A different voice

Carol Gilligan’s sweet reason

By Clea Simon

The Birth of Pleasure By Carol Gilligan. Alfred A. Knopf, 256 pages, $24.

EMOTIONAL RESCUE: Gilligan’s qualitative, intuitive approach has earned her the ire of other academics.

Carol Gilligan is the mistress of voice. Best known for her ability to hear the unspoken, the revealing rhythms beneath the conventional answers, she has found her calling in speaking out for the unheard. Taking her acute ear into the hidden realm of girls, she made her name in 1982 with In a Different Voice. In her fourth book, the voice she listens to is her own, and those of adult women like her; the passionate if flawed result is an exploration into freeing love from an age of conflict.

Tuning into the voices of adults like herself sets Gilligan up in a more subjective style of hearing than in her past work, and this has sparked controversy. Some of the turmoil may have nothing to do with The Birth of Pleasure: the feminist groundbreaker raised eyebrows by leaving Harvard University’s first full professorship in gender studies for New York University, despite the launching of Harvard’s Center on Gender and Education. Some of the conflict has been stirred (according to the New York Times) by conservative thinkers who doubt her research and perhaps wish to undermine her feminist findings. But much of the controversy surely stems from the intuitive leaps she makes as she listens, and the poetic voice in which she conveys her findings.

This voice — qualitative rather than quantitative, emotional rather than intellectual despite Gilligan’s ferocious mind — is not that of the standard academic. In a personal style that’s at its peak in The Birth of Pleasure, she writes lyrically as she weaves myth and literature, interview and memoir. Full of imagery and rhythm, it’s a voice that is often beautiful and compelling but occasionally frustrating. As Gilligan tells and retells stories, the reader can get confused. So, Pleasure is supposed to symbolize what? Psyche is who again?

Behind the images, her thesis is actually quite simple. Our society is based on conflict; it’s a patriarchy built on dominance, father ruling son, man ruling woman. In our myths and our literature’s most lasting stories (from Orestes through Shakespeare), the author finds illustrations of this societal struggle. However — and here Gilligan’s work as a psychotherapist comes into play — such dominion does not allow for the honesty necessary for true intimacy. Men believe they cannot allow themselves to become vulnerable, women that they cannot allow themselves to take responsibility. But because we live in a time of change, when society’s rules are being questioned, we can rewrite this code. Looking for other paradigms (such as the myth of Cupid and Psyche, which gives this book its title), the author lays out a new model for mutual satisfaction. Bravery and integrity, she contends, make possible real intimacy — the birth of Cupid and Psyche’s child, Pleasure.

It’s a heady precept and an attractive one. Who wouldn’t want the key to real love? Shed of its literary trappings it seems overly simple, too. But such simplicity was key to In a Different Voice. When Gilligan described girls learning to talk in a fake, feminine voice, one that was higher-pitched and more tentative, women everywhere recognized themselves.

Much of The Birth of Pleasure rings true in the same instinctive fashion. Examining, for example, that horrible, maddening experience of having love not only gone but also denied, Gilligan finds sense in our common obsessions. “She had picked up the chemistry, felt the connection, experienced the joy of love, and then it was as if it had never happened, as if she was deluded or crazy,” she writes. What makes the woman cling is her need for her reality to be confirmed, Gilligan decides. “While she may have seemed crazy or pathetic, like Psyche holding on to Cupid, in danger of losing herself, she was holding on to a core sense of self, her ability to register her experience.”

Turning toward men’s issues, Gilligan re-examines the story of Oedipus. Here she argues that our culture has sexualized mother-son intimacy, “placing it under taboo” and thus forbidding such pleasurable vulnerability to adult men who have taken their place in the hierarchy.

Gilligan finds her evidence in the phrases we use — what she calls “I poems” — and the words and stories we choose to repeat. Her critics notwithstanding, this indirect approach may be the only possible one. Emotional truths are slippery, and if we are to believe them — to “get” them — they have to be presented in forms we can digest. We are not a culture of numbers or statistics. We tell stories and search for meanings and hidden morals. Gilligan may stumble on her journey — the reader is advised to bookmark the myths for reference during her frequent reinterpretations — but her path isn’t an easy one. Would we appreciate Pleasure if Psyche’s labor weren’t great?