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Woman to woman: Speaking the common language
Women's Studies Int. Quart., 1980, Vol. 3, pp. 319-323 Pergamon Press, Ltd. Printed in Great Britain
W O M A N TO W O M A N : SPEAKING THE C O M M O N LANGUAGE MERCILEE JENKINS Office of Women's Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL 61801, U.S.A. (Accepted August 1979)
Adrienne Rich. 1978. The dream o f a common language: poems 1974-77, 77 pages. Norton, New York. Price $2.95. Adrienne Rich. 1979. On lies, secrets, and silence: Selected prose 1966-78, 310 pages. Norton, New York. Price $13.95. Tillie Olsen. 1978. Silences, 300 pages. Delta/Seymour Lawrence, New York. Price $4.95. Sally Miller Gearhart. t 978. The wanderground: Stories o f t he hill women. 196 pages. Persephone, Watertown, Mass. Price $5.00.
Adrienne Rich's latest volume of poetry is entitled The dream o f a common language. What is this dream and how can it be realized ? Each of these books is part of the answer. On lies, secrets, and silence and Silences provide the history of our struggle to overcome 'the silence surrounding the lives of w o m e n - - n o t only our creative work, but the very terms on which that work has been created' (Rich, 1979; p. 22). The need to re-name, re-vise, re-capture, re-call, re-imagine all that has been lost or never known about ourselves as women. The desire to define ourselves and connect with each other. These themes are richly woven into Adrienne Rich's collection of essays and Tillie Olsen's gathering of talks, essays, and lessons hard learned; they are distilled in Rich's poetry. The wanderground offers a vision of the future which the others promise where women have expanded their ability to communicate with each other and have broken with patriarchal models of relationships. Rather than describing each of these works, I have selected two of the poems from The dream of a common language to analyze in detail. They foreground the importance of understanding the relationship of women to language as we live our daily lives and as we shape our philosophy and theory. They call for the future which Sally Gearhart portrays. Each of these works documents and refines the other. They are dialogues between women. Using a language that has kept us in our place, we seek to liberate ourselves. I have selected 'The Origins and History of Consciousness' and 'Cartographies of Silence' to discuss because they deal most directly with the dream of a common language. The first emphasizes the vision, the second the means of achieving it. Integral to this analysis is the assumption that these poems are about women in relation to women, not women in relation to men. The author's statements in the journal Sinister Wisdom make this clear: 'as a lesbian/ feminist my nerves and my flesh as well as my intellect tell me that the connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet' (Rich, 1978; p. 20). The scene of 'Origins and History of Conciousness' is set in the first verse. The speaker is alone, conscious of herself and her surroundings. 319
320
MERCILEE JENKINS
'Night-life. Letters, journals, bourbon sloshed in the glass. Poems crucified on the wail, dissected, their bird-wings severed like trophies. No one lives in this room without living through some kind of crisis.' What is the crisis ? The next verse seems to suggest not any one particular crisis, but the crisis of self-definition, of awareness which comes over and over again. 'No one lives in this room without confronting the whiteness of the wall behind the poems, planks of books photographs of dead heroines. Without contemplating last and late the true nature of poetry. The drive to connect. The dream of a common language.' This verse also introduces the theme of the poem--the dream of a common language. This vision is expressed in the third verse as a desire to break through to a new consciousness. ' You are clear now o f the hunter, the trapper the wardens o f the m i n d . . . ' This vision is familiar--'I have dreamed'--but not complete. The woman must think again. Search her past and her present, figure it out. 'we lowered ourselves into this, let ourselves downward hand over hand as on a rope that quivered over the u n s e a r c h e d . . . We did this. Conceived of each other, conceived each other in a darkness which I remember as drenched in light. I want to call this, life.' Out of the darkness comes light, but not yet life. Women are still trapped in Plato's caves, our vision limited to shadows east by the fire light. 'But I can't call it life until we start to move beyond this secret circle fire where our bodies are giant shadows flung on a wall where the night becomes our inner darkness, and sleeps like a dumb beast, head on her paws, in the corner.' There is no personal solution, no separate peace for lovers. Each must struggle for her own awareness together with other women. A turning point has been reached in the cycle, that point between the death of the old order and the birth of the new. The speaker rejects the old patriarchal bonds of darkness, but has not yet found the matriarchal freedom--the new consciousness, the new life, the new love. The means that women have available to realize the dream of a common language are faulty. This is the subject of 'Cartographies of Silence' and of many other feminist writings on language and communication. Men control the language; it does not adequately express the experiences and feelings of women. Women must 'unlearn to not speak', must speak the unspoken, the unspeakable. 'All silence has meaning,' Rivh (1978) has said elsewhere.
Woman to Woman: Speaking the Common Language
321
'It is a presence it has a history--a form Do not confuse it with any kind of absence' Cartography is the art or work of making maps or charts. This poem marks the course of speaking and silence. It is this juxtaposition that informs the poem. This poem does not begin with the dream but with the reality of the 'so-called common language.' 'So-called' gives the phrase a bitter and ironic meaning. We do not really share a common language. The language is corrupt. 'A conversation begins with a lie. And each speaker of the so-called common language feels the ice-floe split, the drift apart' 'The drive/to connect' which is stated in the first poem, seems to be acted out in the second. Each stanza is a new attempt to break through the barriers of silence and talk, to communicate. The couplet form and the short sentences lend a conversational quality to the poem, as if the speaker were talking to someone, trying to make her understand and respond. At the same time, there are times, when the speaker draws back and seems to be speaking more to herself. In 'Cartographies of Silence' the speaker's thoughts and feelings come full circle in a way that is quite different from the unresolved vision in "Origins and History of Consciousness'. 'Cartographies' begins with the realization that conversation is a lie, but ends with the belief that it is also the wellspring of truth. We are told in stanza four that the poem was begun in grief and anger. The first stanza indicates that these feelings arose because of a frustrated desire to communicate with another in conversation. Writing can be controlled but speaking cannot. 'A poem can begin with a lie. And be torn up. A conversation has other laws recharges itself with its own false energy. Cannot be torn up. Infiltrates our blood. Repeats itself.' The bitter irony of conversation is expressed in the last couplet of this stanza. 'Inscribes with its unreturning stylus the isolation it denies' Talking implies you are not alone when in fact you really are. Each successive stanza seems to develop in an associational manner from the last couplet of the previous stanza moving back and forth between a discussion of silence and words. A turning point comes in stanza four:
322
MERCmEEJENKINS
'How calm, how inoffensive these words begin to seem to me' The anger is gone, but still the words are inadequate. The questions at the end of this stanza suggest a revelation. Sounds are a background for silence where their pain is revealed. 'This is why the classical or jazz music station plays ? to give a ground of meaning to our pain ?' Silence strips bare, gets down to basics. If only poetry could do this. 'If there were a poetry where this could happen not as blank spaces or as words stretched like a skin over meanings but as silence falls at the end of a night through which two people have talked till dawn' This is the silence that expresses, the silence that comes after speaking. But we must break the silence of muteness, of illegitimacymyou can't think that, you can't feel that, you can't say that--so we can hear ourselves, so that we are no longer invisible. 'The scream of an illegitimate voice It has ceased to hear itself, therefore it asks itself How do I exist ? This was the silence I wanted to break in you' The speaker concludes that although 'Language cannot do everything--', she still chooses words, conversations 'from which time after time the truth breaks moist and green'. Words are limited, but powerful. We must speak to be heard. 'To speak words that have been unspoken, to imagine that which is unimaginable, is to create the place in which change (action) occurs.' This statement by Judith MeDaniel (1978) captures the motivating force behind each of these books. Rich and Olsen express the desire to use literature to get beyond itself. Sally Gearhart's The wandergroundtakes us into the future where there are new words and new ways of communicating among women. She imagines the world of the hill women who have fled the city of men and created their own new world. The hill women 'enfold' each other with their thoughts, grasping words and intentions without speech. A woman at watch can stretch her mind over the countryside listening, seeing, smelling, tasting. They have 'freestanding selves'; they 'can speak their hearts to rest'. They can love and yet live without each other. These women are outlaws who can ride the wind and travel into the center of the earth. Tillie Olsen shows us what has stood in the way of our lives and art. Sally Gearhart creates a fantasy in which we begin to be free of what Rich calls, 'the hunter, the trapper/the wardens
Woman to Woman: Speaking the Common Language
323
of the mind'. We need more such visions of the future to give perspective to the slow pace of the day to day transformations. Feminist historians have helped restore our past; feminist science fiction writers offer worlds in which women are no longer a muted group. We will have new names for our experience and new forms of experience and expression. The old ways of storytelling among women will also be respected and maintained. The relationship between language change and social change is complex, but I am sure that the words are changing and so are the women. REFERENCES McDaniel, Judith. Summer 1978. Paper given as part of a panel at the 1977 Annual Modern Language Association convention. The panel papers were published with the title, The transformation of silence in language and action, Sinister Wisdom, 6, 20, 21. Rich, Adrienne. Summer 1978.The transformation of silence into language and action, Sinister Wisdom, 6,16.
W O M A N TO W O M A N : SPEAKING THE C O M M O N LANGUAGE MERCILEE JENKINS Office of Women's Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL 61801, U.S.A. (Accepted August 1979)
Adrienne Rich. 1978. The dream o f a common language: poems 1974-77, 77 pages. Norton, New York. Price $2.95. Adrienne Rich. 1979. On lies, secrets, and silence: Selected prose 1966-78, 310 pages. Norton, New York. Price $13.95. Tillie Olsen. 1978. Silences, 300 pages. Delta/Seymour Lawrence, New York. Price $4.95. Sally Miller Gearhart. t 978. The wanderground: Stories o f t he hill women. 196 pages. Persephone, Watertown, Mass. Price $5.00.
Adrienne Rich's latest volume of poetry is entitled The dream o f a common language. What is this dream and how can it be realized ? Each of these books is part of the answer. On lies, secrets, and silence and Silences provide the history of our struggle to overcome 'the silence surrounding the lives of w o m e n - - n o t only our creative work, but the very terms on which that work has been created' (Rich, 1979; p. 22). The need to re-name, re-vise, re-capture, re-call, re-imagine all that has been lost or never known about ourselves as women. The desire to define ourselves and connect with each other. These themes are richly woven into Adrienne Rich's collection of essays and Tillie Olsen's gathering of talks, essays, and lessons hard learned; they are distilled in Rich's poetry. The wanderground offers a vision of the future which the others promise where women have expanded their ability to communicate with each other and have broken with patriarchal models of relationships. Rather than describing each of these works, I have selected two of the poems from The dream of a common language to analyze in detail. They foreground the importance of understanding the relationship of women to language as we live our daily lives and as we shape our philosophy and theory. They call for the future which Sally Gearhart portrays. Each of these works documents and refines the other. They are dialogues between women. Using a language that has kept us in our place, we seek to liberate ourselves. I have selected 'The Origins and History of Consciousness' and 'Cartographies of Silence' to discuss because they deal most directly with the dream of a common language. The first emphasizes the vision, the second the means of achieving it. Integral to this analysis is the assumption that these poems are about women in relation to women, not women in relation to men. The author's statements in the journal Sinister Wisdom make this clear: 'as a lesbian/ feminist my nerves and my flesh as well as my intellect tell me that the connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet' (Rich, 1978; p. 20). The scene of 'Origins and History of Conciousness' is set in the first verse. The speaker is alone, conscious of herself and her surroundings. 319
320
MERCILEE JENKINS
'Night-life. Letters, journals, bourbon sloshed in the glass. Poems crucified on the wail, dissected, their bird-wings severed like trophies. No one lives in this room without living through some kind of crisis.' What is the crisis ? The next verse seems to suggest not any one particular crisis, but the crisis of self-definition, of awareness which comes over and over again. 'No one lives in this room without confronting the whiteness of the wall behind the poems, planks of books photographs of dead heroines. Without contemplating last and late the true nature of poetry. The drive to connect. The dream of a common language.' This verse also introduces the theme of the poem--the dream of a common language. This vision is expressed in the third verse as a desire to break through to a new consciousness. ' You are clear now o f the hunter, the trapper the wardens o f the m i n d . . . ' This vision is familiar--'I have dreamed'--but not complete. The woman must think again. Search her past and her present, figure it out. 'we lowered ourselves into this, let ourselves downward hand over hand as on a rope that quivered over the u n s e a r c h e d . . . We did this. Conceived of each other, conceived each other in a darkness which I remember as drenched in light. I want to call this, life.' Out of the darkness comes light, but not yet life. Women are still trapped in Plato's caves, our vision limited to shadows east by the fire light. 'But I can't call it life until we start to move beyond this secret circle fire where our bodies are giant shadows flung on a wall where the night becomes our inner darkness, and sleeps like a dumb beast, head on her paws, in the corner.' There is no personal solution, no separate peace for lovers. Each must struggle for her own awareness together with other women. A turning point has been reached in the cycle, that point between the death of the old order and the birth of the new. The speaker rejects the old patriarchal bonds of darkness, but has not yet found the matriarchal freedom--the new consciousness, the new life, the new love. The means that women have available to realize the dream of a common language are faulty. This is the subject of 'Cartographies of Silence' and of many other feminist writings on language and communication. Men control the language; it does not adequately express the experiences and feelings of women. Women must 'unlearn to not speak', must speak the unspoken, the unspeakable. 'All silence has meaning,' Rivh (1978) has said elsewhere.
Woman to Woman: Speaking the Common Language
321
'It is a presence it has a history--a form Do not confuse it with any kind of absence' Cartography is the art or work of making maps or charts. This poem marks the course of speaking and silence. It is this juxtaposition that informs the poem. This poem does not begin with the dream but with the reality of the 'so-called common language.' 'So-called' gives the phrase a bitter and ironic meaning. We do not really share a common language. The language is corrupt. 'A conversation begins with a lie. And each speaker of the so-called common language feels the ice-floe split, the drift apart' 'The drive/to connect' which is stated in the first poem, seems to be acted out in the second. Each stanza is a new attempt to break through the barriers of silence and talk, to communicate. The couplet form and the short sentences lend a conversational quality to the poem, as if the speaker were talking to someone, trying to make her understand and respond. At the same time, there are times, when the speaker draws back and seems to be speaking more to herself. In 'Cartographies of Silence' the speaker's thoughts and feelings come full circle in a way that is quite different from the unresolved vision in "Origins and History of Consciousness'. 'Cartographies' begins with the realization that conversation is a lie, but ends with the belief that it is also the wellspring of truth. We are told in stanza four that the poem was begun in grief and anger. The first stanza indicates that these feelings arose because of a frustrated desire to communicate with another in conversation. Writing can be controlled but speaking cannot. 'A poem can begin with a lie. And be torn up. A conversation has other laws recharges itself with its own false energy. Cannot be torn up. Infiltrates our blood. Repeats itself.' The bitter irony of conversation is expressed in the last couplet of this stanza. 'Inscribes with its unreturning stylus the isolation it denies' Talking implies you are not alone when in fact you really are. Each successive stanza seems to develop in an associational manner from the last couplet of the previous stanza moving back and forth between a discussion of silence and words. A turning point comes in stanza four:
322
MERCmEEJENKINS
'How calm, how inoffensive these words begin to seem to me' The anger is gone, but still the words are inadequate. The questions at the end of this stanza suggest a revelation. Sounds are a background for silence where their pain is revealed. 'This is why the classical or jazz music station plays ? to give a ground of meaning to our pain ?' Silence strips bare, gets down to basics. If only poetry could do this. 'If there were a poetry where this could happen not as blank spaces or as words stretched like a skin over meanings but as silence falls at the end of a night through which two people have talked till dawn' This is the silence that expresses, the silence that comes after speaking. But we must break the silence of muteness, of illegitimacymyou can't think that, you can't feel that, you can't say that--so we can hear ourselves, so that we are no longer invisible. 'The scream of an illegitimate voice It has ceased to hear itself, therefore it asks itself How do I exist ? This was the silence I wanted to break in you' The speaker concludes that although 'Language cannot do everything--', she still chooses words, conversations 'from which time after time the truth breaks moist and green'. Words are limited, but powerful. We must speak to be heard. 'To speak words that have been unspoken, to imagine that which is unimaginable, is to create the place in which change (action) occurs.' This statement by Judith MeDaniel (1978) captures the motivating force behind each of these books. Rich and Olsen express the desire to use literature to get beyond itself. Sally Gearhart's The wandergroundtakes us into the future where there are new words and new ways of communicating among women. She imagines the world of the hill women who have fled the city of men and created their own new world. The hill women 'enfold' each other with their thoughts, grasping words and intentions without speech. A woman at watch can stretch her mind over the countryside listening, seeing, smelling, tasting. They have 'freestanding selves'; they 'can speak their hearts to rest'. They can love and yet live without each other. These women are outlaws who can ride the wind and travel into the center of the earth. Tillie Olsen shows us what has stood in the way of our lives and art. Sally Gearhart creates a fantasy in which we begin to be free of what Rich calls, 'the hunter, the trapper/the wardens
Woman to Woman: Speaking the Common Language
323
of the mind'. We need more such visions of the future to give perspective to the slow pace of the day to day transformations. Feminist historians have helped restore our past; feminist science fiction writers offer worlds in which women are no longer a muted group. We will have new names for our experience and new forms of experience and expression. The old ways of storytelling among women will also be respected and maintained. The relationship between language change and social change is complex, but I am sure that the words are changing and so are the women. REFERENCES McDaniel, Judith. Summer 1978. Paper given as part of a panel at the 1977 Annual Modern Language Association convention. The panel papers were published with the title, The transformation of silence in language and action, Sinister Wisdom, 6, 20, 21. Rich, Adrienne. Summer 1978.The transformation of silence into language and action, Sinister Wisdom, 6,16.