The Mechanical Song: Women, Voice, and the Artificial in Nineteenth-Century French Narrative

by Felicia Miller-Frank

Overview

Examining the privileged relation of women to the singing voice in nineteenth-century literary works, the author argues for an emerging identification between women and artifice in the period. Beginning with texts by Rousseau and Proust that show a link between nostalgia for the maternal voice and the writer's self, the book then turns to the psychoanalytic literature on the role of the voice in the formation of the psyche. In the process, it analyses feminist polemics on the maternal voice to show how voice and rhythm together form the matrices of the subject. The voice of the soprano occupied a special place in nineteenth-century operatic history, replacing the castrato voice as a sexless, angelic, ethereal source of pleasure for the opera-goer. The author shows how these qualities are identified with women's voices in literary texts by Sand, Balzac, du Maurier and Nerval.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780804780759
Publisher:	Stanford University Press
Publication date:	09/01/1995
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	1 MB

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The Mechanical Song

Women, Voice, and the Artificial in nineteenth-Century French Narrative

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By Felicia Miller Frank

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1995 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-8075-9

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CHAPTER 1

Nostalgia for the Maternal Voice

The motif of the maternal voice and its nostalgic rediscovery is a familiar one: not only does it occur in the first-person narratives, whether fictional or autobiographical, of such writers as Rousseau and Proust, but as an aspect of the broader question of the feminine voice it also emerges as a problematic term in recent critical and theoretical discussions of language, subjectivity, and gender. Under the rubric of the maternal voice we find a complex cluster of elements that includes the erotic, the suppressed feminine, the foundational divisions in the psyche, and the role of the mode of the acoustic in all of these. The questions it raises inevitably bring up the feminist debates over how to theorize feminine subjectivity. While the theme of the maternal voice seemed to present opportunities for a "rescue-reading" to certain proponents of women's writing (écriture féminine), such a line of thinking, despite its initial attractiveness as a validating feminist term, has since been criticized as utopic or essentialist by American feminist critics. For example, in her article on the voice in film, Mary Ann Doane has written:

The notion of a political erotics of the voice is particularly problematic from a feminist perspective. Over and against the theorization of the look as phallic, as the support of voyeurism and fetichism (a drive and a defense which, in Freud, are linked explicitly with the male), the voice appears to lend itself readily as an alternative to the image, as a potentially viable means whereby the woman can "make herself heard." Luce Irigaray, for instance, claims that patriarchal culture has a heavier investment in seeing than in hearing. ... Nevertheless, it must be remembered that, while psychoanalysis delineates a pre-oedipal scenario in which the voice of the mother dominates, the voice, in psychoanalysis, is also the instrument of interdiction, of the patriarchal order. And to mark the voice as an isolated haven within patriarchy, or as having an essential relation to the woman, is to invoke the specter of feminine specificity, always recuperable as another form of "otherness."

For Doane, the problem is that of the classic bind for feminists, for grounding a politics in a conceptualization of the body — and the voice retains a link to the body — reinforces it as guarantee of lack and difference, but the body as "site" of oppression is also contested ground, the possible site of redefinition.

In discussing the nostalgia for the maternal voice and its relation to the role of the voice in the fabrication of subjectivity, in seeing the memory of the maternal voice as imbricated in a broader way in the appeal of the female voice, I do not make an appeal to nature or to any biological foundationalism, but rather conduct my inquiry in terms of the historical and cultural determinants that construct and motivate these relations. The suggestion that the feminine has been bound to the maternal in the discursive framework we have inherited and that cultural systems of values work to negate or efface both is no longer a new argument. Of numerous variants of this idea, the homologous arguments of Goux and Irigaray can serve here as exemplary and provide a backdrop to my own proposition that the feminine voice in its literary representations repeats within the modality of the acoustic the specular structure of the psyche, like Echo, Narcissus's other mirror. While I will not gesture repeatedly toward the myth of Echo as an organizing figure, it may be seen to govern the discursive situation I outline and may be traced en filigrane throughout the literary instances discussed in the book.

It is not possible to invoke the Echo-Narcissus myth, the story that casts in human figures the logic dictating the feminine position reflecting male subjectivity in discourse, without pointing to Irigaray's work. Her argument in Spéculum de l'autre femme, for example, has become well known. She shows there how the specular logic of the "same" positions the subject as always male and the feminine as a mirror of the phallic, a structure she presents as that underpinning Western discourse, philosophical, social, and psychoanalytic, through her discussions of Freud, Plato, and Descartes. Writing of the subject in Ethique de la différence sexuelle she calls for a different look at these relations:

Everything about the relations of subject and discourse, the subject and the world, the individual and the cosmic, the micro and macrocosm is being reinterpreted. Everything, and first off, that the subject writes itself in the masculine, even if "he" wills himself to be universal or neuter: man. Never mind that man (at least in French) is not neuter but sexed. Man has been the subject of discourse: theological, moral, political. And the gender of God, guarantor of every subject and of all discourse, is always masculine-paternal in the West.

Within the phallocentric system thus set in place, the feminine position is that of the mute ground that makes discourse possible, but which is by definition out of the picture:

If the woman traditionally, and as mother, represents place for man, the limit signifies that she becomes a thing, with some possible mutations from one epoch to another. She finds herself hemmed off as a thing. Now the maternal-feminine serves also as an envelope, with which man limits his things. The relation between envelope and things constitutes one of the aporias, or the aporia, of Aristotelianism and the philosophical systems that derive from it.

The philosopher Goux articulates a parallel argument about sexual difference in his book Les Iconoclastes (selections of which are translated in Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud). He discusses the ways in which an idealizing injunction against figuration structures the process of symbolization in the Western philosophical tradition. In his argument tracing the history of the symbolic economy with its equivalence between the phallus and gold (i.e., value), Goux insists on the repression in this system of the maternal, equated with the feminine. His last chapter, "Sexual Difference and History," presents a "sexual archaeology of idealism" derived from the metaphors used by Plato and Aristotle on the model of sexual difference found in ancient procreation myths. These metaphors underpin the elaboration of idealism, and of history in a more general sense. Goux argues against the transparency of philosophical concepts to affirm the historical roots of idealism in a repression of mater, hence matter. It is grafted onto an underlying structure he calls "paterialism," which identifies man with form and thought, woman with matter and death:

What does idealism say? It says that the conscious power of thought is of an entirely different order from that of nature. It bars mother and matter from generative power. Matter is dead; it is mater and not genetrix. It desires an order. It requires a meaning it does not have, which must come from without. Thought is not the product of matter, the offspring (however sublime) of organized living nature: it is wholly other.

To reduce Goux's argument somewhat, the symbolic system inaugurated by idealism works through a process of unconscious systematization of the opposing terms provided by sexual difference. Thus, biological difference becomes the "prop and pretext" for symbolic divisions at another level, so that they pass from a position of external reflection to an internal one, becoming thereby naturalized. In pointing to the homology between the Freudian symbolic system and that of the dominant order out of which it arises, Goux argues, like Irigaray, that it reduplicates its phallus-centered logic.

This perhaps now-familiar position, that phallocentric logic structures all symbolic thinking, has been criticized by Monique Plaza, who seeks to cut the knot of phallomorphic "bouclage," looping or closure, in a well-known article directed at attempts to use Freudian theory for feminist ends. Such a formulation remains controversial, particularly for American feminists, since it seems to close off the possibilities for an articulation of a theory of female subjectivity. In her introductory essay to a recent issue of Hypatia devoted to critiques of French feminist philosophy, Nancy Fraser raises the issue of the dangers posed to feminist thinking by views that posit phallocentric thinking as monolithic and univocal rather than contested and plurivocal. Arguing that Irigaray's critique of phallocentrism unwittingly extends it, she suggests that it should "be possible to replace the view that phallocentrism is coextensive with all extant Western culture with a more complicated story about how the cultural hegemony of phallocentric thinking has been, so to speak, erected."

When qualified by such caveats as this, the analyses by Goux and Irigaray remain useful to describe the unconscious emplacement of sexual difference within the structures of history and discourse, an emplacement that carries a heavy ideological freight. In elaborating his argument for how reproductive models provide the generative formulae for the symbolic order, Goux traces out how, from Plato to Hegel, the feminine gets tied to the maternal, the maternal to matter and nature and thus devalued. This logic "glorifies" the phallic, identifying the male and the paternal with idea and form. In this process that objectifies imaginary constructs, "history" is itself conceived in imaginary terms, predicated on the terms of biological difference: "If the phylogenetic odyssey of libidinal positions of knowledge, through which social access to reality is gained, comprises a multi-phased shift from inclusion in nature as mother, through a separation, and finally to an inclusive reciprocity with the other nature, human history through the present has been limited to the history of man: history is masculine. It has never been conceived otherwise." In fact, Goux suggests that history itself must be seen as a masculinist construct, based on the negation of the mother: "History is the history of man." Goux offers the corrective of a materialist dialectic that considers "material organizational potency as including the production of concepts, [and that] to make mind the offspring of organized matter, is to explode the paterialist barrier between concept and materiality." This would be an "other" matter, the work of another feminine not the mother, yet to be conceptualized. This "other woman" of whom Goux speaks bears some traits in common with the "other woman" whose concave mirror Irigaray theorizes.

To show how Echo gives voice to Narcissus's concerns, as I seek to do in this study, may not work to restore Echo's body and voice, her absent outline, but perhaps holds up a mirror in which her absence may be seen.

Several texts by Proust and Rousseau can serve as examples of works written in an autobiographical mode that tie the voice to the maternal and to the paired association with origin and with death invoked by the writer's self-constitution in writing. Behind the voice of the writer's "I" attempting to realize itself one hears the echo of the voice of his earliest cognizance of life, the echo of the subject's own intrinsic division.

The second volume of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu contains a passage that vividly invokes the motifs both of a disembodied female voice and of nostalgia for the maternal. The voice is that of Marcel's grandmother, with whom he has a conversation over the telephone, a still unfamiliar device at the time the narrative is placed. The passage falls early in Le Coté de Guermantes, which opens with a meditation on the evocative power of names. The resonant sounds of certain names (those of Guermantes, Berma, the names of officers at the garrison town Marcel visits) evoke places, artists, distinguished people still beyond Marcel's experience; he fills the neutral frames of the words with qualities projected from his own imaginings. Proust's work here is, of course, a progressive emptying and refilling of these names with new associations and qualities, ironic and surprising in their differences from Marcel's naive expectations.

Marcel's conversation with his grandmother takes place within this thematic matrix of familiar names paired with unfamiliar realities, potent incantations that call up emptiness — in short, the jarring or gratifying mismapping of language to the world it aims to represent. The shock of the grandmother's voice heard over the telephone line operates a transformation of these same thematic materials in another sphere: the seeming fullness of presence implied in the warmth of her voice inverts itself into a sharpened awareness of her absence and approaching death. A second framework sets up the conversation as well, that of the Proustian motif of absences, minor and major, temporary and permanent, that recurs throughout the novel: Marcel's separation from his grandmother is occasioned by his trip to Doncières where Saint-Loup is stationed, and the bass note of his resulting anxiety is preceded and comically paralleled by the goings-on surrounding Saint-Loup's separation from his mistress.

Proust couches his description of the unfamiliarity of the telephone in a hyperbolic and ironic vocabulary of fairy tale and myth that allows him to render a variation on his recurrent theme of the anesthetizing force of habit: the magic of the unfamiliar telephone quickly yields to banality, and we wait irritably during the slow connection, wondering whether to lodge a complaint. Proust humorously invokes the "sacred forces" at work in the establishment of telephone communication, comparing a person speaking to a loved one on the phone to the hero of a fairy tale aided by a sorceress to defeat distance, and the characterization of the faceless female operators as "Vigilant Virgins" and invisible, jealous "Guardian Angels" in fact introduces the real enchantment of his grandmother's transformed voice. From his ironically cadenced mythologizing of the operators as the "All Powerful by whose intervention the absent rise up at our side," "the Danaids of the unseen who incessantly empty and fill and transmit to one another the urns of sound," "the ever-irritable handmaidens of the Mystery, the umbrageous priestesses of the Invisible, the Young Ladies of the Telephone," he moves to the actual shock of hearing the loved voice. It only requires a call to them, he writes, and distance is abolished: "And as soon as our call has rung out, in the darkness filled with apparitions to which our ears alone are unsealed, a tiny sound, an abstract sound — the sound of distance overcome — and the voice of the dear one speaks to us."

Proust develops the material in the telephone conversation over several pages, moving through the logic of the emotions implicit in it. The telephone, which seems at first to abolish distance and separation, ends in reinforcing it. Thus, Marcel's joy at hearing the beloved voice gives way to a pang of Proustian anxiety over separation, when the sense of proximity of the beloved voice on the telephone provokes a paradoxical realization of the actual gulf that intervenes between them:

It is she, it is her voice that is speaking, that is there. But how far away it is! How often have I been unable to listen without anguish, as though, confronted by the impossibility of seeing, except after long hours of journeying, her whose voice was so close to my ear, I felt most clearly the illusoriness in the appearance of the most tender proximity, and at what a distance we may be from the persons we love at the moment when it seems that we have only to stretch out our hands to seize and hold them. A real presence, perhaps, that voice that seemed so near — in actual separation! (Proust, 135)

Instead of deriving comfort from the sound of his grandmother's voice heard over the telephone, Marcel experiences a wrenching sense of loss. Because of the way her voice is isolated, he hears it in a new way, as if for the first time. The very familiarity of her voice thus resolves into a poignant newness: he hears in it an unaccustomed sweetness and aged fragility that moves him painfully. The present separation brought home to him by this isolation of her voice gives him an intimation of her mortality, of the permanent separation to come. The mythological register on which Proust plays earlier in the passage remains to provide another, more serious reference, at first only implicit:

Many were the times, as I listened thus without seeing her who spoke to me from so far away, when it seemed to me that the voice was crying to me from the depths out of which one does not rise again, and I felt the anxiety that was one day to wring my heart when a voice would thus return (alone and attached no longer to a body which I was never to see again), to murmur in my ear words I longed to kiss as they issued from lips forever turned to dust. (Proust, 135)

Like the disembodied voice of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's Android, heard in a tomblike chamber, like the memory of Eurydice that haunts Orpheus, after her death the grandmother's voice will haunt Marcel from the depths.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Mechanical Song by Felicia Miller Frank. Copyright © 1995 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Introduction 1. Nostalgia for the maternal voice 2. Ech's haunting song 3. Consuelo: high priestess of song 4. The bird of aritifice: singers, angels and gender ambiguity 5. Baudelaire and the painted woman 6. Edison's recorded angel 7. Inhuman voices, sublime song Notes Bibliography Index.

Editorial Reviews

This is an absorbing study that brings together work in psychoanalysis, the history of opera, and nineteenth-century literature in such a way that each area is illumined by the others. [The author] deals resourcefully and informatively with an intriguing question of great interest to cultural and literary historians and to feminist and psychoanalytic critics.” —Ross Chambers, University of Michigan

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