Women's Language: An Analysis of Style and Expression in Letters Before 1800

by Eva Haettner Aurelius (Editor), Hedda Gunneng (Editor), Jon Helgason (Editor)

Overview

By linguistic close-reading of more than a thousand letters from the 12th through the 18th centuries—written in Latin, Swedish, French, German, and English—this compilation analyzes the differences in language and communication between women and men. Armed with an exhaustive stylistic analysis, this volume attempts to answer the question Is there a special niche reserved for women’s language? As it pinpoints the variations in how women expressed themselves when addressing men or other women, this detailed investigation of style and expression comes to the conclusion that there is no evidence for a particular female language; however, this authoritative work is a joy to follow for anyone interested in language, linguistics, stylistic analysis, and gender.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9789187121890
Publisher:	Nordic Academic Press
Publication date:	03/01/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	18 MB
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About the Author

Eva Haettner Aurelius is a professor in comparative literature at Lund University in Sweden. Hedda Gunneng is an associate professor in Medieval Latin at Gotland University in Sweden. Jon Helgason is an editor of the dictionary from the Swedish Academy and a researcher in comparative literature at Lund University.

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Women's Language

An Analysis of Style and Expression in Letters Before 1800

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By Eva Hættner Aurelius, Hedda Gunneng, Jon Helgason, Lena Olsson

Nordic Academic Press

Copyright © 2012 Nordic Academic Press and the authors
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-91-87121-89-0

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CHAPTER 1

Theoretical foundation

Eva Hættner Aurelius

In essence, feminist literary scholarship can be divided into three separate approaches: first, what Elaine Showalter has called 'the feminist critique', which examines lacunae and errors in the history of literature and stereotypical literary images of women; second, gynocriticism, which brings to the fore women's texts and sets out to describe potentially distinctive feminine characteristics in the texts and in culture alike; and thirdly, deconstruction, which questions 'woman' and 'feminine' as analytical concepts, and instead suggests that they are in fact social constructions, produced by dichotomies ('woman'/'feminine' is produced as the opposite to 'man'/'masculine') that always represent 'woman' as a deviation from the norm ('man'). 'Woman' and 'feminine' become problems that not only have to be corrected, but also consolidate the dominant position of 'the masculine'. Dichotomous thinking can, in addition, result in actual, individual women being locked into stereotypical gender roles and/or heterosexual identities. What feminist research should do is question this dichotomy in various ways, and show how the social construction of 'woman' is produced. Simply put, these three main approaches can be fitted into a chronological perspective: the feminist critique belongs to the 1960s and 1970s, gynocriticism to the 1980s, and deconstruction to the end of the 1980s and the 1990s.

Our investigation takes as its point of departure a critical theory that was first presented by Elaine Showalter in the well-known article 'Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness', originally published in 1981 in Critical Inquiry. Her main purpose was to formulate a theory of women's writing or women's culture and its special characteristics: Showalter claimed that, until that point, Anglo-American research into women's literature had been theoretically naïve. Influenced by such feminist theorists as Cixous, Kristeva, and Irigaray, among others, Showalter attempted to formulate a comprehensive theory of women's writing. The term 'gynocriticism' is, in fact, Showalter's own, coined to differentiate the feminist critique, which focuses on the reader and the history of literature, from gynocriticism, which focuses on the female author.

In 1981, Showalter analysed the state of research about women's literature — Anglo-American feminist research dealing with women's writing, that is — and concluded that while women's texts had begun to be examined, scholars did not have any way of defining what it was they were investigating. Showalter continued: 'It is no longer the ideological dilemma of reconciling revisionary pluralisms but the essential question of difference. How can we constitute women as a distinct literary group? What is the difference of women's writing?' One of the reasons for Showalter's theoretical concern was the fact that during the 1970s a number of scholars in the US and the UK had written histories of women's literature without theoretically clarifying the subject of their histories. A similar objection can, incidentally, be made about the multi-volume Nordisk kvinnolitteraturhistoria ('History of Nordic Women's Literature', (1993–2000) and the project that preceded it.

Showalter identifies four theoretical models of differentiating 'female/ feminine' or 'woman' from 'male/masculine' and 'man': biological, linguistic, psychoanalytical, and cultural. The biological theory bases difference in the uniqueness of the female body and in women's bodily experiences; the linguistic, in the assumption or hypothesis that women and men use language in different ways; the psychoanalytical, in the assumption that there are fundamental differences in the psychology of men and women as described by the psychoanalytical tradition. The differing psychosexual development of women compared to that of men has left women with a different relationship to language, creativity, imagination, and culture. Showalter herself is a proponent of the fourth or cultural theory, which is distinctly anthropological. This is because it is capable of incorporating all of the other theories:

A theory based on a model of women's culture can provide, I believe, a more complete and satisfying way to talk about the specificity and difference of women's writing than theories based in biology, linguistics, or psychoanalysis. Indeed, a theory of culture incorporates ideas about women's body, language, and psyche but interprets them in relation to the social contexts in which they occur. The ways in which women conceptualize their bodies and their sexual and reproductive functions are intricately linked to their cultural environments. The female psyche can be studied as the product or construction of cultural forces. Language, too, comes back into the picture, as we consider the social dimensions and determinants of language use, the shaping of linguistic behaviour by cultural ideals. A cultural theory acknowledges that there are important differences between women as writers: class, race, nationality, and history are literary determinants as significant as gender. Nonetheless, women's culture forms a collective experience within the cultural whole, an experience that binds women writers to each other over time and space.

It is clear that Showalter on the one hand perceives 'woman' and 'feminine' as cultural products, or 'constructions', but that on the other hand she also sees 'woman' and 'feminine' as universals. Because women in different cultures and in different periods share the same experiences, it is reasonable to use concepts like 'woman' and 'feminine'. The question is whether or not this constitutes essentialism (in other words, whether it is a purely ideological concept, produced by the man/woman dichotomy). Strictly speaking, it does not. Referring to anthropological theories and research, Showalter points out that the important thing is to empirically test the theory of a separate women's culture.

Showalter's concept of culture is an anthropological one: culture equals values, norms, actions, roles, behaviour, and social institutions. When investigating whether or not the concept of a separate female culture is a meaningful one, it is important to point out that such a culture must be one that is defined and maintained by women themselves, not one that society (in other words, men) has prescribed for women. Referring to the anthropologists Gerda Lerner and Shirley and Edwin Ardener, Showalter argues that this hypothetical female culture is not a subculture in the sense that women form a completely separate cultural sphere; on the contrary, they are part of a general culture, one in which both men and women participate. However, because women, being powerless, have generally been a muted group, meaning that their special experiences and perspectives have not been made visible or audible other than as deviations from the norm, their views on reality and themselves have not been made visible either. The Ardeners' model of the culture of the silenced women requires that women always have to 'mediate their beliefs through the allowable forms of dominant structures', and Showalter follows suit with her argument that 'all language is the language of the dominant order, and women, if they speak at all, must speak through it'. The relationship between the dominant and the muted culture as represented by the Ardeners is given in Figure 1.

The Ardeners call the silenced culture 'the wild zone'. Their definition of this wild zone makes it impossible, by its very nature, to empirically confirm the presence of a female culture in language. Showalter adopts the Ardeners' view on this matter:

We can think of the 'wild zone' of women's culture spatially, experientially, or metaphysically. Spatially it stands for an area which is literally no-man's-land, a place forbidden to men, which corresponds to the zone in X which is off limits to women. Experientially it stands for the aspects of the female life-style which are outside of and unlike those of men; again, there is a corresponding zone of male experience alien to women. But if we think of the wild zone metaphysically, or in terms of consciousness, it has no corresponding male space since all of male consciousness is within the circle of the dominant structure and thus accessible to or structured by language.

What can be found in this metaphysical wild zone is the subconscious, the unspoken, that which feminism will bring into the light by means of a new language. On the whole, Showalter is sceptical of the idea of attempting to base a theory about the uniqueness of women's writing on analyses of linguistic phenomena.

English and American linguists agree that 'there is absolutely no evidence that would suggest the sexes are preprogrammed to develop structurally different linguistic systems.' Furthermore, the many specific differences in male and female speech, intonation, and language use that have been identified cannot be explained in terms of 'two separate sex-specific languages' but need to be considered instead in terms of styles, strategies, and contexts of linguistic performance.

Showalter emphatically rejects any attempt to describe the potential difference between men's and women's language in terms of linguistic structures:

dominant groups control the forms or structures in which consciousness can be articulated. Thus muted groups must mediate their beliefs through the allowable forms of dominant structures. Another way of putting this would be to say that all language is the language of the dominant order, and women, if they speak at all, must speak through it.

This leads Showalter to argue that women's writing, women's literature, can be positioned within two traditions: 'Women writing are not, then, inside and outside of the male tradition; they are inside two traditions simultaneously, "undercurrents", in Ellen Moers's metaphor, of the mainstream.' That is to say that women speak in two voices, and the point of empirical research would be to somehow make audible the second voice. Showalter believes that this second voice, this second language, must be studied within its cultural context: 'Language too, comes back into the picture, as we consider the social dimensions and determinants of language use, the shaping of linguistic behaviour by cultural ideals.'

The researchers in the current project agree with Showalter that any potential difference between the languages of men and women cannot be formulated in terms of different languages, and that if differences are found, they are tied to a particular culture. We have taken as our starting-point Showalter's idea that this potential difference between men's and women's languages needs 'to be considered instead in terms of styles, strategies, and contexts of linguistic performance', and we have therefore chosen to study various aspects of linguistic style. Style, in our definition, is the individual stamp given to human language by the conscious or unconscious choice of linguistic features in any given situation. In this way, we modify Showalter's manner of determining how the potential differences between men's and women's language can be identified: for practical reasons, we cannot study the strategies and context of every text we analyse. If Showalter's and the Ardeners' theoretical model is to be tested in this way, it will be necessary to look for linguistic features when women write to women (FF), and compare these with linguistic features, first, when women write to men (FM) and vice versa (MF), and, second, when men write to men (MM). According to our modified theory, the language (style) of the FF category should differ in a significant manner from the language (style) of the three other categories. This linguistic material must be of a kind that any potential differences between these two groups (FF versus FM, MF, and MM) should preferably not be possible to attribute to any other factor than sex/gender. We would like to emphasize that the hypothesis we are testing is not identical to the hypothesis about a women's culture proposed by Showalter: we have, for practical reasons, been unable to study the entire cultural context surrounding each of the texts we have analysed.

Most investigations of the relationship between gender and language attempting to discover potential differences between men's and women's language — an active field of research since the late 1970s — have been conducted on contemporary spoken language. Because we wanted to test the idea of a female literary culture, we have chosen to study written language, and we have chosen a type of text (discourse or genre, if you will) where scholars, irrespective of their field of study, generally agree that women as writers are, or have been, especially prominent and even considered superior to men: the familiar letter. We believe that this genre, where women have played an important role in the history of European culture, provides eminently suitable material on which to test the hypothesis of a separate female culture. One of the premises of the project has been the assumed connection between letter-writing on the one hand and women and womanliness on the other. In terms of literary history, it is true that the relationship between womanliness and letter-writing is seen as both a historical reality (women wrote letters) and a cultural notion (women wrote better letters than men; in letters, it was possible to express womanliness). What then of the relationship between gender (as a social, cultural, and historical construction) and genre? This is a question often addressed in research on women's literature in general, especially when it comes to genres such as autobiography, diaries, and letters; genres that to a greater degree than the usual literary genres have historically been ascribed the ability to be a more immediate expression of the writer's ego and its experiences.

In our material, the first category (FF) is compared to the other three (FM, MF, MM) in order to test the hypothesis about the existence of a female culture. The letters are written in five languages: Swedish, English, German, French, and Latin. The letters written in the modern languages date back to the long eighteenth century (c. 1660–1830), whereas the letters written in Latin date back to the twelfth century. In each language group, the material consists of approximately 250 letters written by women and around 50 letters written by men. The letters in Latin number about 150. These two groups of letters (FF versus FM/MF/MM) are subject to a linguistic analysis focusing on style and content, and the results of this analysis are then compared within each language group. Next, the results of these intra-lingual comparisons are compared to one another in order to chart any differences between the FF corpus and the FM/MF/MM corpus that can be attributed to cultural variables. We would like to emphasize that in our method we have attempted to analyse phenomena relating to language and content that can be applied to all of the languages included in the study. However, we are aware that there are such differences between these languages that such an inter- lingual comparison suffers from a significant number of methodological problems. In order to eliminate (if possible) the alternate hypothesis that the potential similarities or differences between the letters may derive from the fact that they were written in the same historical period, we have included letters from the twelfth century. Also, as will be apparent from the discussion that follows about the relationship of our investigation to linguistic research on potential differences between men's and women's (spoken) language, we have, through our choice of material (letters to and from members of the same social class) attempted to eliminate the alternate hypothesis that any potential differences in the texts are due to an unequal relationship between correspondents, and not to gender differences.

Socio-linguistic research on women's language

Even if our investigation, as far as we can tell, is unique in the sense that it deals with women's written language in medieval, early modern, and modern times, thereby complementing the existing wide-ranging research about men's and women's contemporary spoken language, something should be said about the relationship between our research and the latter. It should be borne in mind that our survey of this extensive field of research is by no means comprehensive. The comparison that follows below is merely a broad outline focusing on general issues and on investigations that have important features in common with our own (for example, studies of women's conversations with women).

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Women's Language by Eva Hættner Aurelius, Hedda Gunneng, Jon Helgason, Lena Olsson. Copyright © 2012 Nordic Academic Press and the authors. Excerpted by permission of Nordic Academic Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction Eva Hættner Aurelius, Hedda Gunneng & Jon Helgason,
1. Theoretical foundation Eva Hættner Aurelius,
2. Linguistic stylistics — methodological considerations Hedda Gunneng & Börje Westlund,
3. Medieval letters in Latin Hedda Gunneng,
4. Swedish letters c. 1700–1740 and c. 1740–1800 Marie Löwendahl & Börje Westlund,
5. Letters in French in the eighteenth century Elisabet Hammar,
6. English letters from the long eighteenth century Lena Olsson,
7. German letters in the eighteenth century Jon Helgason,
8. Project summary and conclusions Hedda Gunneng,
Appendix 1. Tables and diagrams,
Appendix 2. Statistical analysis and hypothesis testing & statistical result tables,
Appendix 3. Register of letters,
About the authors,

Editorial Reviews

"Women's Language is, in my opinion, a work of highest scientific standard in its presentation of analyses and results; it is efficient, straight-to-the-point, and precisely argued throughout despite its, in parts, relatively specialized content. That the book will leave a distinct thumb-print within its discipline is quite evident. Therefore, it has my evident and best recommendations."  —Boel Westin, professor in comparative literature, Stockholm University

From the Publisher