Sandra Gilbert & Susan Gubar, Sexual Linguistics

1985
Is anatomy linguistic destiny? Is womb a metaphorical mouth, a pen a metaphorical
penis? the authors begin.
From Freud to Lacan to Derrida on the one hand, and from Woolf to Irigaray to Cixous
on the other, masculinist and feminist theorists alike have toyed with the idea of a
culturally determined body language which translates the articulations of the body into
that body of articulated terminology we call language 515.
If language is a process of cultural artifiice that both distances and defines nature,
then it would seem that its workings might well embody the bodily differences through
which each human being first confronts the fundamental sexuality of his or her own
nature as Julia Kristeva puts it, Sexual difference which is at once biological,
physiological, and relative to production is translated by and translates a difference in
the relationship of subjects to the symbolic contract which is the social contract: a
difference, then, in the relationship to power, language, and meaning 515-16.
Gilbert and Gubar seek to interrogate this psychologically and historically through the
primacy of the mother in the symbolic contract and through a tradition of female
writing that belies the idea that the feminine does not appear in common language.
The female subject is not necessarily alienated from the words she writes and speaks
516. A French feminist approach prioritizes the preexistence of a womans language
that breaks from patriarchy, while an a priori Anglo-American approach has been
focused on research into a praxis of linguistics itself. Irigaray and Kristeva picture the
female body as open, blank, full of gaps and lacunae that speak louder than words,
and Cixous calls writing an outpouring or disgorging of fluids. These thinkers seek to
move beyond the binary of patriarchy for Cixous, Molly Bloom carries Ulysses off
beyond any book and toward the new writing 518. By opting for matter over mind, the
female body escapes.
However, the mysteriously multiple fluency and antithetical imagining of eloquent
silence is more like the male avant-gardes fine de siecle concept of women 519.
Thus, many feminists refuse to be Mollified 519. Is it better to speak illegibly outside
history or to join the forces of the enemy? Empiricism is a way out for many American
feminists, who examine linguistic structures for how he/man usages filter out
recognition of female existence; indeed, as if corroborating the French emphasis on
blanks, gaps, silences for females, the only semantic space in English is negative
519. Beyond pronoun envy are also lexical asymmetries of wholeness for man and
things like hysteria for women 520. Robin Lakoff proposes that womens English is
collaborative, but weaker than mens.

Ultimately, the French and American sides of the argument appear quite different, at
least in part because French is a more gender-marked and inflected language 520. The
authors wonder if the charisma of French discourse is a haute-couture of linguistics
(a utopian vision of womans language) beside the garment district empiricism of
Americans (a dystopian version of womans sentence) 521. Rather than a joyously
emetic emission from a community based on the commonality of women, the
American approach has stressed that if a woman learns and uses womens language,
she is necessarily considered less than a real full person, but if she does not, she is
ostracized as unfeminine (Lakoffs double bind) 521.
One issue is the repetition of women as suppressed, as not yet fully present. But even
Virginia Woolf, in tracing a weak line up to her own time, 70 years before Gilbert &
Gubar are writing, found a tradition beginning in the late 18th century of womens
writing 522. Woolfs womans sentence is neither French nor American in its approach
it is more historical than the first and more optimistic than the latter. Woolf used what
was essentially a fantasy about a utopian linguistic structure to define (and perhaps
disguise) her desire to revise not womans language but womans relation to language
523. The womans sentence is not so much about the grammatical construction of
language as it is about overturning the idea that a sentence is final, judgmental, or
complete, by which woman has been kept from feeling that she can be in full
command of language 523. Woolfs fantasy is of the legal power to sentence being
moved to the realm of femininity.
Molly Blooms, while held up as example, is still a leaky, chaotic discourse set against
the two mens. James (in The Bostonians) fears the chatter of women will take over
male discourse, and Eliot (in Hysteria), has caught the disease from woman and
runs on in a paragraph rather than a poem proper 526. Even in The Waste Land, the
female characters are hysterical, and can connect nothing with nothing, except for the
silent hyacinth girl, and Eliots goal seems to be to transcend female language,
justifying Joyces claim that The Waste Land ended the idea of poetry for ladies 526.
The authors point to Emily Dickinson as the foremother of a fantasy of womens
language as sorcery, as well as Wharton, Barnes, Cather, Hurston, H.D. and Stein.
Stein speaks in tongues in Tender Buttons, recover[ing] the numinous names of an
alternative history 529. G & G also point to the inscrutable sky-writing of Mrs.
Dalloway, where the homeless womans song is mystical and Clarissa and Septimus
are given a similar language 531. Woolf emphasizes the fact that both the alienation
from language her books describe and the revision of lexicography her books detail are
functions of the dispossession of women, as well as of womens natural resources in
the face of this dispossession 531. This includes Mrs. McNab and Mrs. Basts creaking
on in To the Lighthouse as they keep the house from further disintegration 531.
What is the difference between mother tongue and father speech? The latter is an
external possession, like Latin or Greek, and is hierarchically above and more pure the

intimate vernacular we gain at birth 533. Perhaps men translating between these two
forms of speech also feel belated to their forefathers. Joyce is the prime example, the
authors hold, of the transformation of mother tongue into dense, hard father speech.
Oxen of the Sun plays through a (male) linguistic ontogeny that recapitulates (male)
linguistic phylogeny (the individuals development scans the biological history of that
development) 534-5. Most male writers are either reacting against or appropriating the
verbal fertility of the mother, since there are truly no father tongues 535.
The swerve Lacan must make to align language and the Oedipal complex
demonstrates the extreme fixation on the necessary abjection of the mother. The child
already has language at this point, language fed to him by his mother, but Lacan
makes a logical detour to conceal this and subsume language as fatherly, as part of
individuating from the mother 536. Is the obsession with a patriarchal language actually
the result of the fear that it is matriarchal? Thus castration anxiety is more about the
anxiety of the knowledge that woman is complete, that she is not castrated, as Susan
Lurie argues 537. The symbolic (maternal) contract is signed before the social
(paternal) contract is constructed 538.
We must also ask whether the whole structure of hierarchized oppositions that some
of us have thought essentially patriarchal has been historically erected as a massive
defense against the deep throat of the mother and the astonishing autonomy of that
mother tongue which is common to both genders 538.
It would be interesting to compare this to stories and food in Toni
Morrisons Beloved, where a female language is also under construction.
To carry such an empowering intuition one step further can it be that feminist
theorists must look beyond the traditional alphabetizings of history, with its masculinist
syntax of subordination, to discover and recover the ways in which, as we have seen
here, women have sometimes stealthily and sometimes ecstatically claimed the
alphabet to capitalize (on) their own initials and their own initiatives? 538.
Here, you might think of Mr. Ramsays stubborn progress through the alphabet, or even
the narrator of Isherwoods Prater Violet, cataloguing his male lovers. The authors
suggest seeking language and readings and writings in the chaos of an alphabet
soup
The very possibility that women might achieve such a vision implies that the
relationship between anatomy and linguistic destiny, between sexual diference and the
symbolic contract, may promise not just female jouissance but feminist puissance. For
at last, in spite of feminist doubt and masculinist dread, we can affirm that woman has
not been sentenced to transcribe male penmanship; rather, she commands sentences
which inscribe her own powerful character 539.