when using any philosophies (including those of femi-
nism) —we can fall into dogmatism. The error of dogmatism is not, how-
ever, one we will learn from Bakhtin, but one we might bring to him, and
this ought to remind us just how much control we the readers have over
what the text ends up being/saying.
As both Josephine Donovan and Michael Holquist have argued, Ba-
khtin is more than just a simple pluralist.3 Bakhtin argues that not all lan-
guages bear hearing; rather, all the languages, concepts, ways of being in
Introduction ix
an utterance must be sorted and identified. A dialogic is formed by the
different meanings within and between utterances. Thus, the bringing to-
gether of different theories of feminist criticism and the various emphases
on those parts of a whole called "Bakhtin" result in a type of dialogism.
Perhaps a more pertinent question than whether Bakhtin is, as a male
thinker, worth using is whether Bakhtin's philosophy has anything to
contribute to feminism. Could his philosophy elucidate problems raised
by/in feminism? More interesting than a flat rejection of Bakhtin because
of his gender or because he did not speak on gender are the possibilities
that his concepts, such as heteroglossia and dialogism, hold for feminist
writers. The question of what feminine écriture is/should be and whether
it is even necessary is one that Bakhtin serves well to address.
But what would be a "feminist dialogics"? Patricia Yaeger, Dale M.
Bauer, and Susan Jaret McKinstry state that a feminist dialogics would
emphasize gender,4 a topic that many feminist critics of Bakhtin under-
score that he has left unexplored. For both Bauer and Ann Herrmann, a
feminist dialogics would disrupt patriarchal hierarchy.5 Bauer claims that
the "female voice" disrupts the "surveillant" male gaze.6 Here, as in
many feminist criticisms, the female voice is referred to but is not defined.
Is the female voice simply the voice of a female author or character? And
what is this emphasis on singularity, on unity, on voice rather than voices?
If we agree with Bakhtin that, given the heteroglossia of dialogism, each
voice, whatever its gender(s), will contain the voices of others, then the
singularity of the female voice is at best an illusion, at worst a silencing of
the many experiences and contexts about which and within which
women have spoken through the ages.
An example of the heteroglossic nature of the feminine or "etherized"
voice is discussed in Siobhan Craig's essay in this volume, "Monstrous
Dialogues: Erotic Discourse and the Dialogic Constitution of the Subject
in Frankenstein"; she points out that Frankenstein's creature speaks with
the voice of patriarchal authority, although he is denied any power by his
creator and by society and is forced to the margins of his world. The crea-
ture speaks against his oppressors but appropriates their speech. While
Frankenstein sees him as the enemy, the creature perceives Frankenstein
as his oppressor. If we regard the creature as representing the other, the
feminized voice in the novel, is it empowering to define this feminized
voice as a simple opposition to the voice of power and authority? If the
"female voice" or female writing, feminine écriture, is defined as being
the opposite of the masculinist products of a patriarchal culture, then we
end up only validating masculinism.
There is the problem of the word to which feminine ecriture is reacting
or opposing itself—call it masculinist, authoritative, monologic, phall-
