by Anne Carson

1992

The Gender of Sound

Chapter 6

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.(1) If you hear a man talking in a gentle or highpitched voice you know he is a kinaidos (''catamite'').(2)
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 reasures 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 continlially 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.(4)
In Hellenistic and Roman times doctors recommended vocal exercises to cure all sorts of physical and psychological ailments in men, on the theory that the practice of declamation would relieve congestion in the head and correct the damage that men habitually do to themselves in daily life by using the voice for highpitched sounds, loud shouting or aimless conversation. Here again we note a confusion of vocal quality and vocal use. This therapy was not on the whole recommended to women or eunuchs or androgynes, who were believed to have the wrong kind of flesh and the wrong alignment of pores for the production of low vocal pitches, no matter how hard they exercised. But for the masculine physique vocal practice was thought an effective way to restore body and mind by pulling the voice back down to appropriately manly pitches.

I have a friend who is a radio journalist and he assures me that these suppositions about voice quality are still with us. He is a man and he is gay. He spent the first several years of his career in radio fending off the attempts of producers to deepen, darken, and depress his voice, which they described as "having too much smile in it."
Very few women in public life do not worry that their voices are too high or too light or too shrill to command respect. Margaret Thatcher trained for years with a vocal coach to make her voice sound more like those of the other Honourable Members and still earned the nickname Atilla The Hen. (6) This hen analogy goes back to the publicity surrounding Nancy Astor, first female member of the British House of Commons in 1919, who was described by her colleague Sir Henry Channon as "a queer combination of warmheartedness, originality, and rudeness... she rushes about like a decapitated hen... intriguing and enjoying the smell of blood... the mad witch."(7)
Madness and witchery as well as bestiality are conditions commonly associated with the use of the female voice in public, in ancient as well as modern contexts. Consider how many female celebrities of classical mythology, literature, and cult make themselves objectionable by the way they use their voice. For example there is the heartchilling groan of the Gorgon, whose name is derived from a Sanskrit word garg meaning "a guttural animal howl that issues as a great wind from the back of the throat through a hugely distended mouth." (8)
There are the Furies whose highpitched and horrendous voices are compared by Aiskhylos to howling dogs or sounds of people being tortured in hell (Eumenides).(9) There is the deadly voice of the Sirens and the dangerous ventriloquism of Helen (Odyssey) (10) and the incredible babbling of Kassandra (Aiskhylos, Agamemnon) (11) and the fearsome hullabaloo of Artemis as she charges through the woods (Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite). (12) There is the seductive discourse of Aphrodite which is so concrete an aspect of her power that she can wear it on her belt as a physical object or lend it to other women (Iliad).(13) There is the old woman of Eleusinian legend Iambe who shrinks obscenities and throws her skit up over her head to expose her genitalia.(14)
There is the haunting garrulity of the nymph Echo (daughter of Iambe in Athenian legend) who is described by Sophokles as “the girl with no door on her mouth” (Philoktetes) (15) Putting a door on the female mouth has been an important project of patriarchal culture from antiquity to the present day. Its chief tactic is an ideological association of female sound with monstrosity, disorder, and death. Consider this description by one of her biographers of the sound of Gertrude Stein:

The sentences, with their artful confusion of factual and metaphorical levels, carry with them as it seems to me a whiff of pure fear. It is a fear the projects Gertrude Stein across the boundary of woman and human and animal kind into monstrosity. The simile “she had a laugh like a beefsteak” which identifies Gertrude Stein with cattle is followed at once by the statement “she loved beef” indicating that Gertrud Stein ate cattle. Creatures who eat their own kind are regularly called cannibals and regarded as abnormal.
Gertrude Stein’s other abnormal attributes, notably her large physical size, and lesbianism, were emphasized persistently by critics, biographers and journalists who did not know what to make of her prose. The marginalization of her personality was a way to deflect her writing from literary centrality. If she is fat, funny-looking and sexually deviant she must be a marginal talent, is the assumption.

One of the literary patriarchs who feared Gertrud Stein most was Ernest Hemingway. And it is interesting to hear him tell the story of how he came to end his friendship with Gertrude Stein because he could not tolerate the sound of her voice. The story takes place in Paris. Hemingway tells it from the point of view of a disenchanted expatriate just realizing that he cannot after all make a life for himself amid the alien culture where he is stranded. One spring day in 1924 Hemingway comes to call on Gertrude Stein and is admitted by the maid:

The maidservant opened the door before I rang and told me to come in and wait. Miss Stein would be down at any moment. It was before noon but the maidservant poured me a glass of eau-de-vie, put it in my hand and winked happily. The colorless liquid felt good on my toungue and it was still in my mouth when I head someone speaking to Miss Stein as I had never heard one person speak to another; never, anywhere, ever.
Then Miss Stein’s voice came pleading and begging, saying, “Don’t, pussy. Don’t. Don’t, please don’t. Please don’t, pussy”

I swallowed the drink and put the glass down on the table and started for the door. The maidservant shook her finger at me and whispered, “Don’t go. She’ll be right down.“
“I have to go,” I said and tried not to hear any more as I left but it was still going on and the only way I could not hear it was to be gone. It was bad to hear and the answers were worse…
That was the way it finished for me, stupidly enough… She got to look like a Roman emperor and that was fine if you liked your women to look like Roman emperors…
In the end everyone or not quite everyone made friends again in order not to be stuffy or righteous. But I could never make friends again truly, neither in my heart nor in my head. When you cannot make friends any more in your head is the worst. But it was more complicated than that.(17)

Indeed it is more complicated than that. As we shall see if we keep Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein in mind while we consider another vignette about a man confronting the female voice. [...]

1. Physiognomics, 807a.
2. Physiognomics, 813a. On kinaidos see Aiskhines 1.131 and 2.99; Dover (1975), 17, 75; M. W. Gleason (1990), 401; I am indebted to Maud Gleason also for allowing me to preview a chapter (“The Role of the Voice in the Maintenance of Gender Boundaries”) of her book on self-presentation in the Second Sophistic, Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome.
3. Aristophanes, Ekklesiazousai, 113–114.
4. Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals, 787b–788.
5. Oribasios, 6; Gleason (1994), 12.
6. A. Raphael, The Observer, October 7, 1979.
7. S. Rogers in S. Ardener (1981), 12.
8. T. Howe (1954), 209; J.-P. Vernant (1991), 117.
9. Eumenides, 117, 131.
10. Odyssey, 4.275.
11. Aiskhylos, Agamemnon, 1213–1214.
12. Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, 18–20.
13. Iliad, 14.216.
14. On Iambe see Me. Olender (1990), 85-90 and references.
15. Philoktetes, 188.
16. M. D. Luhan (1935), 324.
17. E. Hemingway (1964), 118.

Design and programming
by Lucie Bole, 09/2018