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).

Rupturing with The Yellow Wallpaper

I have discovered something at last. Through watching so much at night, when it [the wallpaper} changes so, I have finally found out. The front pattern does move--and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it! Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over. Then in the very bright spots she keeps still, and in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard. And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern--it strangles so: I think that is why it has so many heads. They get through, and then the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside down, and makes their eyes white! If those heads were covered or taken off it would not be half so bad. The Yellow Wallpaper - Charlotte Perkins Gilman

In the novel, John’s wife after having a child suffers from a “temporary nervous depression” which at the time was treated with the “rest cure” which consists of a stay in the country, complete rest, and consumption of phosphates, tonics, and other elixirs. She believes that “congenial work with excitement and change” would do her good. However, her husband the physician totally disagrees, won’t discuss the situation, and mandates the “rest cure” which is based on the knowledge of the time and the authority of Dr. Weir Mitchell, its devisor. Consequently, his wife is sent to an upper room in a large rundown country house. The ghastly wallpaper is pealing and the windows are barred. She has requested convalescence in a downstairs well-lighted room , but John in his dual hierarchical role of husband and physician ignores her requests and protestations, thus preserving the hierarchical structure and her place within that structure.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story The Yellow Wallpaper and the writing and publishing of it are examples of what Julia Kristeva defines as the new feminism and the use of language against itself to rupture the marginalizing of women. Kristeva identifies discourse which confronts language and thinks it against itself as “intertextuality” (The System 29).

John’s wife in her journal vividly depicts the impact society/culture has on women: inscripting and restricting them, “working to place the body (social or individual) under the law of writing.” The body is “itself defined, delimited, and articulated by what writes it” (de Certeau 139).The larger body influences a person and impacts the development of the material body itself. The inscriptions of society’s norms restrict if ruptures to the status quo are not attempted and/or acknowledged, entrenching hierarchical phallocentric culture and limiting rebirth often as the result of the norms being accepted as good or even truth. People are encouraged through speech and action to sustain what is “good and true” and not to challenge the norms, denying evolution and further rebirth.

John uses language to manage the other, to keep his wife in her subordinate role and disavow her ability to know what she needs. Kristeva would suggest that she disrupt the symbolic chain from her marginal position within the order. Kristeva believes that if a woman identifies with the mother, she ensures her exclusion from the marginality in relation to the patriarchal order. If, on the other hand, she identifies with the father--makes herself in his image, then she ends up becoming “him” and supporting the same patriarchal order which excludes and marginalizes her as a woman. Instead, women must work within the Law and accept sexual difference within the framework but refuse to “become one of ‘them.’” From her marginal position she needs to disrupt. If she doesn’t disrupt, the “balancing act” in between becomes too costly, with some women going mad or committing suicide (Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and Maira Tsvetaeva). The heroine cannot seem to “break the code” which Kristeva insists needs to be accomplished (Bizzell 1259-60). John’s wife near the end of the story has three choices: either to accept her place in the normed society and hope the “rest cure” works to banish her depression (perhaps postpartum depression), or find her own provisional space or go completely insane. Sadly the latter is her outcome.

In writing about a woman’s bout with depression, its attempted cure, and her ultimate escape into madness, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story is a rupturing from within of the patriarchal order. For Gilman to write this story at the time (about 1891) and get it published was no small task. Previous to the writing, Gilman found herself a victim of the same malady as her heroine and victim of a publishing world dominated by men.

Gilman responded to questions of why she wrote The Yellow Wallpaper in the October 1913 issue of The Forerunner explaining that for several years she had suffered with bouts of depression (Why I Wrote). After the birth of her first child in 1887, she was diagnosed as neurasthenic and sent to Dr. Weir Mitchell who prescribed the “rest cure” (Gilman, Charlotte). Physically the rest was successful and the doctors determined there was nothing much the matter, and she was sent home. She was instructed to live as “domestic a life as possible” and to have “but two hours’ intellectual life a day,” and “never to touch pen, brush, or pencil again” as long as she lived.” She went home and obeyed for three months and went almost totally insane. However, with the help of a friend, she went to work again, to a life of “joy and growth and service, with out which one is a pauper and a parasite--ultimately recovering some measure of power.” She rejoiced by writing The Yellow Wallpaper and sent a copy to the physician she claimed nearly drove her mad. “He never acknowledged it” (Why I Wrote).

The story was a rupturing of the status quo for Gilman held that man is “being held the human type; woman a sort of accompaniment and subordinate assistant, merely essential to the making of people. She has held always the place of a preposition in relation to man...before him, behind him, beside him, a wholly relative existence-- ‘Sydney’s sister,’ ‘Pembroke’s mother’--but never by any chance Sydney or Pembroke herself (qtd. in Jamieson 102). However, she had great difficulty getting her story published. She first sent her manuscript to William Dean Howells, who with some support, sent it to Horace Scudder, editor of The Atlantic Monthly, a very prestigious magazine at that time. According to Gilman’s account in her autobiography, he sent this note:

“Dear Madam, Mr. Howells has handed me this story. I could not forgive myself if I made others as miserable as I have made myself! Sincerely yours, H.E. Scudder.”

The story with its crawling mad heroine had obviously made an impression on Scudder, but he wasn’t about to let it affect the status quo. To rupture the structure and norms Gilman faced, she needed to get the story published. The New England Magazine finally published the story in 1892.

While some people responded positively to the story many did not. One responded that it was “perilous stuff,” another that it “posed a threat to relatives of such ‘deranged’ persons as the heroine” (Scudders’s). In The Transcript a physician said, “Such a story ought not to be written; it is enough to drive anyone mad to read it.” Yet another physician wrote, “It was the best description of incipient insanity he had ever seen, and-- begging my pardon--had I been there?” However, the best reaction Gilman claimed she ever got was when she was told years later that “the great specialist had admitted to friends of his that he had altered his treatment of neurasthenia since reading The Yellow Wallpaper.” In addition, one woman had claimed the story saved her from the same end as John’s wife (Why I Wrote).

Gilman used language in her novel to situate herself within and to the norm. She worked in the margins to rupture the dominant culture, to work to generate social change. Kristeva notes in her description of intertextuality that the novel has the particular “potential for embodying a ‘redistribution’ of several different sign systems” where diverse meanings overlap allowing transpositions of signifying systems (Moi). The official text needs to be broken down and the writing seen as both subjectivity and communication--writing where one reads the other (Desire in Language). Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a model of Julia Kristeva’s theory.

Linguistic Theory

Julia Kristeva's main interest is in discourse which confronts language and thinks it against itself. She focuses on the signifying process, trying to answer not only the question of exactly how language means but also what is in language that resists intelligibility and signification. She argues that structuralism, which focuses on the static phase of language and attempts to fix it and describe its details, sees it as homogeneous. Semiotics, on the other hand, which studies language as discourse articulated by a speaking subject, sees it as fundamentally heterogeneous. Influenced by Lacan and her study of psychoanalysis, she combined semiotics with analysis to create "semanalysis" which sees language as a "signifying process," at once a system and a transgression, coming from the drive-grounded basis of sound production and produced in the social space---the site of the speaking subject. "All functions which suppose a frontier (in this case the fissure created by the act of naming and the logico-linguistic synthesis which it sets off) and the transgression of that frontier (the sudden appearance of new signifying chains) are relevant to any account of signifying practice, where practice is taken as meaning acceptance of a symbolic law together with a trangression of that law for the purpose of renovating it" (The Kristeva 29).

For Kristeva, semiotics occupies a paradoxical position. It is a meta-language---a language which speaks about language and, therefore, homogenizes its object in its own discourse. But, at the same time, semiotics insists on the heterogeneity of language. The semiotician, thus, finds herself caught, forced to analyze her own discursive position while at the same time renewing her connection with the heterogeneous forces of language. These forces, in her view, make it a productive structure. ". . .thus poetic language making free with the language code; music, dancing, painting, reordering the psychic drives which have not been harnessed by the dominant symbolization systems. . .all seek out and make use of this heterogeneity and the ensuing fracture of a symbolic code which can no longer 'hold' its (speaking) subjects" (30). Semanalysis, then, is a way of thinking about language which has the potential to subvert established beliefs in authority and order.

"Word, Dialogue, and Novel" from her work entitled Desire in Language shows the particular influence of the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin on Kristeva's work. Actually, she was one of the first to introduce Bakhtin's theories to the West. Her insistence upon the importance of the speaking subject as the primary object for linguistic analysis is itself rooted in "dialogism" and her own active dialogue with Bakhtin's texts. According to Kristeva, Bakhtin saw the literary word as an intersection of textual surfaces rather than as a fixed point or meaning---as a dialogue among various texts: the writer's, the character's, and the historical cultural context. Each word (or text) is an intersection of words or texts where at least one other word or text can be read; the horizontal axis composed of the writer-character intersects the vertical axis composed of the text-context. Any text, therefore, is double---both "an absorption and a transformation of another." This reading of Bakhtin's dialogism led to her own idea of " intertextuality ," identifying writing as both subjectivity and communication---writing where "one reads the other." Poised between structuralism and post-structuralism, Kristeva was also interested in the way structuralism's "pure" categories break down in circumstances where language is ambivalent, subversive, and mocking as in the tradition of carnival which Bakhtin described in his work on Rabelais. In the space of carnival, the official text broke down when it confronted the text of carnival (and Rabelais' rabble-rousing). Great potential exists within carnival where prohibition (the monologic) and transgression (the dialogic) co-exist. Language both parodies and relevatizes itself, thereby repudiating its role in representation. Dialogism situates philosophical problems within language, language as a correlation of texts. It does not strive toward transcendence; it absorbs concepts within relationships, working toward harmony while implying the idea of RUPTURE as a way of transforming. In examining the "ambivalence" of spectacle and of lived experience itself, the potental for rupture between them becomes possible. Culture, thus, can forsake itself to go beyond itself. The novel and other ambivalent literary structures, then, provide the basis for new intellectual structures. Interest in the subversive effects of language grounded her later interest in the politics of marginality.

Intertextuality

In Revolution and Poetic Language, Kristeva's thesis for her Doctorat d'Etat, she further developed her concept of intertextuality. To the two processes Freud identified as being at work in the unconscious, displacement and condensation, Kristeva added a third process, "the passage from one sign system to another." Inherent in this process she saw an alteration of the thetic phase of language involving the destruction of the old system and the forming of a new one. The new system may use the same or different signifying materials, as in "carnival" as described by Bakhtin. She argued that the novel particularly exhibited the potential for embodying a "redistribution" of several different sign systems. "Intertextuality," then, is a specific type of coextension in which a variety of diverse meanings overlap; it refers to the transposition of one or more sign systems into another or a "field" of transpositions of many signifying systems. The novel provides a particularly good space for this phenomenon to occur.