The Articulation of Difference: Imagining “Women’s Language” between 1650 and the Present Sophie A. Salvo Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2017 © 2017 Sophie A. Salvo All rights reserved Abstract The Articulation of Difference: Imagining “Women’s Language” between 1650 and the Present Sophie A. Salvo This dissertation is an archaeology of so-called Weibersprache. While the concept of feminine language is typically associated with 1970s feminist theory, this study shows that there was a diverse history of conceptualizing “women’s language” prior to this period. I begin with seventeenth-century ethnographic texts that report on a langage des femmes among Island Caribs (by authors such as Jean Baptiste du Tertre, Charles de Rochefort, and Raymond Breton). Shifting genres, I then trace how the idea of a separate women’s language was appropriated by German philology and philosophies of language in the nineteenth century. I show how authors ranging from Wilhelm von Humboldt to Fritz Mauthner reconceptualize Weibersprache to be a universal female phenomenon and present “primitive” women’s languages as evidence for the general alterity of female speech. The second chapter of the dissertation juxtaposes this genealogy of Weibersprache with the nineteenth-century debate over the origin of grammatical gender, and contends that discourses on gendered language constitute an important part of the broader reconfiguration of the sexes during this period. The third chapter moves to literary discourse to show how the notion of women's language fulfills a different discursive function around 1900. With recourse to texts by Robert Musil (Vereinigungen, Drei Frauen), Hugo von Hofmannsthal (Furcht, Elektra), and Walter Benjamin (“Das Gespräch”), I demonstrate how Modernist writers use the idea of an alternative feminine language as a means to test the boundaries of their own literary genres. Once the concept of Weibersprache is reimagined in Modernist literature, it assumes a utopian dimension, which then becomes a central concern for French feminist theory. The fourth chapter offers new readings of feminist theories of language (Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva) by contrasting their focus on textuality with earlier conceptions of Weibersprache that link women’s language to orality. A genealogy of “women’s language” from “primitive” phenomenon to feminist politics in ethnography, philology, literature and theory, this dissertation is an interdisciplinary study of language, sex and gender. Table of Contents Introduction 1 Sex as Historical Category 7 Outline of Chapters 11 A Note on Terminology 15 Chapter 1. Auch bei uns: “Women’s Language” between Cultural and Sexual Difference 17 Early Ethnographic Accounts of the langage des femmes 20 Linguistic Relativity and the Sexed Speaker 36 Strategies of Authority: Female Speech vs. the Language of Science 54 Conclusion: Weibersprache into the Twentieth Century 67 Chapter 2. The Sex of Language: Locating the Origin of Grammatical Gender 71 The Beginnings of the Romantic Theory of Grammatical Gender 81 From Animism to Analogy: Humboldt and Grimm on Grammatical Gender 90 “Eine nichtsagende Form”: The Neogrammarian Critique of Grimm 107 Chapter 3. Embodying the Unsayable: “Feminine Language” and Literary Form around 1900 115 Can Women Speak? Benjamin’s Silent Sappho 120 “Unsagbar”: “Feminine Language” and Narrative Form in Musil 130 The Female Body in Hofmannsthal’s “Medienwechsel” 158 i Chapter 4. “Women’s Language” Revisited 177 What is Language? Norms and Deviations 179 Can “Women’s Language” be Written? 188 “Feminine” Form: Theory and Practice 193 Gender and Language after the 1970s: The End of Essentialism? 197 Bibliography 205 ii Acknowledgements This dissertation would not have been possible without the support of my teachers, family, and friends. I would first like to thank my advisor, Oliver Simons, who has been a source of inspiration since I first enrolled in his Kleist class as an undergraduate. His patience, insight, and enthusiasm for this project gave me the confidence to pursue a different approach to gender studies and to develop my own voice as a scholar. I would also like to thank my second reader, Dorothea von Mücke, who has offered encouragement and thoughtful commentary since the inception of this project. Her ideas helped me to reframe the dissertation and to think about the material in new ways. Additionally, I would like to thank Vincent Debaene, the third member of my committee, whose helpful comments pushed me to consider the implications of my own rhetoric. I am also indebted to Nicola Behrmann and Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky for their productive comments during the defense. I would furthermore like to express my gratitude to my mother, Helene Alexander, and to my father, Robert Alexander, for their continuous love and support over the past seven years— and all the years before that—and for never once questioning my decision to pursue a Ph.D., even when I did. Finally, I would like to thank my husband, Arthur Salvo, who thought through every chapter with me and read every word I wrote. His love, encouragement, and culinary expertise got me through the most challenging parts of the dissertation, and it is to him that I dedicate this work. iii Introduction In Les Bijoux indiscrets, Denis Diderot’s novel from 1748, the sultan Mangogul is bored with his life of leisure and decides to play a trick on the ladies at court. He wishes for the women to tell him of the amorous adventures “qu’elles ont et qu’elles ont eues” and, to this end, invokes a genie. The genie balks at first—“vouloir que des femmes confessent leurs aventures, cela n’a jamais été et ne sera jamais”1—but then produces a magic ring. Whenever the sultan wears this ring, the genie instructs, “Toutes les femmes sur lesquelles vous en tournerez le chaton, raconteront leurs intrigues à voix haute, claire et intelligible: mais n’allez pas croire au moins que c’est par la bouche qu’elles parleront.” —Et par où donc, ventre-saint-gris! s'écria Mangogul, parleront-elles donc? —Par la partie la plus franche qui soit en elles, et la mieux instruite des choses que vous désirez savoir, dit [le génie]; par leurs bijoux.2 Much to the delight of the sultan, and to the dismay of the ladies, the genie’s decree turns out to be true. In the presence of Mangogul’s ring, the “bijoux” reveal the sexual exploits that the women would prefer to keep hidden. Some women try to muzzle their genitals, with disastrous results: within Diderot’s text, the jewels speak a truth that cannot be silenced. In the end, the sultan abandons the amusement of the ring only once he has turned it on his “favorite” and obtained documentation of her fidelity. Diderot does not invent the trope of the vagina loquens; it is present already in the medieval period, if not earlier. Texts such as Le Chevalier Qui fit les Cons Parler and Der Rosendorn from the thirteenth century, as well as a contemporary text of Diderot’s, Nocrion, 1 Denis Diderot, Les Bijoux indiscrets, Oeuvres de Denis Diderot, vol. 10 (Paris: Desray, 1798), 3-413, here 15. 2 Ibid., 15-16. 1 conte allobroge,3 all feature male characters who receive the power to make women’s genitals speak. What is noteworthy about Diderot’s novel, as well the earlier texts that he borrows from, is that the language the vagina speaks is not in any way marked as Other. It is the same language as that of the narrator, as well as of the other characters—“à voix haute, claire et intelligible,” as the genie puts it. Indeed, the voices of the jewels seem to be directly aligned with the voice of the narrator in Les Bijoux indiscrets, insofar as they are themselves associated with narration. At the beginning of the novel, the sultan is bored because his favorite lady has run out of stories to tell him. He escapes his boredom only once the jewels begin to tell their tales; the jewels thus take over the function of storytelling within the text. In the kind of speech they produce, Diderot furthermore does not distinguish the jewels from other figures. Their loquacity, for instance—the text often makes reference to their “chatter”—is not marked as specifically female, as Diderot assigns this attribute to male characters as well.4 Les Bijoux indiscrets suggests that, whatever difference there may be between the sexes, this difference is not borne out in language. In fact, the arrival of the “talking jewels” does away with superficial distinctions between male and female speech in the text. The female characters 3 See Emma L. E. Rees, The Vagina: A Literary and Cultural History (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 61-72. 4 Chantal Thomas, for instance, compares the chatter of the “jewels” to the “irrepressible chattering” of the titular character in Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste et son maître. See Thomas, “The Indiscreet Jewels: A Dangerous Pastime,” in The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth Century France, ed. Michel Feher (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), 334-346, specifically page 336. Thomas Kavanagh furthermore argues that the language the “jewels” speak is not marked in relation to the physical body: “If it is a voice of nature we are listening to here, it is a nature held strangely apart from the whole and disruptive body in which it is grounded. […] the jewels express themselves in a voice abstracted from the present reality of the physical body.” Thomas Kavanagh, “Language as Deception in Diderot’s ‘Les Bijoux indiscrets,’” Diderot Studies, vol. 23 (1988): 101-113, here 107-108. 2 may seem to speak differently than their male counterparts—more prudent and coquettish, less direct—but the language of the jewels, which is clear and candid, show this to be an affected stance, rather than evidence of a truly different nature.