Don’t you wish you could rise powerfully above your time and name? I’m sure we all try, but here we are, always slipping and falling down into them, speaking their narrow language.

—“The Story Hearer,” Later the Same Day, 140

With the publication of Paley’s first collection of short stories, a boldly original voice emerged, telling stories about women unlike any we had heard before. But even though her early work challenges dominant meanings and offers woman-centered definitions, it does not provide the sort of explicit and conscious critique of male dominance in language that we find in her more recent work.

Of course, one can make changes in language without consciously identifying language as the site of a problem, and indeed Paley does so in her early work. But it is interesting that as Paley has matured, and as feminists have developed increasingly powerful critiques of the dominant language, Paley’s stories have come to incorporate ever more explicit references to women’s particularly problematic relationship with language. In arguing that Paley reveals a conscious awareness that women have been muted and offers specific challenges to examples of male dominance in language, this chapter will draw heavily on evidence in Later the Same Day, her most recent volume of short stories. But first I want to show that such language awareness, although much less consciously developed, is prefigured in her first two volumes.

When Paley began writing stories in the 1950s, the generic use of man and he went unchallenged, and no one voiced concern over the precedence of the male term in such phrases as “husband and wife” or “male and female.” The title of Paley’s first volume contains an interesting combination of accepting and challenging these evidences of male dominance which would provoke so much discussion twenty years later. The Little Disturbances of Man: Stories of Women and Men at Love is a title whose generic use of man sounds like a misnomer to contemporary ears. But the same title challenges dominant language in a subtitle that gives unconventional precedence to the female term. In fact, Paley’s use of “women and men” was so unconventional that in the second edition of her book, a typesetter “inadvertently” transposed the words, a mistake Paley herself failed to catch.¹ The book continued to be printed with the transposed title until it was reissued in the eighties. The typesetter’s mistake provides a dramatic illustration of the power of dominant meanings to reassert themselves.

The Little Disturbances of Man also contains the first evidence of Paley’s belief that women and men do not always speak the same language. In “A Subject of Childhood,” Faith’s boyfriend Clifford accuses her of having done a “rotten job” as a mother and of raising her kids “lousy” and “stinking.” These remarks so infuriate Faith that she hurls an ashtray at him. She takes this action because Clifford has used the wrong language: “‘You don’t say things like that to a woman,’ I whispered. ‘You damn stupid jackass. You just don’t say anything like that to a woman. Wash yourself, moron, you’re bleeding to death’” (140). “A Subject of Childhood” is one of two stories about Faith in this volume linked by the title “Two Short Sad Stories in a Long and Happy Life.” Besides the characters of Faith and her two sons Richard and Anthony, these stories share a growing consciousness that women and men occupy different worlds (more on this in chapter 4). Faith’s explanation to Clifford rests on the propositions that women have particular and distinctive language requirements and that men often fail to understand this.

The idea that sometimes women and men simply do not speak the same language surfaces again in Paley’s second volume of stories:

Cool it! he said. Come back. I was just starting to fuck you and you get so freaked.

And another thing. Don’t use that word. I hate it. When you’re with a woman you have to use the language that’s right for her.

(“Enormous Changes at the Last Minute,” Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, 128)

Paley’s character is not the first to note that fuck is a word that describes sexual activity from a male perspective. As Germaine Greer noted in 1971, “All the vulgar linguistic emphasis is placed upon the poking element, fucking, screwing, rooting, shagging are all acts performed upon the passive female.”²

Enormous Changes contains another instance of an explicit critique of male language. In “The Immigrant Story,” Jack’s use of dominant language seems to the female character so dangerous that she refuses to answer him. Jack and a woman friend (probably Faith) argue about why Jack as a young boy found his father sleeping in the crib. Jack shouts, “Bullshit! She was trying to make him feel guilty. Where were his balls?” The narrator-character explains to the reader: “I will never respond to that question. Asked in a worried way again and again, it may become responsible for the destruction of the entire world. I gave it two minutes of silence” (172). Never in the discussions of male dominance in language have we seen a clearer dissection of the word balls as a name for macho courage. This narrator knows she has encountered a word so dangerous that silence is the only effective response. A nuclear holocaust could be precipitated by just this mix of insecurity and machismo.

One other technique Paley has developed for critiquing male language appears in Enormous Changes. At times, she explicates the problems with dominant language by contrasting the dominant label with a woman’s definition. A narrator who reflects the consciousness of Faith tells us about Faith’s ex-husband, Ricardo:

He was really, he said, a man’s man. Like any true man’s man, he ran after women too. …

He called them pet names, which generally referred to certain flaws in their appearance. He called Faith Baldy, although she is not and never will be bald. She is finehaired and fair, and regards it as part of the lightness of her general construction that when she gathers her hair into an ordinary topknot, the stuff escapes around the contour of her face, making her wisp-haired and easy to blush. He is now living with a shapely girl with white round arms he calls Fatty.

(“Faith in the Afternoon,” 34)

The contrast between Ricardo’s and Faith’s meanings in this scene is stark indeed. According to dominant meanings, a man’s man is one whose masculinity is unassailable. He is unambiguously one of the boys. Faith’s commentary on Ricardo’s dominant definitions directs our attention to the objectifying and demeaning implications of his names for women. Ricardo’s requisite pursuit of women depends on a view of women as interchangeable objects of male desire. Similarly, Ricardo’s “pet names” are not endearments at all but call attention to the women’s failure to conform to a narrowly defined and objectifying standard of female beauty.

Paley’s critiques of and negotiations with dominant meanings depend on her belief that the meaning of a word is not absolutely fixed but rather is negotiated through use, a belief that surfaces in the title story of her second volume. In “Enormous Changes at the Last Minute,” songwriter Dennis defends his use of a word (ecology) that Alexandra believes is too technical for a song: “Any word is good, it’s the big word today anyway, said Dennis. It’s what you do with the word. The language and the idea, they work it out together” (129). Dennis’s comment recognizes that language and the ideas language represents are not identical but exist instead in a relationship of tension. Furthermore, meaning is evolutionary, negotiated through use.

Although language that is fixed and that represents perfectly the ideas to which it refers might simplify the world, it is not available to the narrator of another story in this collection, “Faith in a Tree”: “Despite no education, Mrs. Finn always is more in charge of word meanings than I am. She is especially in charge of Good and Bad. My language limitations here are real. My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life. If I really knew the language there would surely be in my head, as there is in Webster’s or the Dictionary of American Slang, that unreducible verb designed to tell a person like me what to do next” (85). Although Faith claims that the language limitations are her own, the reader recognizes her ironic acknowledgment that Mrs. Finn, with her belief in absolutely fixed word meanings, has the more serious limitations. Faith shares with Paley a postmodern belief in the negotiation of meaning and the potential within language for the kind of wordplay that expands or revises definitions (we will examine the negotiation of meaning through wordplay more fully in the next chapter).

These first two collections of stories were published in 1959 and 1974. Thus, Paley wrote most of these stories well before the comprehensive critique of male dominance in language that feminists have recently articulated (in fact, many of these stories preceded the critique of male dominance at all—the word sexism was not coined until the late sixties).³ Given the times in which she was writing, it is not surprising that these stories reveal relatively few examples of conscious critiques of language. As awareness of the male dominance revealed and perpetuated in language increased during the seventies, so too did Paley’s explication of the problem in her stories. Her latest volume, Later the Same Day, provides ample evidence that Paley believes language is male dominated and language change worth the struggle.

The women in Paley’s most recent stories recognize that many of the words used in the dominant language to name women function to demean or denigrate us. When the middle-aged Selena addresses her friends, she reveals a developing consciousness of this: “Well girls—excuse me, I mean ladies—it’s time for me to rest” (“Friends,” 76). Selena participates in the conscious language change which results from the recognition that naming grown women “girls” belittles them, but her substitution of “ladies” still smacks of patriarchal control. In “The Story Hearer,” Paley’s recurrent character Faith goes farther than Selena, objecting to a similar title and explaining exactly what is wrong with such names for women:

At this point the butcher said, what’ll you have, young lady?

I refused to tell him.

Jack, to whom, if you remember, I was telling this daylong story, muttered, Oh God, no! You didn’t do that again.

I did, I said. It’s an insult. You do not say to a woman of my age who looks my age, what’ll you have, young lady? I did not answer him. If you say that to someone like me, it really means, What do you want you pathetic old hag?

Are you getting like that now too? he asked.

Look, Jack, I said, face facts. Let’s say the butcher meant no harm. Eddie, he’s not so bad. He spends two hours commuting to New York from Jersey. Then he spends two hours going back. I’m sorry for his long journey. But I still mean it. He mustn’t say it any more.

Eddie, I said, don’t talk like that or I won’t tell you what I want. (136)

Faith wins her point after a fashion. The butcher does not call her “young lady.” His response, however, reveals his inability or unwillingness to find any real alternative to denigrating names for women: “whatever you say, Honey, but what’ll you have?” Language change is both important enough to struggle for and exceedingly difficult to implement.

Faith’s success with the butcher is mixed, at best. But her protest and her lengthy and lucid explanation of the problem to Jack make it abundantly clear that she knows exactly what is wrong with naming a woman of her age “young lady.” Jack’s strategy for silencing such protest is to place Faith in a group with other women who are “like that”—i.e., crazy, difficult, strident, unreasonable. Women who make explicit the language bias against women learn that the price of such protest is classification as members of an undesirable group. Jack’s remark is an example of the kinds of pressures exerted against women who attempt to break down mutedness, but it does nothing to dissuade Faith from voicing her critique.

To correct inaccurate names reveals an underlying belief that such names matter. In the same story, Faith corrects an old friend:

You don’t understand Artaud, he said. I believe that the theatre is the handmaiden of the revolution.

The valet, you mean.

He deferred to my correction by nodding his head. He accepts criticism gracefully, since he can always meet it with a smiling bumper of iron opinion. (136)

Faith objects here to a metaphor that places the female in the subservient position. Her friend could convey his idea as easily with a metaphor of male subordination. She believes it is important to make these corrections, even though the old friend’s “smiling bumper of iron opinion” shows that real change is as unlikely here as in the exchange with the butcher.

Some words are used to apply to only one sex, even when the same behavior can be observed in persons of either sex: “Jack … unbuttoned his shirt. My face is very fond of the gray-brown hairs of his chest. … He began to get a very rosy look about him, which is a nice thing to happen to a man’s face. It’s not called blushing. Blushing is an expression of shyness and female excitement at the same time. In men it’s observed as an energetic act the blood takes on its determined own” (“Listening,” 205–206). Although Jack is, in fact, blushing, dominant meanings dictate that men do not blush, so the narrator offers this tongue-in-cheek explanation of the difference. The technique she uses in this passage is a favorite of Paley’s. By explaining in simple and patient terms the implicit notions on which dominant usage rests, she exposes the absurdity of dominant categories. Her (only apparently) guileless statement of the enthymeme immediately exposes its illogic to the reader.

In “The Story Hearer,” Faith experiences the difficulty of trying to get women’s meanings into the record. The butcher announces:

… when I was a boy, a kid—what we called City College—you know it was C.C.N.Y. then, well, we called it Circumcised Citizens of New York.

Really, said Jim. He looked at me. Did I object? Was I offended?

The fact of male circumcision doesn’t insult me, I said. However, I understand that the clipping of clitorises of young girls continues in Morocco to this day.

Jim has a shy side. He took his pork butt and said goodbye. (137)

The butcher’s joke is, of course, based on an assumption that all City College students are Jewish males. Thus the comment is at once anti-Semitic and sexist. The anti-Semitism is the basis of the joke, while the sexism results from ignoring the presence of women. The muted condition of women is maintained through just such an assumption of males as the normative humans. Faith attempts to shift the conversation to a consideration of women’s experience (and thus highlight the male-dominant perspective on which the joke is based) by making a transition from circumcision to clitoridectomy. But her effort is met with awkward silence. The men are embarrassed not by their own omission of women, but because Faith has violated a cultural rule that denies the very existence of clitoridectomy (and even of clitorises, for that matter).

Women who try to tell the truth about women’s lives find that the dominant culture can employ a whole range of strategies to silence them or divert them from their point:

Ruth was still certain that the bad politics and free life of Jiang Qing would be used for at least a generation to punish ALL Chinese women.

But isn’t that true everywhere, said Faith. If you say a simple thing like, “There are only eight women in congress,” or if you say the word “patriarchy,” someone always says, Yeah? look at Margaret Thatcher, or look at Golda Meir.

(“The Expensive Moment,” 189)

Faith identifies a familiar patriarchal strategy: justifying the continuation of male dominance by pointing to the failure of token women to provide an alternative. Meanwhile, the colossal failures of patriarchy—war, ecological destruction, world hunger—go unmentioned.

Faith realizes that dominant beliefs about the lives of women make it so difficult for woman-centered stories to get a hearing that sometimes it is better not to try to tell them. In “Listening,” Jack, Faith’s companion, asks her to tell him stories about women:

… all those stories are about men, he said. You know I’m more interested in women. Why don’t you tell me stories told by women about women?

Those are too private.

Why don’t you tell them to me? he asked sadly. Well, Jack, you have your own woman stories. You know, your falling-in-love stories, your French-woman-during-the-Korean-War stories, your magnificent-woman stories, your beautiful-new-young-wife stories, your political-comrade-though-extremely-beautiful stories …

Silence—the space that follows unkindness in which little truths growl. (203)

Faith refuses to tell Jack the “stories told by women about women” because “those are too private.” She implies that the stories told by women about women can only be told to women. As Faith lists Jack’s “woman stories,” she reminds us of the narrow and distorting formulae within which women appear in dominant narratives. The women in Jack’s stories are seen through a romantic and objectifying lens that is so powerful that it would profane and distort his hearing of the woman-centered stories Faith could tell.

In “Ruthy and Edie,” Faith offers further evidence that stories structure meaning and that the stories of a dominant tradition often fail to account for the experiences of female readers. Two small girls talk “about the real world of boys” (115). Ruthy maintains that one of the advantages of being a boy is that “you could be a soldier.” We learn that “Ruthy was a big reader and most interesting reading was about bravery—for instance Roland’s Horn at Roncevaux. Her father had been brave and there was often a lot of discussion about this at suppertime. In fact, he sometimes modestly said, Yes, I suppose I was brave in those days. And so was your mother, he added. Then Ruthy’s mother put his boiled egg in front of him where he could see it” (116). This passage is revealing both because it shows how Ruthy has identified with the male protagonists in her childhood reading, concluding that theirs are the interesting lives (an experience all too common for young female readers), and because it offers an ironic contrast between the family belief in the father’s past bravery and the reality of his present life in which his wife waits on him as if he were helpless.

In “Zagrowsky Tells,” Paley herself provides a good explanation for the prevalence of explicit critiques in language in her recent stories. We learn from the narrator Zagrowsky that he is another in the apparently long list of men whose language Faith has corrected: “She got more to say. She also doesn’t like how I talk to women. She says I called Mrs. Z. a grizzly bear a few times. It’s my wife, no? That I was winking and blinking at the girls, a few pinches. A lie … maybe I patted, but I never pinched. Besides, I know for a fact a couple of them loved it. She says, No. None of them liked it. Not one. They only put up with it because it wasn’t time yet in history to holler” (165). As women have become conscious of our position as an oppressed group, it has become “time … in history to holler”; thus, the women in Paley’s most recent fiction register complaints when the language is used against them.

These passages clearly demonstrate Paley’s consciousness of the language problems women face when trying to articulate our experience through dominant modes. In a statement from “The Story Hearer” that served as the epigraph for this chapter, Faith provides a good summary of the extent of the problem and the urgency of the situation: “In fact, I am stuck here among my own ripples and tides. Don’t you wish you could rise powerfully above your time and name? I’m sure we all try, but here we are, always slipping and falling down into them, speaking their narrow language, though the subject, which is how to save the world—and quickly—is immense” (140).

Notes

1. Lidoff, “Clearing Her Throat,” 23.

2. Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch, 41, cited in Spender, Man Made Language, 177.

3. Although the current wave of feminism did not provide the first critique of male dominance, the fact remains that in the fifties and sixties earlier critiques had been thoroughly suppressed and the contemporary women’s movement did not yet exist.