Doniger

Doniger’s chapter about women’s voices in myths raised a number of questions for me about the role and effect of women’s voices in narrative, and whether a woman’s narrative can be said to exist.
Doniger begins by citing the tradition of ‘old wives’ tales’. These stories were often physically voiced by women, and the implication is also that they were told for women. Yet what genders a particular story? Is it the physical narrator, the subject, the content, or the subject matter? Does the physical telling of a story mean that a woman has a voice in that particular story, or must ‘voice’ be something that is written into the material, rather than an agent of transmission? H.M. and N.K. Chadwick believe that there is female content in the story of David, and this is what makes the story ‘by/for’ women (Doniger 112), yet Holbek says it’s the subject, and the subject’s predicament that genders the story. However, neither content nor subject are guarantors of the story’s female-ness, for as Doniger points out, many stories with powerful women or goddess end with the women being undercut, subverted or destroyed in some way.
“Often the stories told by women do not seem to express a woman’s point of view at all” (Doniger 117) for sometimes the female narrator presents male bias, and sometimes the male narrator speaks sympathetically about women’s position. Although there is a problem with gendering a story one way or another and speculating on whether one story is for women, and another against women. One runs into problems, essentializing women to certain traits, and the other, of ascribing them a political agenda as part of their essentiality. Doniger points this out when she says that not all stories that portray women in a bad light are the sole products of men and likewise, stories that portray women in a good light are the sole products of women. She mentions qualities such as class, age, beauty, and race that are factors by which women differentiate themselves and denigrate one another in their stories. There is not always a common interest shared by old wives’ tales.
Another point that I found interesting was Doniger’s assertion that women’s stories were also the result of a subaltern identity absorbing the cultural mores of the dominant group, thus “even women authors will share the dominant mythology of their clture; they learn and assimilate the images that men have of them, and express those images in their own storytelling” (Doniger 119). Doniger seems to be drawing on the Foucauldian notion of modern discipline wherein discipline works in and through people to the point where it becomes second nature, and ultimately, natural. Story-telling occupies this liminal territory wherein on the one hand the authors can absorb and express dominant hierarchies in their stories, and on the other hand, have the ability to subvert them. This potential of subversion is also expressed, “just as the dominated often reproduce the opinions of the dominators, so it is also true, though less so and less well known, that the dominators mirror the opinions of the dominated” (122). And yet, while I agree that this is part of the process of the interaction between dominant and dominated discourses, I don’t see it as a 50-50 exchange. While I understand that one culture can be influenced by the culture it suppressed, in the way the European subject is constructed by its production of the Other, I think that Doniger gives the sub-altern a stronger identity than it actually has. In Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak defines the subaltern as that “whose identity is its difference, there is no unrepresentable subaltern subject that can know and speak itself” (324). The subaltern by virtue of being the subaltern exists on the fringes, because it is the Other, not the Subject. It never speaks for itself, but is spoken to or spoken for. The subaltern does not have access to language, which is the property of the Subject, they are historically mute. Spivak points to the double silencing discourse of androcentrism and colonialism that construe the subaltern as Other, thereby denying it participation in the discourse of subject-hood: “Between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and object-formation, the figure of the woman disappears, not into pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling which is the displaced figuration of the ‘third-world woman’ caught between tradition and modernization” (Spivak 337).
This isn’t to say I agree with Spivak entirely either, for I think that Spivak exists at an extreme end of the spectrum, utterly denying the possibility of women’s vocality. However, it is useful for me to contrast Spivak with Doniger when it comes to the possibility of hearing women’s voices in the stories, whether they be old wives’ tales or otherwise. And after all that, I’m still undecided on the level of agency women’s voices possess in text…