Shattering Language

Julia Kristeva is interested in the subversive effects of language---discourse that confronts language and thinks it against itself, discourse (like the language of carnival) that absorbs concepts within relationships and works toward harmony all the while implying the idea of rupture as a way of transforming or breaking the code "to shatter language. . .to find specific discourse closer to the body and emotions, to the unnameable repressed by the social contract. . ." (1259-60). We asked the students in our ENG 980 "Studies in Rhetoric" course to take a Kristevan look at the following passage from the Bible (Revised Standard Edition):

1Timothy2:11-15 Let a woman learn in silence with all submissiveness. I permit no woman to teach or have authority over men; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet woman will be saved through bearing children, if she continues in faith and love and holiness, with modesty.

We told them to think of language as Kristeva does, making it a productive structure by fracturing not only its meaning, but also its grammar and syntax which attempts to manage the voice of the other, thereby contributing to the "phenomenology of the lie," and by demystifying "the community of language as a universal and unifying tool." Each of three groups devised a different treatment of this passage from the Bible.

One group offered the following creation. Note the "moebius strip" in the upper left corner composed of "Let a woman learn in silence with all submissiveness," a continuous circuit---a closed system like the symbolic order itself. Note also the reordering of the text, the highlighting of certain words and the deletion of others. This group reworded and added new text, elevating and projecting significant sections. The text is multi-dimensional, fragmented, and non-linear. So, the "official" meaning and usual syntax are disrupted in the attempt to produce new meaning.

Another group approached the task by cutting words and phrases from the original text and placing them in quite a different order. In this order the text may be read in several different ways, depending on how the reader holds it. Some phrases will be upside-down no matter how the reader views them, some will draw the eye around the rectangle of the text, and some will remain in the usual syntactic position. In the upper left corner a significant section of the text runs diagonally across the page and off of it. The effect is to produce mutiple readings of the same text, depending on the reader and the various ways the reader chooses to view the text---very much on the order of hypertext. Also, it's difficult to distinguish nouns from verbs from prepositions in this arrangement, thus interrupting the order suggested by the lexicon. Again this group has chosen to produce new meanings by fracturing and reordering the original text and literally turning it on itself.

The third group approached the task differently. They broke the text apart and presented it in an oral performance. The female voices in the group were interwoven with a single male voice, producing a representation that reinforced the new meaning created by the group's rearrangement of the text and the layering of the voices. Click here to listen to the group's performance.

Each group worked within the patrilinear framework of the language but disrupted the usual patterns of useage to subvert the "official" meaning.

The Woman's Bible

Elizabeth Cady Stanton offered another reading of this same scripture in The Woman's Bible. She wrote this book with a committee of other women to revise the texts and chapters of the Bible which directly refer to women and .those in which women are prominently excluded because in her view, "The canon and civil law; church and state; priests and legislators; all political parties and religious denominations have alike taught that woman was made after man, of man, and for man, an inferior being, subject to man. Creeds, codes, Scriptures and statutes, are all based on this idea. The fashions, forms, ceremonies and customs of society, church ordinances and discipline all grow out of this idea" (7). Her thought was that although Bible historians claim special inspiration for the Old and New Testaments, the records are contradictory in that the miracles and events oppose all known laws, ". . .of customs that degrade the female sex of all human and animal life, stated in most questionable language. . .and call this 'The Word of God' ." Stanton's work differs from eclesiastical teaching in her interpretation only in that she does not "believe that any man ever saw or talked with God, [she does] not believe that God inspired the Mosaic code, or told the historians what they say he did about woman, for all the religions on the face of the earth degrade her, and so long as woman accepts the position that they assign her, her emancipation is impossible" (12). She sees her task as one of working within existing scripture but bases her re-interpretations on the idea that the texts were written by men who are fallible. What follows, then, is a reading of 1Timothy2:11-15 which like those above offers an alternative:

Jesus is not recorded as having uttered any similar claim that woman should be subject to man, or that in teaching she would be a usurper. The dominion of woman over man or of man over woman makes no part of the sayings of the Nazarene. He spoke so the individual soul, not recognizing sex as a quality of spiritual life, or as determining the sphere of action of either man or woman.

Stevens, in his "Pauline Theology," says: "Paul has been read as if he had written in the nineteenth century, or, more commonly, as if he had written in the fifth or seventeenth, as if his writings had no peculiarities arising from his own time, education and mental constitution." Down these nineteen centuries in a portion of the Christian Church the contempt for woman which Paul projected into Christianity has been perpetuated. The Protestant Evangelical Church still refuses to place her on an equality with man.

Although Paul said: "Neither is the man without the woman nor the woman without the man in the Lord," he taught also that the male alone is in the image of God. "For a man ought not to have his head veiled forasmuch as he is the image of God: but the woman is the glory of man." Thus he carried the spirit of the Talmud, "aggravated and re-enforced," into Christianity, represented by the following appointed daily prayer for pious Jews: "Blessed art thou, O Lord, that thou hast not made me a Gentile, an idiot nor a woman." Paul exhibits fairness in giving reasons for his peremptory mandate. "For Adam was first formed, then Eve," he says. This appears to be a weak statement for the higher position of man. If male man is first in station and authority, is superior because of priority of formation, what is his relation to "whales and every living creature that moveth which the waters bring forth, and every winged fowl after his kind," which were formed before him?

And again, "Adam was not beguiled, but, the woman being beguiled, hath fallen into transgression." There was then already existing the beguiling agency. The transgression of Eve was in listening to this existing source of error, which, in the allegory, is styled "the most subtle beast of the field which the Lord God hath made." Woman did not bring this subtle agency ino activity. She was not therefore the author of sin, as has been charged. She was tempted by her desire for the knowledge which would enable her to distinguish between good and evil. According to this story, woman led the race out of the ignorance of innocence into the truth. Calvin, the commentator, says: "Adam did not fall into error, but was overcome by the allurements of his wife." It is singular that the man, who was "first formed," and therefore superior, and to whom only God has committed the office of teaching, not only was not susceptible to the temptation to acquire knowledge, but should have been the weak creature who was "overcome by the allurements of his wife."

But the story of the fall and all cognate myths and parables are far older and more universal than the ordinary reader of the Bible supposes them to be. The Bible itself in its Hebrew form is a comparatively recent compilation and adaptation of mysteries, the chief scenes of which were sculptured on temple walls and written or painted on papyri, ages before the time of Moses. History tells us, moreover, that the Book of Genesis, as it now stands, is the work not even of Moses, but of Ezra or Esdras, who lived at the time of the captivity, between five hundred and six hundred years before our era, and that he recovered it and other writings by the process of intuitional memory. "My heart," he says, "uttered understanding, and wisdom grew in my breast: for the spirit strengthened my memory."

With regard to the particular myth of the fall, the walls of ancient Thebes, Elphantime, Edfou and Darnak bear evidnce that long before Moses taught , and cetainly ages before Esdras wrote, its acts and symbols were embodied in the religious ceremonials of the people, of whom, according to Manetho, Mses was himself a priest. And the whole history of the fall of man is, says Sharpe, in a work on Egypt, "of Egyptian origin. The temptation of the woman by the serpent, the man by the woman and the serpent, may all be seen upon the Egyptian sculptured monuments."

This symbology signifies a deeper meaning than a material garden, a material apple, a tree and a snake. It is the relation of the soul or feminine part of man, "his living mother," to the physical and external man of sense. The temptation of woman brought the soul into the limitations of matter, of the physical. The soul derives its life from spirit, the eternal substance, God. Knowledge, through the intellect alone, is of the limitation of flesh and sense. Intuition, the feminine part of reason, is the higher light. If the soul, the feminine part of man, is turned toward God, humanity is saved from the dissipations and the perversions of sensuality. Humanity is not alone dual in the two forms, male and female, but every soul is dual. The more perfect the balance in the individual of masculine and feminine, the more perfect the man or the woman. The masculine represents force, the feminine love. "Force without love can but work evil until it is spent."

Paul evidently was not learned in Egyptian lore. He did recognize the esoteric meaning of the parable of the fall. To him it was a literal fact, apparently, and Eve was to be to all womankind the transmitter of a "curse" in maternity. We know that down to the very recent date of the introduction of anesthetics the idea prevailed that travail pains are the result of, and punishment for, the transgression of Mother Eve. It was claimed that it was wrong to attempt to remove "the curse" from woman, by mitigating her suffering in that hour of peril and of agony.

Whatever Paul may mean, it is a fact that the women of our aboriginal tribes, whose living was natural and healthful, who were not enervated by civilized customs, were not subject to the sufferings of civilized women. And it has been proven by the civilized woman that a strict observance of hygienic conditions of dress, of diet, and the mode of life, reduces the pangs of parturition. Painless child-bearing is a physiological problem; and "the curse" has never borne upon the woman whose life had been in strict accord with the laws of life. Science has come to the rescue of humanity, in the recognition of the truth that the advancement as well as the conservation of the race is through the female. His audacity was sublime; but it was the audacity of ignorance.

No more stupendous demonstration of the power of thought can be imagined, than is illustrated in the customs of the Church for centuries, when in the general canons were found that "No woman may approach the altar," "A woman may not baptize without extreme necessity," "Woman may not receive the eucharist under a black veil." Under canon 81 she was forbidden to write in her own name to lay Christians, but only in the name of her husband; and women were not to receive letters of friendship from any one addressed to themselves. Canon law, framed by the priesthood, compiled as early as the ninth century, has come in effect to the nineteenth, making woman subordinate in civil law. Under canon law, wives were deprived of the control of both person and property. Canon law created marriage a sacrament "to be performed at the church door," in order to make it a source of revenue to the Church. Marriage, however, was reckoned too sinful "to be allowed for many years to take place within the sacred building consecrated to God, and deemed too holy to permit the entrance of a woman within its sacred walls at certain periods of her life" (164-168).