Masculine Voice Research Articles

Le Chant de la douleur dans les poésies de Christine de Pizan: Essai (review)

Reviewed by: Le Chant de la douleur dans les poésies de Christine de Pizan: Essai Stephanie L. Hathaway Kosta-Théfaine, Jean-François, Le Chant de la douleur dans les poésies de Christine de Pizan: Essai (Collections ‘Le tunnel de Platon’), Nantes, Éditions du Petit Véhicule, 2007; pp. 158; paperback; R.R.P. €16.00; ISBN 9782842735715. This short volume focuses on the motif of grief and suffering in select lyric poems of Christine de Pizan, posing several new approaches to the theme and texts. Kosta-Théfaine’s book consists of essentially three essays that explore [End Page 210] the expression of grief and suffering in the courtly idiom, suggesting a less gender-oriented reading, as well as a renewal of courtly themes in Christine’s novel expression. The reader is well served by ample textual passages and a selection of the poems is included in the appendices. The first section suggests grouping the selected ballades, rondeaux and virelais according to theme, not form. Kosta-Théfaine outlines that those poems he has chosen for this study, though they were not all written at the same time, are concerned with the feelings of grief and sorrow, deuil and douleur. In his brief survey, he asserts that lyric helps Christine overcome her loss, just as it does for the general grief felt over the loss of figures in the community, in that literature is seen as internally purifying. The following section deals with the oscillation between lamentation lyric and courtly lyric, and Kosta-Théfaine touches, albeit not always convincingly, on what he sees as French patriotism in the form of courtly verse as a vehicle for the expression of grief and lament. The final section looks cleverly at the courtly elements of this lyric poetry, suggesting both historical and contemporary perspectives in reading. Kosta-Théfaine identifies the elements in Christine’s poems that correspond to the courtly themes of the twelfth- and thirteenth-century troubadours, such as the lover admiring his lady from afar, and the necessity of the lover to paint himself as inferior in order to describe his lady as both superior and unique. Here the interesting point is made that, while traditional courtly lyric expressed the lamentation in the masculine voice, Christine’s not only expresses the lamenting of the lady in the act of love, but also that the masculine and feminine voices seem to be interchangeable. The conclusion is that there is no pleasure in love, but only suffering, and that as the masculine and feminine voices appear interchangeable, both the lady and the lover suffer equally and death is the only release. Comparisons are made to other poets such as Ovid and Machaut throughout, as well as engagement with secondary literature, but in some sections the reader would certainly benefit from more thorough commentary. On the whole, however, this is a valuable survey of a theme that contributes to the study of Christine’s works and life, as well as interpretation of medieval French poetry and medieval courtly poetry in general. [End Page 211] Stephanie L. Hathaway Departments of French and Germanic Studies University of Sydney Copyright © 2009 Stephanie L. Hathaway

Meaningful novelty processing during sleep in humans

Event Abstract Back to Event Meaningful novelty processing during sleep in humans Jean-Baptiste Eichenlaub1*, P. Ruby1 and Dominique Morlet1 1 INSERM U821, France How does the sleeping brain process external stimuli, and in particular, up to which extent does it detect and process modifications in its sensory environment? In order to address this issue, we investigated brain reactivity to verbal and meaningful novel auditory stimuli during wakefulness and sleep in young healthy subjects. EEG (23 scalp electrodes referenced to nose), EOG and EMG were recorded during wakefulness and all-night sleep, while a passive oddball paradigm including standards, deviants and two types of novels was applied. Novel sounds were first names uttered by a neutral masculine voice: the subject’s own name (‘own’) and an unfamiliar first name (‘other’). They were presented rarely (p = 0.02) in a background of regularly presented tone-bursts. Stimuli were presented at a level of 50 dB SL via two mini-earphones inserted into the external acoustic canals. During wakefulness recordings, subjects watched a silent movie with subtitles. During sleep recordings, stimuli were presented continuously during the whole night. During wakefulness, ‘own’ and ‘other’ names evoked expected N1 and P3a components. Interestingly, the P3a component peaked significantly earlier (15 ms) for the ‘own’ name. In addition, analysis of the data revealed that the ‘own’ name only, evoked a large parietal positivity peaking at 550 msec. An enhanced response to the ‘own’ name was also detected during sleep, at late latencies, with a similar topography as the one observed during wakefulness (Figure), in sleep stages 2, 4 and REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep. These results demonstrate that, during wakefulness, the own first name induces an earlier reorientation of attention than another first-name, possibly due to its greater familiarity or to its meaning. The ‘own’ name subsequently evoked a late positivity which may be interpreted as a complex cognitive processing such as a recall of memory associated to the ‘own’ name. Only late positivities were found in sleep stages 2, 4 and REM suggesting that only the latter effect is preserved during sleep. In conclusion this study demonstrates verbal discrimination for the first time in all sleep stages and suggests a possible preservation of stimulus-driven recollection during sleep. pic Conference: 10th International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience, Bodrum, Turkey, 1 Sep - 5 Sep, 2008. Presentation Type: Poster Presentation Topic: Perceptual Processing and Recognition Citation: Eichenlaub J, Ruby P and Morlet D (2008). Meaningful novelty processing during sleep in humans. Conference Abstract: 10th International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience. doi: 10.3389/conf.neuro.09.2009.01.357 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 15 Dec 2008; Published Online: 15 Dec 2008. * Correspondence: Jean-Baptiste Eichenlaub, INSERM U821, Lyon, France, jb.eichenlaub@gmail.com Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Jean-Baptiste Eichenlaub P. Ruby Dominique Morlet Google Jean-Baptiste Eichenlaub P. Ruby Dominique Morlet Google Scholar Jean-Baptiste Eichenlaub P. Ruby Dominique Morlet PubMed Jean-Baptiste Eichenlaub P. Ruby Dominique Morlet Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.

Holy Tears, Holy Blood: Women, Catholicism, and the Culture of Suffering in France, 1840–1970 (review)

Reviewed by: Holy Tears, Holy Blood: Women, Catholicism, and the Culture of Suffering in France, 1840–1970 Susanna Lee Burton, Richard D. E. Holy Tears, Holy Blood: Women, Catholicism, and the Culture of Suffering in France, 1840–1970. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2004. Pp. 291. ISBN 0-8014-4207-9. Richard Burton's Holy Tears, Holy Blood is an engaging historical, political, and psychological study of women's voluntary suffering in the name of religion. Focusing on the "centrality of Christ's Passion in French Catholic thought and practice," the book is about the practice of suffering, and specifically about eleven women who practiced, in nineteenth- and twentieth-century France. From the second epigraph by the Goncourt ("By bringing into the world the feeling for suffering, Jesus Christ has increased enormously the ability to suffer. His death was the death of physical and moral pagan health. Neurosis comes from Golgotha"), this study presents a rich compendium of perspectives on suffering. Indeed, the perspective or focus varies considerably from chapter to chapter, from literary analysis to psychological commentary to social history to theology, with the result that the book reads not as a linear argument or arguments, but rather as a series of slices of life and thought. It raises far more questions than it answers; however, there is great richness in the questions themselves and how they are raised, and this richness makes the book more than worthwhile. After an introduction on suffering and the gendering of its permutations, the first chapter is devoted to Mélanie Calvat, the witness (or alleged witness) to the La Salette Marian apparition of 1846. In describing La Salette and the weeping, afflicted image of the Virgin associated with it, Burton establishes the sort of female religious image that found primacy in nineteenth-century France. He then moves in the second chapter to Thérèse Martin, who concentrated on God's love and mercy rather than on God's judgment and anger. This chapter is more psychological in nature; we see Thérèse's devout family, her mother's obsession with expiation and sacrifice, her assumption of the masculine voice in autobiographical writings, and her curious conflation of Jesus Christ with her own biological father. The third chapter shifts into literary territory to discuss Camille Claudel, principally as sister and inspiration to Paul Claudel; it contains an analysis of Claudel's play, L'Annonce faite à Marie. The fourth chapter is [End Page 656] a wonderful piece of social history. Devoted to Jacques and Raïssa Maritain and their "conversion machine" headquarters at Meudon, it chronicles in lively detail the Maritains' relationship with Léon Bloy as well as the various converts, successful and unsuccessful (Jean Cocteau was one such unsuccessful) to their "congregation." The fifth chapter moves to the realm of pathology to present Marthe Robin, who ate nothing and re-enacted Christ's passion on a seven-day cycle for decades. Burton then passes to a discussion of more than thirty women and their "extraordinary phenomena," which included stigmatic bleeding, fasting, and visions, among others. This chapter contains some of the book's most fascinating biographical/ psychological portraits: in addition to Robin, we meet Pauline Lamotte/"Madeleine Lebouc," Eva Lavallière, Claire Ferchaud, and Simone Weil. The sixth chapter, combining the pathological and literary veins, discusses Colette Peignot, a "self-created negation of everything that the other Catholic women discussed here held dear." It examines Colette's sadomasochism, her relationship with Georges Bataille, as well as Bataille's review Acéphale. The final chapter roams through numerous psychological and sociological questions raised by the book's portraits. It moves from the gendering of the Church in the nineteenth century to the medical concept of hysteria, from anorexia and mother-daughter dysfunction to the public and private phenomenon of dying, from homosexuality to hair and sacrifice. It also contains the book's eleventh portrait, this time of Anne-Marie Roulé, mistress and "mystagogue" to Bloy. One important strength of this book is its extraordinary wealth of historical and anecdotal detail – from an intriguing discussion of Christian anti-Semitism to the relationship between the Tour de France and the crucifixion, to a description...

Erasing Cerinthus: Sulpicia and Her Audience

Erasing Cerinthus:Sulpicia and Her Audience Lee T. Pearcy Maria Wyke, Allison Sharrock, and others have recently reminded us that in Latin elegy, loving and writing are often figured as the same activity, as are being loved and being read.1 The elegists' masculine voices constitute their mistresses and their books simultaneously. In the self-centered world of elegy, problems of love and gender blend into and feed on problems of authorship and genre.2 The beloved puella docta becomes an ideal reader. When Propertius imagines his literary fate and posthumous audience, he pictures a very private recitation to an audience of one: me iuvet in gremio doctae legisse puellae, / auribus et puris scripta probasse mea ("Let me enjoy reciting my poems in the lap of a scholarly girl and having her approve them with the pure taste of her ears," Prop. 2.13.11–12).3 The puella becomes the primary audience through which the elegist creates his erotic and literary persona. Other readers include an assortment of individual addressees, human and divine, but the elegist can also imagine an audience wider than the private world of assignation, friendship, and prayer. Propertius imagines a throng of writers following his triumphal example (Prop. 3.1.11–12) and an envious crowd of readers whose detractions will be erased by his posthumous fame (21–22). Ovid imagines an extensive readership of troubled lovers: atque a sollicito multus amante legar (Am.1.15.38). Loving entails writing, and writing entails not only being read, but also being published. The masculine elegist's emotions are not a private phenomenon. This masculine elegiac ego constructs his hard-hearted, enticing mistress as he writes his poems and shares her and them with a public readership. The puella docta, however, remains his primary audience, and what might be called the wider erotic public, the community of lovers and readers, becomes his secondary audience. What happens to these two audiences when the first person of Latin erotic poetry becomes feminine? The poems of and around Sulpicia, even though most are better called epigrams than elegies, allow us to try to answer. Just as Cynthia is the key to understanding Propertius, our answer will begin with Cerinthus. It will be a different answer than the one given for the masculine elegist who writes Cynthia into his poetry and by doing so, creates his elegiac persona. Sulpicia writes Cerinthus out of her poetry and as she deconstructs him, creates her distinctive revision of the elegiac ego. [End Page 31] In poem 7, Tandem venit amor, Sulpicia works against masculine elegy's convention that the poet's lover is both primary subject and primary reader; instead, she claims amor and fama as her subject.4 The character we have been calling "Cerinthus," in fact, does not appear by name in this poem, but only as a demonstrative: illum.5 Venus has brought him in response to her poetry (exorata meis illum Cytherea Camenis / attulit, 7.3). Unlike the male elegist's beloved, however, Cerinthus is not the first possible reader of Sulpicia's poetry. She does not, she declares, want to entrust anything to sealed tablets so that no one will read it before her lover. Sulpicia thus denies Cerinthus his place as primary and privileged reader (ne legat id nemo quam meus ante, 7.8).6 In a characteristic, hypotactic litotes,7 Sulpicia here suggests an inversion of masculine elegy's usual relationship between the beloved as ideal reader and the public audience who are witness to the elegist's experience. If Sulpicia's primary readers are her public audience, then to read Sulpicia's poetry is to take part in experiences that, in the normal world of masculine elegy, should be enjoyed first by the poet's beloved primary reader and only then overheard by a secondary, public audience. If loving and writing are figured as the same activity, as are being loved and being read, then this experience must be understood as in some sense erotic. Sulpicia's primary audience, then, consists of a public defined by shared erotic experience. In the second couplet of Tandem venit amor, Sulpicia tells how she had sought her love from...

Blue Pencils & Hidden Hands: Women Editing Periodicals, 1830-1910 (review)

Reviewed by: Blue Pencils & Hidden Hands: Women Editing Periodicals, 1830–1910 Juliette Berning Schaefer (bio) Sharon M. Harris , ed., Blue Pencils & Hidden Hands: Women Editing Periodicals, 1830–1910 (Boston: Northeastern UP, 2004), pp. xxxvi+279, $45.00 cloth. In Blue Pencils & Hidden Hands, editor Sharon M. Harris includes twelve essays that examine American women editors during the period from 1830 until 1910, as well as representative selections from the original periodicals. She groups the essays into three main parts, depending on the subjects' role in editing periodicals: "Apprenticeship," "Editing as Impetus," and "Career Editors." In the foreword, Ellen Gruber Garvey states that "new research on women editing periodicals is allowing us to examine and reexamine questions about magazines as a genre: about their creation, about the communities surrounding them, about how women, who might have been excluded from other kinds of careers, created and ran them" (xxii). Harris states in her introduction that "[p]erhaps the most important aspect of studying women editors and the periodicals they produced is understanding how women wielded the editorial pen to influence public opinion" (xxxv). In Part I, "Apprenticeship," Harris includes essays that address young schoolgirls who published a school paper and editors of special issues. Lucille M. Schultz writes about The Jabberwock, a student-run school paper, and argues that it "provided a site where a girl might experience herself as a writer in a public forum of students, faculty, and friends of the school" (7). In the next essay, Ann Mauger Colbert discusses women's editions of newspapers from 1894–1896. Colbert states that "[w]hatever the rationale for publishers' permission, the women used their foray into publishing to form firm links of communication and marketing with other women's groups around the country" (23). In Part II, the longest section of Blue Pencils & Hidden Hands, "Editing [End Page 83] as Impetus," Harris includes essays about "women for whom editing was an impetus to other kinds of literary or activist endeavors" (xxvi). Jennifer Blanchard argues that Ann S. Stephen's "rhetoric of modesty, femininity, and local loyalties" in the Portland Magazine is "steeped in nineteenth-century ideals of gender and class" (46, 44). Linda Frost describes Miriam Frank Leslie's "Ladies' Conversazione," a column that invited female readers to engage in a "free exchange" with the editor, as an outlet for "the domestically isolated reader" (60, 63). Carolyn Karcher describes Frances Wright's mission in the Free Enquirer as an attempt to "raise the level of the American press" by adopting "an aggressively masculine voice" (85, 80). Katharine Rodier describes the life and work of lecturer and activist Lucy Stone who used the The Woman's Journal, "a weekly newspaper dedicated to women's issues," to "help create a public record of her remarks" (99, 100). Jacqueline Fear-Segal asserts that Marianna Burgess created an anonymous persona who interjected "comments and opinions all through the paper," the Carlisle Indian School's publication The Indian Helper, to "control, intimidate, and manipulate the children" who read it (124, 126). Hanna Wallinger discusses Pauline E. Hopkins's work on the Colored American Magazine, where she "chan-nel[ed] ... her literary activities" which were replete with her main political concerns, gender and race (148). In the final essay in this part, James H. Cox explains that "we can understand [Gertrude] Bonnin's work as editor [of The American Indian Magazine] most clearly by focusing on her role within the context of continuing and emerging Native intellectual traditions in the era in which assimilation was federal policy" (174). In Part III, Harris includes essays about "women for whom editing was their primary work" (xxvi). Steven Fink discusses antebellum periodical editors such as Sarah Josepha Hale, Caroline Kirkland, and Ann Stephen, as "engaged in the business of periodical publication" in their relationship with the owners/publishers, with contributors, and with readers (208). In the next essay, Paula Bernat Bennett argues that Mary Louise Booth "exploited" Harper's Bazar from its inception "as a cover for her advocacy of social and, in particular, gender reform" (226). In the final essay, Gary Scharnhorst discusses Kate Field and her "campaigns for progressive causes" in her Kate Field's Washington. This volume...

Voices and Silences in Our Classrooms: Strategies for Mapping Trails Among Sex/Gender, Race, and Class

If student voices and silences represent strategic performances navigating sex/gender, race, and class, then such performances pose teaching dilemmas for the authors: how to (1) intervene in “Good Girl” silences without privileging masculine voice, (2) celebrate African-American women without reinforcing racist essentialisms, (3) keep class and women's labor from going “missing in action,” and (4) pre-empt poisonous voices without silencing. This essay explores classroom experiences that road-test theory to map practical teaching solutions.

‘I'm Just Shy’: Using Structured Computer-Mediated Communication to Disrupt Masculine Discursive Norms

In the context of a class is of pre-service, undergraduate educational technology, primary and secondary majors, the author explores feminist theories and post-structuralist theories regarding gender dichotomies to better comprehend how young women have internalized cultural biases informing them that computers are masculine artifacts. The issues are addressed in both in-class discussion and online forums. Because discursive norms tend to favour masculine voices, the author used Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) to disrupt assumptions regarding public/private discourse by intentionally structuring these spaces to limit aggressive rhetorical attacks (i.e. flaming) that young men are more apt to use than young women. The results so far have proved encouraging. The author elaborates on these successes by comparing differences from female and male contributions to a post-class, open-ended (qualitative/ethnographic) survey.

Incognito, Intervention, and Dismemberment in Adam Bede

George Eliot’s Adam Bede utilizes the metaphors of obstetric invasion and dismemberment to negotiate the author’s enduring dilemma: how to assume a masculine voice and retain a feminine sympathetic insight. Eliot set the novel at a historical moment that saw a crucial shift in medical discourse, the usurpation of (female) midwifery by invasive (male) obstetric medicine; this rhetoric informs the birth and murder of Hetty Sorrel’s infant. Hetty stands in for the author in her obsession with concealment, and also remains a strangely androgynous figure. She embodies Eliot’s nightmare possibility of female authorship: the “hidden dread” of a secret birth becomes a botched and bifurcated text, a baby whose dead body has perhaps even been dismembered by its mother. Through the figure of Hetty Eliot is able to rehearse and resolve, through her character’s banishment and death, the tensions inherent in her androgynous incognito and narratorial style.

Identity Crossings and the Autobiographical Act in Willa Cather's My Ántonia

KAREN A. HOFFMANN Identity Crossings and the Autobiographical Act in Willa Cather's My Antonia riLLA cather's My Antonia has prompted considerable debate over its representation of identity, its relationship to feminism, and its uses of the first-person narrator.1 Especially given its framing, M) Antonia offers a conception of identity that is far more complex than some critics have claimed. This complex treatment of identity calls for a reconsideration of Cather's place in a feminist literary tradition as well as recognition of her importance to theorists of autobiographical practice. Through M) Antonia, Cather implicitly comments on social identity , addressing particularly the extent to which identity categories can be crossed. Cather explores crossings of identity both by writing as a female author who speaks in the voice of a male narrator and by depicting characters, especially the narrator Jim Burden, crossing back and forth between feminine and masculine and immigrant and Americanborn positions. Indeed, M) Antonia offers a particularly complex case of crossings; because Jim has been created by a female author, his "authorial " position is already cross-gendered even before he tries to occupy Antonia's position.2 Some critics, such as Deborah Lambert, have interpreted Cather's use of a male voice as Cather's alliance with masculinity , as her desire to be a man. Lambert claims that "as a professional writer, Cather began, after a certain point in her career, to see the world and other women, including her own female characters, from a male point of view. ... In her society it was difficult to be a woman Arizona Quarterly Volume 58, Number 4, Winter 2002 Copyright © 2002 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 1 61 o 26 Karen A. Hoffmann and achieve professionally. . . . She responded by denying . . . her womanhood " (676-77). I would argue, however, that Cather's use of a male narrator in M) Antonia may be read not so much as a desire to be a man as a resistance to restrictive categories of gender that would lock her into a feminine position. By signing the name "Willa" to her novel, thus marking her feminine position, yet writing in a masculine voice, Cather neither renounces her feminine position nor treats masculine positions as inaccessible to het. Instead, she tries to have it both ways. Cather suggests that masculine positions, and thus, masculine privilege and power, are not necessarily beyond her reach even though her culture assigns her and she also claims a female subject position.3 Cather's cross-gendered narration (signing her name Willa yet writing most of the novel in the voice of a male narrator) as well as her depictions of Jim's and Antonia's identity crossings carry significant ramifications for feminism. These crossings unsettle the traditional distributions of power along gender lines. In other words, Cather represents subjects culturally defined as female (such as Antonia) having access to masculine positions and subjects culturally defined as male (such as Jim) having access to feminine positions; by doing so, Cather explores the possibility of circulating power and privileges between male and female subjects. As I will argue, however, Cather also suggests the barriers in her culture to these crossings and the difficulties of redistributing power. Certainly, in a numbet of ways, Cather cannot be teimed a feminist. Asserting that "Cather's misogyny was not merely a transitory attitude confined to her college years," Jeane Harris points out that Cather's acceptance and praise of women writers were rare and that more than one piece ofher short fiction from the late 1890s can be read as demonstrating a disdain for female characteristics (83, 85, 8o).4 Moreover, as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue, Cather "[found] it necessary to separate herselffrom the didacticism of the feminist movement and from what she viewed as a fatally feminized literary matrilineage " (174). While Cather demonstrates in these ways an antagonistic relationship to feminism, her exploration of identity crossings offers a less obvious contribution to feminist goals by implying that masculine privilege need not be limited only to subjects culturally defined as male.5 Cather's resistance to subjects being locked into one gender position can also be found in her depiction...

Speaking and Silent Women in Upon Appleton House

Ostensibly, Andrew Marvell's Upon Appleton House is a country-house poem praising Nunappleton House, the Yorkshire estate of the great Parliamentarian general, Thomas, Lord Fairfax. 1 Marvell, however, is never one to do anything simply; Upon Appleton House, ranging widely through the gardens and the history of Nunappleton House, is as much a conflict, on its own poetical terms, as the Civil War itself, the memory of which the poem so uneasily skirts. One locus of this pervasive agon is poetic representation, an arena in which the poem's argument with itself plays out most clearly through its use of feminine voices; as Christopher Kendrick points out, remarking on the sexual connotations of "upon" in the poem's title, "women sum this manor up." 2 Marvell deploys the women in the poem to show ruptures between history and poetry, and between the historical poet and the poetic speaker. There are two feminine voices that disrupt the masculine voice of the speaker, and two other women in the poem who, like these speakers' shadows, do not speak at all. The voices are the unnamed nun and the cook Thestylis; the silent bodies are the virgin Thwaites and the child Maria.

Weighing Women's Words

Mona Ozouf’s book opens with the startling assertion that “The woman’s portrait is a male genre. It rarely boasts a female signature. It is little concerned with women’s words.” Unlike portraits of men, it always begins with an exploration of the feminine “nature”— from which deviations must be explained. Women’s Words: Essay on French Singularity attempts to reformulate the historical woman’s portrait from a woman’s perspective. She pays attention to what individual women said and thought, and gives credence to their ideas. This is a perspective familiar to practitioners of Anglo-American women’s history; that it should have to be argued so forcefully by a French woman historian reveals much about the possibilities for and constraints on writing women’s history—at least among academic historians in France. Indeed, Ozouf is critical of women’s history as it has emerged in France since the mid-1970s for paying too much attention to (male) discourse about women and not enough to what women had to say about themselves, for focusing inordinate attention on victims and statistics and not enough on exceptional lives. These latter are also part of the story, she argues. So far, so good. The author points to numerous examples of French women writing against the prevailing or asserted norms, the “normative discourse on femininity” (xi), contesting claims by others that it is inevitably the masculine voice and prescriptions for femininity that drowns out the authentic voices of speaking women. Then she segues into a discussion of the relative timidity of contemporary French feminism, especially with reference to French academia. Finally, she addresses the theme of French singularity (raised by Michele Sarde and others), emphasizing the importance of the French Revolution in shaping this “singularity,” even as she objects vociferously to the still widely promulgated view that the exclusion of women was central to the foundation of democracy in France (48). She emphasizes instead “the inventive variety of individual paths” (xv) of a cluster of women engaged in inventing themselves, and united by their common concern for girls’ education. Their literary activity, Ozouf argues, was “a talisman against the mediocrity and monotony of female existence” (xxi) and on “the feminine art of managing time” (xxii). The ensuing portraits are rich, brisk, engaging. They are built by paying strict attention to what the women—beginning with Madame Deffand, Madame de Charriere, Madame Roland, and Madame de Stael, and proceeding through Madame de Remusat, George Sand, Hubertine Auclert, Colette, Simone Weil, and Simone de Beauvoir—had to say, in their own words and to the contexts in which they spoke. Each portrait, introduced by a short biographical sketch, focused on a distinctive personal trait (e.g. Ž xity, valor, stubbornness, gluttony, asceticism, greed). Each responds to the judgments of earlier male portraitists, but builds something very distinctive out of the written evidence provided by each woman. What comes through is the complex, highly developed intelligence of each of these ten women, ranging from the childless Deffand, Charriere, Auclert, and the

Androglottia in a young female adolescent with congenital adrenal hyperplasia and 21-hydroxylase deficiency.

Vocal disturbances in women with congenital adrenal hyperplasia and androgen excess should be extremely rare today since effective substitution with glucocorticoids is available. We present a 17 year-old female with congenital adrenal hyperplasia due to 21-hydroxylase deficiency and severe virilization because of long-term insufficient therapy. Laboratory data showed elevated serum levels of testosterone, 17-hydroxyprogesterone, plasma ACTH and a high excretion of urinary pregnanetriol. The phoniatric aspect showed a masculine voice. We discuss the different effects of androgens on the pubertal larynx and various hormonal disturbances that may cause voice changes as well as therapeutic options of voice therapy. From the pediatric point of view it might be important to perform a phoniatric examination in girls with congenital adrenal hyperplasia during puberty in order to monitor androgen effects.

Disciplinary Violation as Gender Violation: The Stigmatized Masculine Voice of Performance Studies

Disciplinary Violation as Gender Violation: The Stigmatized Masculine Voice of Performance Studies

Specificities: Other Cinemas Speaking the Experience of Political Oppression with a Masculine Voice: Making Feminist Sense of Yilmaz Guneys Yol

(1998). Specificities: Other Cinemas Speaking the Experience of Political Oppression with a Masculine Voice: Making Feminist Sense of Yilmaz Guneys Yol. Social Identities: Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 283-300.

Gender presentation: Perceptual and acoustical analysesof voice

This study investigated the perceptual and acoustical characteristics of vocal presentation in both the masculine and the feminine modes by the same group of male subjects. Listeners (N = 88) evaluated 22 voice samples by using 18 semantic differential scales and 57 adjectives. The 22 voice samples were provided by 11 biologically male speakers, who described themselves as heterosexual crossdressers. Each speaker read a standard passage under controlled conditions. In one reading, they demonstrated their typical masculine voice and in the other they spoke in their feminine voice. Acoustical analyses included mean fundamental frequency, frequency range, overall passage duration, and duration of a sample of stressed vowels. Results indicated that listeners heard significant differences between masculine and feminine presentations across the 11 speakers and the 18 semantic differential scales. Masculine-feminine and high-low pitch were the most salient scales in the perceptual judgments. Acoustical analyses indicated wide variation according to speaker and condition. Clinical applications are provided.

Thea Kronborgs's Vocal Transvestism: Willa Cather and the "Voz Contralto"

Thea Kronborg’s Vocal Transvestism: Willa Cather and the “Voz Contralto” John H. Flannigan (bio) Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark (1915) may be, as John Dizikes has called it, “the finest American novel about art and the artist” (277). Ironically, however, Cather’s third novel may also be her least appreciated work (277). Its excessive length (nearly 500 pages in its original edition) probably discourages many general readers. But even sympathetic critics of Cather’s fiction such as David Stouck have regretted a more serious flaw, namely the novel’s hollow center. “On the surface it is a success story . . . but the incontrovertible truth of every such story is that art is achieved at the expense of life” (184). Cather herself realized that Thea Kronborg’s rise from naive child of Moonstone, Colorado into world-renowned Wagnerian diva necessitated a depletion of the very energy that had made Thea interesting to readers. In an introduction written for the novel’s re-issue in 1932, Cather compared its dramatic arc to that of Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray: “As the gallery of [Thea’s] musical impersonations grows in number and beauty, as that perplexing thing called ‘style’ (which is a singer’s very self) becomes more direct and simple and noble, the Thea Kronborg who is behind the imperishable daughters of music becomes somewhat dry and preoccupied” (The Song of the Lark, [1938] vii–viii). 1 Thea’s life was in fact “the reverse of Wilde’s story.” Unlike Dorian [End Page 737] Gray, the musical artist “comes and goes, subject to colds, brokers, dressmakers, managers,” while the “free creature, who retains her youth and beauty and warm imagination, is kept shut up in the closet along with the scores and wigs” (Preface, viii). Thea’s artistic struggles likewise have their physical counterparts à la Dorian Gray. According to Susan J. Rosowski, these struggles involve Thea’s incarnation of romantic desires for an imaginative existence, “a secret or second self” whose “gestation, birth, and passion” are charted throughout the novel (Voyage Perilous 63). In a letter to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Cather wrote that when Thea achieved vocal maturity near the novel’s middle, she (Cather) could almost feel Thea’s burgeoning body within her own flesh (7 Dec. 1915). Yet Sharon O’Brien sees the full-blooded Thea Kronborg as Cather’s last experiment with a strong female character before succumbing to “romantic women and male perceivers in later novels,” a move that O’Brien explains in terms of Cather’s disillusionment with her lesbian attachment to lsabelle McClung following the latter’s marriage to Jan Hambourg in 1916 (“The Thing Not Named” 596). I believe that all of the above readings are valid and highlight important aspects of Thea’s character. But I would like to add to the discussion about Thea’s artistic development some ideas about two vital physical aspects of her character: the voice itself; and the music it produces. Of particular interest to me are Cather’s curious choice of range for the young Thea—a contralto—and her use of musical texts that amplify Thea’s struggle for artistic freedom by linking it to her struggle for physical maturity. Thea’s passage through puberty and adolescence to adulthood resembles her search for the right voice and musical texts. Her early use of the contralto voice represents her vocal, physical, and social confusion—her “working-out” of competing impulses that define her as a daughter, an artist, and a woman. Thus Thea’s “imaginative rebirth” (in Rosowski’s terminology) also has a profoundly physical component illustrated by her search for a particular vocal range and the musical texts appropriate to it in charting her progress toward sexual awareness and professional success. The Song of the Lark contains various references to musical texts that underline the transgressive and transvestite possibilities of the contralto voice. Cather’s allusions sometimes make only oblique reference [End Page 738] to a transvestite context, but elsewhere Thea performs with the approximation of a masculine voice and point-of-view. Such examples not only complicate a reader’s assessment of this feminine Künstlerroman (David Stouck’s label) but...

Machado de Assis Leitor de Alexandre Dumas e Victor Hugo

In "Missa do Galo", by Machado de Assis, an intertextual relationship with Os tres mosqueteiros, by Alexandre Dumas, and "Vieille chanson du jeune temps" (Les contemplations) by Victor Hugo is established.The texto critically assimilates and inserts the french characteristics in new contextual, onomastic and imagenic relationships, in oposition to d´Artagnan or in consonance with the lyric and masculine voice of the Victor Hugo poem.This presence goes to meet with what exposed in "Notice from the actual brazilian literature/Nationality instinct" (1873), where Machado de Assis asks himself about the possibility of national literary development, without the peculium legated from the foreign production.

Frankensteinand the subversion of the masculine voice

(1992). Frankenstein and the subversion of the masculine voice. Women's Studies: Vol. 21, No. 3, pp. 307-322.

Structures of Power in Duras's "Un Barrage contre le Pacifique"

It has often been said that the early novels of Marguerite Duras resemble the American novel of the same period, particularly the novels of Hemingway. Alfred Cismaru, for one, sees a combination of adventure, brutality, drunkenness, sexual aggressiveness hiding deep frustrations, and artificial gaiety that are reminiscent of Hemingway (18). Given the tremendous popularity of American writers in the 1940s and 50s it is not at all surprising that an unproven woman writer might adopt a safe voice as her own. How else, after all, is one to find a publisher? Certainly the Duras of the 1960s and beyond would not have found acceptance easily as an unknown. Nathalie Sarraute, even with a preface by Sartre (the obligatory masculine acknowledgement), had trouble finding a publisher for her excellent first novel, Portrait d'un inconnu; and when it was published, it was not particularly well received. It is no wonder then that in Un Barrage contre le Pacifique, Duras's third novel, we find the story of a young woman struggling with a voice that is not her own, a masculine voice that she has uncomfortably adopted, mirroring the author's own subservience to an alien voice. In fact, the novel studies a number of tools of subjugation, two of which, language and the gaze, will be the focus of this discussion.

Feminist Criticism and the Study of Children's Literature

Feminist Criticism and the Study of Children's Literature Anita Moss Introduction In her article, "One Woman as Writer and Feminist," included in the following group of essays, Eleanor Cameron recalls instances when male friends have insinuated that writing a children's book somehow requires less creative power than writing for adults. Many of us have resented stinging comments from collegues who have suggested that children's literature is after all not really literature. Francelia Butler has written that many of these negative attitudes toward children's literature stem from the notion that it is somehow associated with women. Certainly the number of women engaged in writing children's literature in its three-hundred year history (and the feet that many of them published under their own married names, rather than adopting male pseudonyms) suggest that Professor Butler's point is valid. Most of us, moreover, have been educated by male professors to admire male traditions and to adopt a masculine voice when we write criticism. Recently, however, feminist scholars and critics have atempted to identify specifically female literary traditions, to forge a feminist aesthetic, to write in their own voices, and thereby to acquire more integrity as women, as writers, teachers, and critics. A variety of feminist criticisms can now be found—from the analysis of stereotypes, to archetypal, textual, contextual, and ideological investigations of literature. Much feminist criticism of children's literature in the past has been mainly sociological. We are all familiar with articles which have identified rather obvious sex role stereotyping in children's books. Such articles have been invaluable in raising our consciousnesses (and those of children's book editors and publishers), but they often did little to illuminate the literary dimensions of the books they treated. Recently, major theoretical works of feminist criticism have been published by major presses, many of which offer startingly original interpretations of literature. In organizing the following group of essays, I have included a writer's view of feminist issues and several review essays of major feminist works of literary criticism. Kathy Piehl has investigated the work of a feminist reviewer. Since women writers, women teachers and librarians, and women critics still predominate in the field of children's literature, perhaps this group of essays may offer some productive lines for further inquirey. For both male and female critics in the field, perhaps we can aspire to transcend the narrow categories of gender to attain androgynous being, the characteristic which Coleridge attributed to truly great minds. Anita Moss University of North Carolina at Charlotte Copyright © 1982 Children's Literature Association