Submitted by Jim Aune on October 29, 2008 - 6:43am
I'm still pondering Josh Gunn's and Chuck Morris' talks on "voice" from the Wisconsin Public Address conference. "The Gender of Sound" is a very cool essay by Anne Carson, a Canadian classics professor and poet, in her 1995 book Glass, Irony, and God. Here's how it starts: "It is in large part according to the sounds people make that we judge them sane or insane, male or female, good, evil, trustworthy, depressive, marriageable, moribund, likely or unlikely to make war on us, little better than animals, inspired by God. These judgments happen fast and can be brutal. Aristotle tells us that the highpitched voice of the female is one evidence of her evil disposition, for creatures who are brave or just (like lions, bulls, roosters and the human male) have large deep voices [Physiognomics 807a]. If you hear a man talking in a gentle or high-pitched voice you know he is a kinaidos ('catamite'). The poet Aristophanes puts a comic turn on this cliche in his Ekklesiazousai: as the women of Athens are about to infiltrate the Athenian assembly and take over political process, the feminist leader Praxagora reassures her fellow female activists that they have precisely the right kind of voices for this task. Because, as she says, 'You know that among the young men the ones who turn out to be terrific talkers are the ones who get fucked a lot.' This joke depends on a collapsing together of two different aspects of sound production, quality of voice and use of voice. We will find the ancients continually at pains to associate these two aspects under a general rubric of gender. High vocal pitch goes together with talkativeness to characterize a person who is deviant from or deficient in the masculine ideal of self-control. Women, catamites, eunuchs and androgynes fall into this category. Their sounds are bad to hear and make men uncomfortable. Just how uncomfortable may be measured by the lengths to which Aristotle is willing to go in accounting for the gender of sound physiognomically; he ends up ascribing the lower pitch of the male voice to the tension placed on a man's vocal chords by his testicles functioning as loom weights [On the Generation of Animals 787b-788]."
And from the conclusion: "Lately I have begun to question the Greek word sophrosyne. I wonder about this concept of self-control and whether it really is, as the Greeks believed, an answer to most questions of human goodness and dilemmas of civility. I wonder if there might not be another idea of human order than repression, another notion of human virtue than self-control, another kind of human self rather than one based on dissociation of male and female. Or indeed, another human essence than self."
Anyway, the whole thing is important, I think. And if you haven't read her book on love, Eros the Bittersweet, that's really fine,too.
I've just bought the book online. Can't wait to read this.
Thanks for this. Where can we find more of Josh Gunn's and Chuck Morris' talks?
When I posted a bit of Carson's "Gender of Sound," a reader (Daniel) brought up a study which observed the "pitch of the male voice" of Larry King interviewing Bill Clinton and Dan Quayle.
http://speakeristic.blogspot.com/2008/09/gender-of-sound.html
And the best thing Carson says about "sophrosyne" is this:
"Females blurt out a direct translation of what should be formulated indirectly. . . . since woman does not bound herself, she must be bounded. The celebrated Greek virtue of self-control (sophrosyne) has to be defined differently for men and for women, Aristotle maintains. Masculine sophrosyne is rational self-control and resistance to excess, but for the woman [according to Aristotle] sophrosyne means obedience and consists in submitting herself to the control of others." (Men in the Off Hours 142)