Presidential Address 1984

Abstract

O NE-that wonderfully neuter, transcendent, hegemonic one-always begins presidential address by referring to past presidents. All presidents express, one way or another, the impossibility of representing, in their single persons, so heterogeneous organization as the MLA. shall quote only one past president. Though in principle am speaking as the voice of the Helen Vendler began fine address in 1980, expressing its concerns, have noticed in reading past presidential speeches that presidents are helpless to do other than to express their hopes, couched in various literary frames of reference, in addresses tending toward the homiletic. Here paused to wonder if would indeed be delivering homily. My desk Webster defines homily as a tedious exhortation on some moral point. Clearly, would be delivering one. Two additional statements in Vendler's presidential address have encouraged me: she said, owe to ourselves to teach what we love (350), and she said also, Love is shown, as Harold Bloom has made us recognize, as much by reaction and as by and imitation (346). You will already have guessed that am going to speak tonight not just as the president of the MLA but as woman president, to ask what effect the fact that women are one third of our membership, and more than third of our professional colleagues, has had or is likely to have on our association and our profession. speak both to women and to men. speak to men about their inevitable problems with revolutionary reaction and reappropriation where they might have expected gratitude and imitation. speak to women of the need we have long felt to articulate-and here again borrow Vendler's words, though from different occasion-our own balance between danger and decorum in imagery of rebellion (which usually lost) against tradition (which usually won) (Adrienne Rich 238). Before 1973, there were eighty-two presidents of the MLA, two of them women. These two women presidents made it, as some of their kind still tell us they have done, on their merits and saw no reason why other women could not do likewise. These two women presidents, furthermore, had in their unmarried state apparently chosen the life of the mind over the life of the body. Only in imagination could women, in Nina Auerbach's words, live her unacted parts, dream herself into forbidden roles. For most of us, whether actual or metaphorical, maternity alone was the seal of respectable female maturity. Here shall let Vendler speak for me again: The long exposure of most women to the more primitive experiences still remaining in civilized life-menstruation, intercourse, pregnancy, miscarriage, childbirth, nursing, toilet training, and child-rearing-make any woman feel as if she has spent ten to fifteen years in Cro-Magnon cave (Adrienne Rich 261). Vendler, writing about the poems of Adrienne Rich, spoke of childbearing, still the prescribed female destiny for generation, Rich's, and mine. Today, we women speak of the body but not alone of childbearing. We have learned to recognize an adult woman without reference to children (Auerbach). We are not men, nor primarily mothers. Yet we know, as Jane McCabe puts it, that while we join men in this association and profession, it simply feels different to be woman and will continue to feel different, even in the most liberated society (223). suspect, though can speak only for myself, that the seven women presidents since 1973 would all agree with that. I, the seventh, speak to you then as woman but as woman declaring, hope honorably, intentions to examine the recent female intrusion on the male hegemony in which have passed my professional life. This intrusion must be examined first as matter of gender. Is gender, as the most exalted of our male theorists tell us, merely property of linguistic discourse? If offer you total of fifteen words, thirteen from Whitman and two from Dickinson, am invoking more than figure in linguistic discourse? Whitman's thirteen words are, I celebrate myself and sing myself / And what