A still, small voice has warned me again to postpone the description of hysteria.¹

[Freud to Fliess, January 1, 1896]

I felt sorry for mama. Trying to believe his story kilt her.²

[Alice Walker's Celie]

In her speech before the London/National Society for Women's Service on January 21, 1931, Virginia Woolf figured the woman novelist as a fisherwoman who lets the hook of her imagination down into the depths “of the world that lies submerged in our unconscious being.” Feeling a violent jerk, she pulls the line up short, and the “imagination comes to the top in a state of fury”:

Good heavens she cries—how dare you interfere with me. … And I—that is the reason—have to reply, “My dear you were going altogether too far. Men would be shocked.” Calm yourself. … In fifty years I shall be able to use all this very queer knowledge that you are ready to bring me. But not now. You see I go on, trying to calm her, I cannot make use of what you tell me—about women's bodies for instance—their passions—and so on, because the conventions are still very strong. If I were to overcome the conventions I should need the courage of a hero, and I am not a hero. …

Very well says the imagination, dressing herself up again in her petticoat and skirts. … We will wait another fifty years. But it seems to me a pity.³

Woman's freedom to tell her stories—and indeed, as this fable shows, to know them fully herself—would come, Woolf went on to predict, once she is no longer the dependent daughter, wife, and servant. Given that condition, Woolf envisioned “a step upon the stair”: “You will hear somebody coming. You will open the door. And then—this at least is my guess—there will take place between you and some one else the most interesting, exciting, and important conversation that has ever been heard” (Pargiters, xliv).

But that was to be in “fifty years.” In 1931, Woolf still felt a silence even within all the writing by women that she knew—even, indeed, within her own. Woolf's fable of silences that go unheard within women's writing points to a violence that is all the more powerful for being nearly invisible, and it interprets women's silence in literary history as an effect of repression, not of absence. In this essay, I will explore the literary history implied by Woolf's fisherwoman image, reading it backward, through Homer and Freud, to elucidate the “conventions” that bound her imagination; and forward, to contemporary works by women that fulfill Woolf's “guess” that women would soon break a very significant silence. Drawing upon feminist analyses of Freud's discovery and rejection of the seduction theory of hysteria, I will argue that the relations of literary daughters and fathers resemble in some important ways the model developed by Judith Herman and Lisa Hirschman to describe the family situations of incest victims: a dominating, authoritarian father; an absent, ill, or complicitous mother; and a daughter who, prohibited by her father from speaking about the abuse, is unable to sort out her contradictory feelings of love for her father and terror of him, of desire to end the abuse and fear that if she speaks she will destroy the family structure that is her only security.⁴ By aligning a paradigmatic father-daughter dialogue in Homer's Iliad with Freud's dialogue with the hysterics, we can grasp the outline of what I shall call the hysterical cultural script: the cultural text that dictates to males and females alike the necessity of silencing woman's speech when it threatens the father's power. This silencing insures that the cultural daughter remains a daughter, her power suppressed and muted; while the father, his power protected, makes culture and history in his own image. Yet, as the hysterics' speech cured their symptoms, so women, telling stories formerly repressed, have begun to realize the prediction of Woolf's fisherwoman. Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) and Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982) exemplify the breaking of women's forbidden stories into literary history—an event that reverberates far beyond their heroes' individual histories to reshape our sense of our cultural past and its possible future directions.

CULTURAL FATHERS AND DAUGHTERS: SOME INTERESTING CONVERSATIONS

What is the fisherwoman's story, the one that got away? The answer I wish to pursue begins with the earliest conversation between man and woman in our literary tradition, that between Helen and Priam in the Iliad, book 3. Although readers tend to remember the Helen of the Iliad as silent—beauty of body her only speech—the text reveals not Helen's silence but her silencing. As they stand upon the city wall gazing down at the battlefield, the Trojan king and patriarch Priam asks Helen to point out to him the Greek heroes whose famous names he knows. Her answer exceeds Priam's request:

                                                                                          “Revere you as I do,
I dread you, too, dear father. Painful death
would have been sweeter for me, on that day
I joined your son, and left my bridal chamber,
my brothers, my grown child, my childhood friends!
But no death came, though I have pined and wept.
Your question, now: yes, I can answer it:
that man is Agamemnon, son of Atreus,
lord of the plains of Argos, ever both
a good king and a formidable solider—
brother to the husband of a wanton …
                                                            or was that life a dream?”(5)

Helen first invokes her own fear of and reverence for Priam. But this daughterly homage to her cultural father only frames her expression of her longing for her former life and companions. Helen, however, is powerless to escape the male war economy that requires her presence to give meaning to its conflicts, and so she translates her desire for her old life into a death wish that expresses at once culturally induced masochism and the intensity of her resistance to her own entanglement in the warriors' plot.

Priam appears to reply only to the words that answer his query:

The old man gazed and mused and softly cried:
“O fortunate son of Atreus! Child of destiny,
O happy soul! How many sons of Akhaia
serve under you! In the old days once I went
into the vineyard country of Phrygia
and saw the Phrygian host on nimble ponies,
.....And they allotted me as their ally
my place among them when the Amazons
came down, those women who were fighting men;
but that host never equaled this,
the army of the keen-eyed men of Akhaia.”

[Iliad, 74]

Priam seems not to notice Helen's misery as he turns to imaginary competition with the admired and envied Agamemnon. What links his speech to Helen's, however, is the extraordinary fact that the occasion he invokes as his most memorable experience of troops arrayed for battle is a battle against the Amazons. That Amazons come to his mind suggests that, on some level, he has heard Helen's desires. Priam's speech recapitulates his conflict with Helen, and hers with Greek culture, as an archetypal conflict between male and female powers. Significantly, Priam does not say which of these forces triumphed. But in leaving the action suspended, he connects past with present, the Amazons' challenge with this moment's conflict between his desires and Helen's, who, merely in having desires that would interfere with her role as battle prize, becomes for Priam the Amazon.

What does it mean that Helen should become the Amazon in Priam's imagination? Page duBois and William Blake Tyrrell analyze the Amazon myth as a representation of female power that has escaped the bounds within which Greek culture, specifically the marriage structure, strives to contain it.⁶ The Amazon myth, Tyrrell writes, is about daughters, warriors, and marriage. It projects male fear that women will challenge their subordinate status in marriage and with it the rule of the father. In Varro's account of the mythology of Athens's origins, the female citizens of Athens were, under Cecrops, dispossessed of their social and political authority after they banded together to vote for Athena as their city's presiding deity and brought down Poseidon's jealous wrath: “‘They could no longer cast a vote, no new-born child would take the mother's name,’ … [and] they are no longer called Athenians but daughters of Athenians.”⁷ From the Greek woman's lifelong role of daughter, her deprivation of political, economic, and social power, the Amazon myth emerges as “the specter of daughters who refuse their destiny and fail to make the accepted transition through marriage to wife and motherhood” (Amazons, 65). Such unruly daughters threatened to be “rivals of men,” “opposed or antithetical to the male as father” (Amazons, 83). Becoming a rival in the male imagination, the daughter also becomes a warrior—as Helen does to Priam, as Clytemnestra does to Apollo when, in the Eumenides, he laments that Agamemnon was not cut down by an Amazon instead of by her, as Dido does to Aeneas in his premonitory conflation of her with Penthesilea in Aeneid 1. These allusions suggest that the Amazon figure, a figment of the male imagination, expresses male desire to contain the threat of a female uprising within the arena of the battlefield; that is, to transform the invisible threat of female revolt into a clear and present danger that males might then band together to combat in the regulated violence of war. In linking Helen with the Amazons, Priam dramatizes the threat that female desire poses to the male war culture predicated on its subjugation. Their conversation replicates the larger design of Homer's epic, which, being “his” story, not hers, turns the tale of a woman's abduction and silencing into the story of a ten-year war between two male cultures. Priam's battle with the Amazons remains suspended in his speech because that battle has not ended. But in this conversation, it is Priam, the cultural father, who triumphs, while Helen's story, by his refusal to hear it, becomes the repressed but discernible shadow of Priam's own.

Helen's exchange with Priam is one skirmish in her culture's war against the Amazons, and a subsequent conversation between Helen and Aphrodite depicts another battle in the form of a cultural daughter's seduction. Here, Helen opposes Aphrodite's demand that she join Paris in bed while the battle rages outside: “‘O immortal madness, / why do you have this craving to seduce me? / … Go take your place beside Alexandros! / … Be / unhappy for him, shield him, till at last / he marries you—or, as he will, enslaves you. / I shall not join him there!’” (Iliad, 81–82). Helen passionately and eloquently resists her cultural fate, but Homer's Olympian magic conquers her. Aphrodite silences Helen and enforces her role as object, not agent, of desire by threatening her: “Better not be so difficult. / … I can make hatred for you grow / amid both Trojans and Danaäns, / and if I do, you'll come to a bad end” (Iliad, 82).⁸ The male-authored goddess, embodying the sublimated social authority of Greek culture, forces Helen to relinquish control over her sexuality to the “higher” power of male culture and, like a complicitous mother, presses her to conform to its rule. Helen easily resists being “seduced,” angrily thrusting back upon Aphrodite the role of compliant wife/slave that the goddess recommends to her. But this scene makes no distinction between seduction and rape—between being “led astray” and being sexually violated—for Helen can resist sexual complicity only on pain of being cast out altogether from the social world, which is constructed upon marriage. She can be a faithful wife or a “wanton,” a “nightmare,” a “whore”; she can be a dutiful daughter or an unruly one. But she cannot act out her own desire as Menelaus and Paris, Agamemnon and Akhilleus, Khryses and Hektor, can theirs. Indeed, if wanton in Troy and wife in the bridal chamber are the only choices her culture allows her, she cannot choose even from these. Whereas Paris can propose to settle the dispute by single combat with Menelaus, or the Trojan elders, seeing Helen on the wall, can murmur “let her go [back to Greece] in the ships / and take her scourge from us” (Iliad, 73), there is never a question of Helen's deciding the conflict by choosing between the two men.⁹

Although not literally silenced by Aphrodite's metaphysical violence, Helen, surrendering her sexuality, is simultaneously subdued to her culture's dominant text of male desire. “Brother dear,” she tells Hektor,

dear to a whore, a nightmare of a woman!
That day my mother gave me to the world
I wish a hurricane blast had torn me away
to wild mountains, or into tumbling sea
to be washed under by a breaking wave,
before these evil days could come! …

[Iliad, 152]

Helen's will to escape the warriors' marriage plot here turns against the only object her culture permits: herself. She names herself from its lexicon for wayward daughters and passionately imagines death as her only possible freedom. Using the names her culture provides her, weighted with its judgments. Helen loses power even to name herself, her speech confined between the narrow bounds of patriarchal culture and death. That she imagines her death as an entering into the wild turbulence of nature allegorizes the radical opposition of male culture to female nature which the Greek marriage plot enforces: Helen, the Greeks' most exalted image of woman, is also a powerfully expressive subject who must, because of her power, be violently driven back into nature.¹⁰

Death failing, Helen fulfills her prescribed role by participating in her culture's metaphysical violence against herself: “You [Hektor] are the one afflicted most / by harlotry in me and by his madness, / our portion, all of misery, given by Zeus / that we might live in song for men to come” (Iliad, 153). She sacrifices herself upon the altar of patriarchal art, a willing victim who not only suffers but justifies her culture's violence. (Men too suffer the violence of the Greek marriage plot—Helen's “we” includes Hektor—but whereas Hektor resists Andromakhe's pleas and follows his desire for honor into battle, Helen's and Andromakhe's desires are entirely ineffectual.) If the poem, like the war, seems to glorify Helen, in fact she and all the female characters serve primarily to structure the dynamics of male desire in a culture that makes women the pawns of men's bonds with each other and the scapegoats for their broken allegiances. The poem's opening scene portrays woman's role in Greek culture as the silent object of male desire, not the speaker of her own. While Agamemnon and Akhilleus rage eloquently over their battle prizes Khryseis and Briseis, the women themselves do not speak at all. They are as interchangeable as their names make them sound, mere circulating tokens of male power and pride—as Akhilleus's apology to Agamemnon upon rejoining the battle confirms: “Agamemnon, was it better for us / in any way, when we were sore at heart, / to waste ourselves in strife over a girl? / If only Artemis had shot her down / among the ships on the day I made her mine, / after I took Lyrnessos!” (Iliad, 459).

The Iliad suggests that women's silence in culture is neither a natural nor an accidental phenomenon but a cultural achievement, indeed, a constitutive accomplishment of male culture. In Helen's conversations, Homer writes the silencing of woman into epic history as deliberate, strategic, and necessary—a crucial aspect of the complex struggle that is the epic enterprise. In Helen, the Iliad represents the subjugation of female desire to male rule by means of a continuum of violence, from physical abduction to the metaphysical violence that Greek culture exerts against woman's words and wishes. To a greater extent than we have yet realized, Homer's epic is about marriage, daughters, and warriors. It is about the Amazon.

The Iliad is an ancient text, and we have moved very far from the world that produced it—a fact often invoked to distance readers from the violence against women in which the poem participates. But if we set Helen's conversations next to a powerful analogue of our century, Sigmund Freud's dialogues with hysterics and with the phenomenon of hysteria, the paradigmatic force of her “abduction” into the cultural father's script becomes apparent. As the Iliad tells the story of a woman's abduction as a male war story, so Freud turned the hysterics' stories of sexual abuse into a tale to soothe a father's ear. And just as Priam's repressed fears seep into his speech in his allusion to the Amazons, so Freud's repression of the daughter's story generates symptomatic moments that “chatter through the fingertips” of his psychoanalytic theory.¹¹

Freud's conversations with hysterical patients began in the 1880s. At first, Freud, unlike Priam, was able to hear his patients' stories, and he found that in every case, analysis elicited an account of sexual abuse suffered in childhood at the hands of a member of the patient's own family—almost always the father, as he belatedly reported.¹² On this evidence, Freud developed his “seduction theory”—the theory that hysterical symptoms have their origin in sexual abuse suffered in childhood, which is repressed and eventually assimilated to later sexual experience. Freud first formulated the seduction theory in a letter to his colleague and confidant Wilhelm Fliess in October 1895, and he presented it to the Vienna psychiatric establishment on April 21, 1896, in a paper titled “The Aetiology of Hysteria.” The paper, Freud wrote to Fliess, “met with an icy reception,”¹³ summed up in Krafft-Ebing's dismissal of it as “a scientific fairytale” (Origins, 167n.). For a time Freud pursued the research by which he hoped to prove the seduction theory, writing to Fliess in December 1896: “My psychology of hysteria will be preceded by the proud words: “Introite et hic dii sunt [Enter, for here too are gods]” (Origins, 172). His pride in his discovery was shortlived, however, for within a year, he would write again to confide “the great secret which has been slowly dawning on me in recent months. I no longer believe in my neurotica” (Origins, 215). From this point, Freud went on to found psychoanalytic theory upon the oedipal complex.

Historians of psychoanalysis consider Freud's turn from the seduction theory to the oedipal complex crucial to the development of psychoanalysis. Anna Freud wrote that “keeping up the seduction theory would mean to abandon the Oedipus complex, and with it the whole importance of phantasy life. … In fact, I think there would have been no psychoanalysis afterwards.”¹⁴ But a more critical reading of Freud's abandonment of his seduction theory has emerged from feminist scholarship over the last decade. Several critics have argued—Luce Irigaray from feminist theory, Alice Miller as well as Herman and Hirschman from clinical evidence, Marie Balmary from a psychoanalytic reading of the “text” of Freud's life and work, Florence Rush and Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson from historical evidence, among others—that Freud turned away from the seduction theory not because it lacked explanatory power but because he was unable to come to terms with what he was the first to discover: the crucial role played in neurosis by the abuse of paternal power.¹⁵

For purposes of the present argument, the issue is best put in terms of credit or authority: the hysterics, Breuer's and his own, confronted Freud with the problem of whose story to believe, the father's or the daughter's. From the first, Freud identified with the hysterics strongly enough that he could hear what they told him. Yet, although he could trace the etiology of hysteria to sexual abuse suffered in childhood, Freud could not bring himself to draw the conclusion that his evidence presented to him: that the abuser was most often the father. The cases of Anna O., Lucy R., Katharina, Elizabeth von R., and Rosalia H. described in Studies on Hysteria all connect symptoms more or less closely with fathers or, in Lucy's case, with a father substitute. In two cases, however, Freud represented the father as an uncle, a misrepresentation that he corrected only in 1924; and his reluctance to implicate the father appears strikingly in a supplemental narrative of an unnamed patient whose physician-father accompanied her during her hypnotic sessions with Freud. When Freud challenged her to acknowledge that “something else had happened which she had not mentioned,” she “gave way to the extent of letting fall a single significant phrase; but she had hardly said a word before she stopped, and her old father, who was sitting behind her, began to sob bitterly.” Freud concludes: “Naturally I pressed my investigation no further; but I never saw the patient again.”¹⁶ Here Freud's sympathies divide: had the father not intruded, Freud undoubtedly would have heard her out as he had Katharina; but, made aware of the father's anguish, he “naturally” cooperated with it even to the extent of repressing from his text the “single significant phrase” that may have held the key to her neurosis.

In larger terms, too, Freud's work on hysteria posed the dilemma of whether to elicit and credit the daughter's story, with which rested, as other cases had shown, his hope of curing her limping walk; or to honor the father's sob, which corroborated even as it silenced the girl's significant word. The list of reasons Freud gave Fliess for abandoning the seduction theory is, as Balmary points out, not very compelling; indeed, it contradicts the evidence of Studies on Hysteria. Freud complains that he cannot terminate the analyses, even though several cases (notably Anna O./Bertha Pappenheim, who was Breuer's patient) are there described as terminating in a lasting cure. He complains of not being able to distinguish between truth and “emotionally charged fiction” in his patients, even though he had linked the vanishing of symptoms with the recovery of traumatic experience through memory—whether narrated with apparent fidelity to literal fact, as in Katharina's case, or in dream imagery, as by Anna O., whom Breuer wrote that he always found “entirely truthful and trustworthy” (Studies on Hysteria, 43). And Freud claims to have been frustrated in his attempt to recover the buried trauma, despite his success in some instances. Only one item on the list is upheld by the earlier cases: “the astonishing thing that in every case my own not excluded, blame was laid on perverse acts by the father, and realization of the unexpected frequency of hysteria, in every case of which the same thing applied, though it was hardly credible that perverted acts against children were so general.”¹⁷

The problem was precisely that sexual abuse of children by fathers appeared “so general.” In the years between conceiving and abandoning the seduction theory, Freud was engaged in his own self-analysis, in which he discovered, through dreams, his own incestuous wishes toward his daughter Mathilde and, through symptoms exhibited by his siblings, the possibility that his father Jakob had abused his children. Jakob himself died on October 23, 1896, initiating in Freud a complex process of mourning that ultimately strengthened his idealization of his father. Freud's dream of Irma's injection, which concerned a patient who shared his daughter Mathilde's name, superimposed a destructive father-daughter relationship upon one between physician and patient. Nor could the father's fault be contained within the bounds of the hysterics' individual histories. Recent research, for example Herman's, has traced many continuities between the problem of father-daughter incest and the dominance of male/paternal authority in society as a whole; Freud too faced implications that would have changed the focus of his work from individual therapy to social criticism. The “icy reception” with which the professional community of fin de siècle Vienna greeted his 1896 lecture, which did not explicitly implicate fathers in hysteria, was indication enough that Freud, if he credited the daughters, would risk sharing their fate of being silenced and ignored. The stakes for Freud were very high, for the fathers who paid him his (at that time meager) living also represented, as had Jakob, the privileged place that Freud, as a male, could himself hope to attain in the culture. Acceding, upon Jakob's death, to the place of the father, he acceded also to the father's text, which gave him small choice but to judge the daughters' stories “hardly credible.”

Yet Freud could not easily call in the credit that he had already invested in the daughters' stories. As Jane Gallop notes, he continued to speak of “actual seduction” long after he had supposedly repudiated it, with the difference that he now deflected guilt from the father to, variously, the nurse, the mother, and, by way of the oedipal complex, the child herself.¹⁸ Balmary argues persuasively that Freud's own hysterical symptoms grew more pronounced as he undertook to deny what he was the first to discover, that “the secret of hysteria is the father's hidden fault”: and that the texts documenting his turn to the oedipal complex betray that turn as a symptomatic effort to conceal the father's fault.¹⁹ Seduced by the father's sob story, Freud took upon himself the burden his patients bore of concealing the father's fault in mute symptomology. Hysterics, Freud wrote, suffer from reminiscence.²⁰ As Priam in his reply to Helen does not forget her words, so Freud in his later writings does not forget the daughter's story but rewrites it as the story of “femininity,” attributing to mothers, nurses, and a female “Nature” the damage to female subjectivity and desire wrought by specific historical events.²¹ Yet when Freud concludes in “Femininity” that woman has an inferior sense of justice and suggests that the “one technique” she has contributed to culture, the invention of plaiting and weaving, is designed to conceal the shame of her genital lack, it is he who, like Priam, is weaving a cultural text whose obscured but still legible design is to protect the father (conceived broadly as general and cultural, that is, as male authority) from suspicion of an insufficiently developed sense of justice. Like Priam, Freud makes subtle war on woman's desire and on the credibility of her language in order to avert its perceived threat to the father's cultural preeminence. If, in doing so, he produces a theory that Krafft-Ebing could have approved, he also composes a genuine “scientific fairytale.”

It appears, then, that Freud undertook not to believe the hysterics not because the weight of scientific evidence was on the father's side but because so much was at stake in maintaining the father's credit: the “innocence” not only of particular fathers—Freud's, Freud himself, the hysterics'—but also of the cultural structure that credits male authority at the expense of female authority, reproducing a social and political hierarchy of metaphorical fathers and daughters. The history of the seduction theory shows Freud's genius, but it also shows his seduction by the hysterical cultural script that protects the father's credit, and Freud's consequent inability, not unlike Helen's, the hysterics', or Woolf's fisher-woman's, to bring the story of sexual abuse and silencing to light. When Helen sublimely paints herself and Hektor as willing victims upon the altar of an art that serves the divine plan of Zeus, “father of gods and men,” she speaks this cultural script; as Priam does in reminiscing about Amazons; as the hysterics with their bodily reminiscences and Freud with his theory of femininity did; and as Woolf's fisherwoman does, with her imagination gagged and petticoated in deference to the “conventions.”

Women's literary history has important continuities with the actual and imaginative histories told by Homer, Freud, and Herman. Woman's cultural seduction is not merely analogous to the physical abuses that Freud's patients claimed to have suffered but continuous with them. Herman shows that the abusive or seductive father does serious harm to the daughter's mind as well as to her body, damaging her sense of her own identity and depriving her voice of authority and strength. For the literary daughter—the woman reader/writer as daughter of her culture—the metaphysical violence against women inscribed in the literary tradition, although more subtle and no less difficult to acknowledge and understand, has serious consequences. Metaphysically, the woman reader of a literary tradition that inscribes violence against women is an abused daughter. Like physical abuse, literary violence against women works to privilege the cultural father's voice and story over those of women, the cultural daughters, and indeed to silence women's voices. If Freud had difficulty telling the difference between his patients' histories and their fantasies, the power of such cultural fantasies as Homer's and Freud's to shape their audiences' sense of the world is self-evident.

But the Freud of 1892 understood the power of language to cure. Woolf, we remember, predicted a moment when women would break through the constraints of the cultural text. If the literary family history resembles the histories Freud elicited from his patients, we could expect the cultural daughter's telling of her story to work not only a “cure” of her silence in culture but, eventually, a more radical cure of the hysterical cultural text that entangles both women and men. To explore these possibilities, I will turn to a daughter's text that breaks even as it represents the daughter's hysterical silence, in doing so, crossing images of literal and literary sexual abuse: Maya Angelou's autobiographical I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

THE DAUGHTER'S STORY AND THE FATHER'S LAW

Early in her memoir, Angelou presents a brief but rich biographia literaria in the form of a childhood romance: “During these years in Stamps, I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare. He was my first white love. Although I enjoyed and respected Kipling, Poe, Butler, Thackeray and Henley, I saved my young and loyal passion for Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson and W. E. B. DuBois' ‘Litany at Atlanta.’ But it was Shakespeare who said, ‘When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes.’ It was a state with which I felt myself most familiar. I pacified myself about his whiteness by saying that after all he had been dead so long that it couldn't matter to anyone any more.”²² Maya and her brother Bailey reluctantly abandon their plan to memorize a scene from Shakespeare—“we realized that Momma would question us about the author and that we'd have to tell her that Shakespeare was white, and it wouldn't matter to her whether he was dead or not” (I Know Why, 11)—and choose Johnson's “The Creation” instead. This passage, depicting the trials attending those interracial affairs of the mind that Maya must keep hidden from her vigilant grandmother, raises the question of what it means for a female reader and fledgling writer to carry on a love affair with Shakespeare or with male authors in general. While the text overtly confronts and disarms the issue of race, the seduction issue is only glancingly acknowledged. But this literary father-daughter romance resonates quietly alongside Angelou's more disturbing account of the quasi-incestuous rape of the eight-year-old Maya by her mother's lover, Mr. Freeman—particularly by virtue of the line she finds so sympathetic in Shakespeare, “When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes.”

Mr. Freeman's abuse of Maya occurs in two episodes. In the first, her mother rescues her from a nightmare by taking her into her own bed, and Maya then wakes to find her mother gone to work and Mr. Freeman grasping her tightly. The child feels, first, bewilderment and terror: “His right hand was moving so fast and his heart was beating so hard that I was afraid that he would die.” When Mr. Freeman subsides, however, so does Maya's fright: “Finally he was quiet, and then came the nice part. He held me so softly that I wished he wouldn't ever let me go. … This was probably my real father and we had found each other at last” (I Know Why, 61). After the abuse comes the silencing: Mr. Freeman enlists the child's complicity by an act of metaphysical violence, informing her that he will kill her beloved brother Bailey if she tells anyone what “they” have done. For the child, this prohibition prevents not so much telling as asking, for, confused as she is by her conflicting feelings, she has no idea what has happened. One day, however, Mr. Freeman stops her as she is setting out for the library, and it is then that he commits the actual rape on the terrified child, “a breaking and entering when even the senses are torn apart” (I Know Why, 65). Again threatened with violence if she tells, Maya retreats to her bed in a silent delirium, but the story emerges when her mother discovers her stained drawers, and Mr. Freeman is duly arrested and brought to trial.

At the trial, the defense lawyer as usual attempts to blame the victim for her own rape. When she cannot remember what Mr. Freeman was wearing, “he snickered as though I had raped Mr. Freeman” (I Know Why, 70). His next question, as to whether Mr. Freeman had ever touched her prior to that Saturday, reduces her to confusion because her memory of her own pleasure in being held by him seems to her to implicate her in his crime: “I couldn't say yes and tell them how he had loved me once for a few minutes and how he had held me close. … My uncles would kill me and Grandmother Baxter would stop speaking. … And all those people in the court would stone me as they had stoned the harlot in the Bible. And mother, who thought I was such a good girl, would be so disappointed” (I Know Why, 70–71). An adult can see that the daughter's need for a father's affection does not cancel his culpability for sexually abusing her. But the child cannot resolve the conflict between her desire to tell the truth, which means acknowledging the pleasure she felt when Mr. Freeman gently held her, and her awareness of the social condemnation that would greet this revelation. She knows the cultural script and its hermeneutic traditions, which hold all female pleasure guilty, all too well, and so she betrays her actual experience with a lie: “Everyone in the court knew that the answer had to be No. Everyone except Mr. Freeman and me. … I said No” (I Know Why, 71). But she chokes on the lie and has to be taken down from the stand. Mr. Freeman is sentenced to a year and a day, but somehow manages to be released that very afternoon; and not long thereafter, he is killed by her Baxter uncles. Hearing of Mr. Freeman's death, Maya is overwhelmed with terror and remorse: “A man was dead because I lied” (I Know Why, 72). Taking his death as proof that her words have power to kill, she descends into a silence that lasts for a year. Like Helen's sacrificial speech, Maya's silence speaks the hysterical cultural script: it expresses guilt and anguish at her own aggression against the father and voluntarily sacrifices the cure of truthful words.

Maya's self-silencing recalls the link between sexual violation and silence in the archetypal rape myth of Philomela. Ovid's retelling of the Greek myth entwines rape with incest as Tereus, watching Philomela cajole her father into allowing her to visit her sister Procne, puts himself in her father's place: “He would like to be / Her father at that moment, and if he were / He would be as wicked a father as he is a husband.”²³ After the rape, in Ovid's story as in Angelou's, the victim's power of speech becomes a threat to the rapist and another victim of his violence: “Tereus did not kill her. He seized her tongue / With pincers, though it cried against the outrage, / Babbled and made a sound like Father, / Till the sword cut it off.”²⁴ The tongue's ambiguous cry connects rape/incest with the sanctioned ownership of daughters by fathers in the marriage structure and interprets Procne's symmetrical violation of killing her son Itys: she becomes a bad mother to her son as Tereus has been a bad father to the daughter entrusted to him. In the suspension wrought by metamorphosis, Tereus becomes a war bird and Procne and Philomela become nightingales whose unintelligible song resembles the hysterics' speech. In silencing herself, Maya—who knows why the caged bird sings—plays all the parts in this cultural drama. She suffers as victim, speaks the father's death, and cuts out her own tongue for fear of its crying “Father.”

Maya breaks her silence when a woman befriends her by taking her home and reading aloud to her, then sending her off with a book of poems, one of which she is to recite on her next visit. We are not told which poem it was, but later we find that the pinnacle of her literary achievement at age twelve was to have learned by heart the whole of Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece—nearly two thousand lines. Maya, it appears, emerges from her literal silence into a literary one. Fitting her voice to Shakespeare's words, she writes safe limits around the exclamations of her wounded tongue and in this way is able to reenter the cultural text that her words had formerly disrupted. But if Shakespeare's poem redeems Maya from her hysterical silence, it is also a lover that she embraces at her peril. In Angelou's text, Shakespeare's Lucrece represents that violation of the spirit which Shakespeare's and all stories of sleeping beauties commit upon the female reader. Maya's feat of memory signals a double seduction: by the white culture that her grandmother wished her black child not to love and by the male culture which imposes upon the rape victim, epitomized in Lucrece, the double silence of a beauty that serves male fantasy and a death that serves male honor.²⁵ The black child's identification with an exquisite rape fantasy of white male culture violates her reality. Wouldn't everyone be surprised, she muses, “when one day I woke out of my black ugly dream, and my real hair, which was long and blond, would take the place of the kinky mass that Momma wouldn't let me straighten? My light-blue eyes were going to hypnotize them. … Because I was really white and because a cruel fairy stepmother, who was understandably jealous of my beauty, had turned me into a too-big Negro girl, with nappy black hair, broad feet, and a space between her teeth that would hold a number two pencil” (I Know Why, 2). Maya's fantasy bespeaks her cultural seduction, but Angelou's powerful memoir, recovering the history that frames it, rescues the child's voice from this seduction by telling the prohibited story.

RE-CREATING THE UNIVERSE

If Angelou presents one woman's emergence from the hysterical cultural text, Alice Walker's The Color Purple deepens and elaborates its themes to work a more powerful cure. Published in 1982 (right on schedule with respect to Woolf's prediction), Walker's novel not only portrays a cure of one daughter's hysterical silence but rewrites from the ground up the cultural text that sanctions her violation and dictates her silence. Whereas the memoir form holds Angelou's story within the limits of history, Walker stages her cure in the imaginary spaces of fiction. Yet Walker conceived The Color Purple as a historical novel, and her transformation of the daughter's story into a fiction that lays claim to historical truth challenges the foundation of the “conventions,” social and cultural, that enforce women's silence.²⁶ Walker retells the founding story of Western culture from a woman's point of view, and in an important sense, her historical novel—already celebrated as a landmark in the traditions of Black women's, Black, and women's writing—also stands in the tradition inaugurated by Homer and Genesis. Her hero Celie is a woman reborn to desire and language; and Walker, while not one with Celie as Angelou is with Maya, is a woman writer whom Woolf might well have considered a hero.

The Color Purple tells the story of a fourteen-year-old daughter's rape by her “Pa.” It begins in its own prohibition: its first words, inscribed like an epigraph over Celie's letters, are her “Pa”'s warning, “You better not never tell nobody but God. It'd kill your mammy” (Color, 11). Thus is Celie robbed, in the name of her mother, of her story and her voice. Later, her pa further discredits her when he hands Celie over to Mr.——— (ironically reduced to generic cultural father), a widower in need of a wife-housekeeper-caretaker of his children, with the warning: “She tell lies” (Color, 18). Isolated, ignorant, and confused, Celie follows her pa's prohibition literally, obediently silencing her speech but writing stumblingly of her bewilderment in letters to God: “Dear God, I am fourteen years old. I have always been a good girl. Maybe you can give me a sign letting me know what is happening to me” (Color, 11).²⁷ Celie's rape leaves her with guilt that blocks her words. But through her letter writing she is able at once to follow the letter of the father's law and to tell her story, first to that imaginary listener, the God of her father's command, and later, to the friend who saves her from silence, Shug Avery.

These ends are all the more powerful in that they emerge from Celie's seemingly hopeless beginnings. With the first of Celie's two pregnancies by her pa, he forces her to leave school: “He never care that I love it” (Color, 19). Celie keeps studying under her younger sister Nettie's tutelage, but the world recedes from her grasp. “Look like nothing she say can git in my brain and stay,” Celie writes God. “She try to tell me something bout the ground not being flat. I just say, Yeah, like I know it. I never tell her how flat it look to me” (Color, 20). While this passage conveys the pathos of Celie's isolation, it also reveals what will eventually prove the source of her strength, for Celie's eventual emergence from silence, ignorance, and misery depends upon her fidelity to the way things look to her. One important instance is her feeling for her mother, who is too weak and ill to intervene in the incest and who dies soon after Celie's second child is born. “Maybe cause my mama cuss me you think I kept mad at her,” Celie tells God. “But I ain't. I felt sorry for mama. Trying to believe his story kilt her” (Color, 15).

As Celie never loses her identification with her mother, so she is saved from her isolation by three other women who become her companions and examples and whose voices foil Celie's submissive silence. Sofia, who marries Mr.———'s son Harpo, is at first a problem for Celie, who tells God: “I like Sofia, but she don't act like me at all. If she talking when Harpo and Mr.——— come in the room, she keep right on. If they ast her where something at, she say she don't know. Keep talking” (Color, 42). When Harpo consults her about how to make Sofia mind, Celie advises: “Beat her” (Color, 43)—propounding the cultural script of violent male rule in marriage, the only one she knows. But when Sofia angrily confronts Celie, a friendship forms, and Celie begins to abandon her numb allegiance to the father's law. Shug Avery, a brilliant blues singer and Mr.———'s long-time lover, enters Celie's life when Mr.——— brings her home ill for Celie to nurse. Like Sofia, Shug talks: “she say whatever come to mind, forgit about polite” (Color, 73). Mary Agnes, Harpo's girl friend after Sofia's departure, begins, like Celie, as a relatively weak and silent woman. Yet when she is elected to go ask help from the white warden for Sofia in prison, she returns from her mission battered and bruised, and only after some urging—“Yeah, say Shug, if you can't tell us, who you gon tell, God?” (Color, 95)—is she able to tell the others that the warden has raped her. Telling the story, she becomes her own authority, symbolized in her self-naming: when Harpo says, “I love you, Squeak,” she replies, “My name Mary Agnes” (Color, 95).

Mary Agnes's example is important for Celie, who, until now, has buried her story in her letters. One night soon afterward, when their husbands are away, Shug comes into bed with Celie for warmth and company, and Celie tells her everything: “I cry and cry and cry. Seem like it all come back to me, laying there in Shug arms. … Nobody ever love me, I say. She say, I love you, Miss Celie. And then she haul off and kiss me on the mouth. Um, she say, like she surprise. … Then I feels something real soft and wet on my breast, feel like one of my little lost babies mouth. Way after while, I act like a little lost baby too” (Color, 108–9). To know all alone, Balmary writes, is to know as if one did not know. To know with another is conscious knowledge, social knowledge, con-science.²⁸ Celie's telling of her story is an act of knowing-with that breaks the father's law, his prohibition of conscience. Knowing her story with Shug begins to heal Celie's long-hidden wounds of body and voice.

The radical conscience of Walker's novel goes beyond restoring Celie's voice to break down the patriarchal marriage plot that sanctions violence against women. This dismantling begins with another wound when Shug and Celie find the letters from Nettie that Mr.——— has spitefully hidden since the sisters' separation. From them, Celie learns her lost history: that their father had been lynched when they were babies for having a store that did too well; that their mother, then a wealthy widow, had lost her reason and married a stranger, the man Celie knew as her “Pa”; that he had given Celie's two children to Samuel and Corrine, the missionaries to whom Nettie had also fled; and that, Corrine having died, Samuel, Nettie, and Celie's children are returning to the United States from their African mission. Celie's first response when she finds the intercepted letters is a murderous fury toward father both physical and metaphysical. Shug has to disarm her of the razor she is about to use to kill Mr.———, and the scales fall from her eyes with respect to the God to whom she has been writing: “Dear God, … My daddy lynch. My mama crazy. All my little half-brothers and sisters no kin to me. My children not my sister and brother. Pa not pa. You must be sleep” (Color, 163).

With Shug's help, Celie is able to translate her murderous rage into powerful speech and to meet Mr.——— on the battlefield of language. Patriarchal family rule and patriarchal metaphysics break down simultaneously as Shug and Celie leave Mr.———'s house for Shug's Memphis estate. Celie's self-assertion is met with scorn by Mr.———: “Shug got talent, he say. She can sing. She got spunk, he say. She can talk to anybody. Shug got looks, he say. She can stand up and be notice. But what you got? You ugly. You skinny. You shape funny. You too scared to open your mouth to people” (Color, 186). But Celie's voice gains strength as she comes into possession of her history, and for the first time, she finds words to resist Mr.———:

I curse you, I say.

What that mean? he say.

I say, Until you do right by me, everything you touch will crumble.

He laugh. Who you think you is? he say. …

A dust devil flew up on the porch between us, fill my mouth with dirt. The dirt say, Anything you do to me, already done to you.

Then I feel Shug shake me. Celie, she say. And I come to myself.

I'm pore, I'm black, I may be ugly and can't cook, a voice say to everything listening. But I'm here.

Amen, say Shug. Amen, amen.

[Color, 187]

Celie's curse, which Walker enhances with epic machinery, is powerful. But unlike the razor which Shug takes out of her hand, it does not return Mr.———'s violence in kind. Instead, the decline of the father's law in Walker's novel creates temporary separate spheres for women and men in which gender hierarchy breaks down in the absence of the “other,” enabling women and men eventually to share the world again. Celie's authority is consolidated as she comes into economic independence. Earlier, Shug had distracted Celie from her murderous rage toward Mr.——— by suggesting that the two of them sew her a pair of pants. “What I need pants for?” Celie objects. “I ain't no man” (Color, 136). In Memphis, while trying to think what she wants to do for a living, Celie sits “making pants after pants” (Color, 190) and soon finds her vocation, founding “Folkpants, Unlimited.” In this comic reversal, the garment that Celie at first associates strictly with men becomes the means, symbolic and material, of her economic independence and her self-possession.

The magical ease with which Celie emerges from poverty and silence classes Walker's “historical novel” with epic and romance rather than with realist or socialist realist fiction. Walker's Shug has a power that is historically rare indeed, and Celie's and Nettie's inheritance of their father's house, in particular, indulges in narrative magic that well exceeds the requirements of the plot. But Celie's utopian history allegorizes not only women's need to be economically independent of men but the daughter's need to inherit the symbolic estate of culture and language that has always belonged to the father, a “place” in culture and language from which she, like Archimedes, can move her world. When Celie comes into the power of language, work, and love, her curse temporarily comes true. As the daughter learns to speak, Mr.——— falls into a hysterical depression. Mr.———'s crisis signals the death of the cultural father whom he had earlier embodied: “Harpo ast his daddy why he beat me. Mr.——— say, Cause she my wife. Plus, she stubborn. All women good for—he don't finish. He just tuck his chin over the paper like he do. Remind me of Pa” (Color, 30). As cultural father, Mr.———'s law was unspoken, his ways immutable, and his words so close to the patriarchal script that he didn't have to finish his sentences. By the end of the novel, however, Mr.——— has abandoned that role to become Albert and to “enter into the Creation” (Color, 181). By the novel's last scenes, Albert's life is scarcely differentiable from Celie's, and he tells her, “Celie, I'm satisfied this the first time I ever lived on Earth as a natural man” (Color, 230).

An important effect of Albert's transition from patriarch to natural man is the abandonment of that strictly literal stake in paternity that the marriage structure serves. As a “natural man,” Albert, like everyone else, spends a lot of time concocting devious recipes to hide the taste of yams from Henrietta—who, Celie explains, has to eat yams to control her chronic blood disease but “Just our luck she hate yams and she not too polite to let us know” (Color, 222). Henrietta, Sofia's youngest child, whose “little face always look like stormy weather” (Color, 196), is a crucial figure in the novel. Though Harpo tries to claim her as his sixth child, she is nobody's baby; only Sofia (if anyone) knows who her father is. Nonetheless, Harpo, Albert, and everyone else feel a special affection for “ole evil Henrietta” (Color, 247), and, as they knock themselves out making yam peanut butter and yam tuna casserole, it becomes apparent that, in Walker's recreated universe, the care of children by men and women without respect to proprietary biological parenthood is an important means of undoing the exploitative hierarchy of gender roles.²⁹ If Celie's discovery that “Pa not pa” liberates her from the law of the father that makes women and children its spiritual and sexual subjects, Albert, in learning to “wonder” and to “ast” (Color, 247) and to care for Henrietta, escapes the confines of the patriarchal role. As the functions of father and mother merge, the formerly rigid boundaries of the family become fluid: Celie, Shug, and Albert feel “right” sitting on the porch together; love partners change with desire; and, most important, children circulate among many parents: Samuel, Corrine, and Nettie raise Celie's; Celie raises Mr.———'s and Annie Julia's; Sofia, Odessa, and Mary Agnes exchange theirs; and the whole community, including the white Eleanor Jane, becomes involved with yams and Henrietta. Whereas, in the patriarchal societies analyzed by Lévi-Strauss, the exchange of women forges bonds between men that support male culture, in Walker's creation story children are the miracle and mystery that bond all her characters to the world, each other, and the future.

Undoing the gender hierarchy necessitates a rewriting of the Creation myth and a dismantling of the hierarchical concepts of God and authority that underwrite them in Western tradition. The God to whom Celie writes her early letters loses credibility once she learns, through Nettie's letters, that nothing is as the law of the father proclaimed it. When Shug hears her venting her wrath, she is shocked: “Miss Celie, You better hush. God might hear you.” “Let 'im hear me, I say. If he ever listened to poor colored women the world would be a different place, I can tell you.” Shug deconstructs Celie's theology: “You have to git man off your eyeball, before you can see anything a 'tall,” she explains. “He on your box of grits, in your head, and all over the radio. He try to make you think he everywhere. Soon as you think he everywhere, you think he God. But he ain't”; “God ain't a he or a she, but a It. … It ain't something you can look at apart from everything else, including yourself. I believe God is everything … that is or ever was or ever will be. And when you can feel that, and be happy to feel that, you've found It” (Color, 175–79). In Walker's cosmos, the monotheistic Western myth of origins gives way to one of multiple, indeed infinite, beginnings that the new myth of Celie's fall and self-redemption celebrates. Hers is not a Creation finished in the first seven days of the world but one in which all creators are celebrated, if at times reluctantly. When Sofia, with what Harpo calls her “amazon sisters,” insists on bearing her mother's casket, Harpo asks,

Why you like this, huh? Why you always think you have to do things your own way? I ast your mama bout it one time, while you was in jail.

What she say? ast Sofia.

She say you think your way as good as anybody else's. Plus, it yours.

[Color, 196]

Walker echoes this moment in her epigraph, which translates Harpo's “here come the amazons” (Color, 198) into: “Show me how to do like you. Show me how to do it” (Color, i). She fills her historical novel with creators, authorities, beginnings, “others.” Like all authors of epic, she collapses transcendence and history; but her history differs from that of earlier epics. Originating in a violation of the patriarchal law, it undoes the patriarchal cultural order and builds upon new ground. “Womanlike,” Walker writes, “my ‘history’ starts not with the taking of lands, or the births, battles, and deaths of Great Men, but with one woman asking another for her underwear.”³⁰ The violation of “conventions” that this exchange of underwear stages breaks through the patriarchal sexual and spiritual economy, writing into history a story long suppressed and revising history by doing so. Celie's last letter—addressed to “Dear God. Dear stars, dear trees, dear sky, dear peoples. Dear Everything. Dear God”—records a conversation about history:

Why us always have family reunion on July 4th, say Henrietta, mouth poke out, full of complaint. It so hot.

White people busy celebrating they independence from England July 4th, say Harpo, so most black folks don't have to work. Us can spend the day celebrating each other.

Ah, Harpo, say Mary Agnes, sipping some lemonade. I didn't know you knowed history.

[Color, 249–50]

Harpo's decentering history is a microcosm of Walker's, which ends with a beginning: “I feel a little peculiar round the children,” Celie writes. “And I see they think [us] real old and don't know much what going on. But I don't think us feel old at all. … Matter of fact, I think this the youngest us ever felt” (Color, 251). As Celie's beginning could have been a silent end, so her ending continues the proliferating beginnings that the novel captures in its epistolary form, its characters' histories, and the daily revelations that Shug names “God.”

Walker's telling of the daughter's long-repressed story marks an important beginning for literary history. In her hands, the forbidden story recreates the world by reclaiming female subjectivity. “What I love best bout Shug,” Celie tells Albert, “is what she been through. When you look in Shug's eyes, you know she been where she been, seen what she seen, did what she did. And now she know. … And if you don't git out the way, she'll tell you about it” (Color, 236). Walker's woman as hero, whose history is her identity and who recreates the universe by telling her story to the world, is not new in real life. But she is only now making her presence felt in the literary tradition, opening a powerfully transformative dialogue between herself and the world, between her story and his, and between ourselves and our cultural past. As she does so, we can look forward to that “most interesting, exciting, and important conversation” that Woolf predicted would begin once woman recovered her voice.

Notes

1. Sigmund Freud. The Origins of Psychoanalysis: Letters to Wilhelm Fliess, Drafts and Notes: 1887–1902, ed. Marie Bonaparte, Anna Freud, and Ernst Kris, trans. Eric Mosbacher and James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1954), 141; hereafter cited in the text as Origins.

2. Alice Walker, The Color Purple (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), 15; hereafter cited in the text as Color.

3. Virginia Woolf, The Pargiters: The Novel-Essay Portion of “The Years,” ed. Mitchell A. Leaska (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), xxxviii–xxxix. See also Woolf's A Room of One's Own (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1929), 5–6, and “Professions for Women” (written in 1932) in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1942). 240–41.

4. See Judith Lewis Herman with Lisa Hirschman, Father-Daughter Incest (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), esp. chaps. 1, 4–7. For a history of twentieth-century sociological scholarship on incest, see pp. 9–21. My reading of women's literary history augments Harold Bloom's model of male literary history as oedipal family romance. On the same question, see Sandra M. Gilbert's “Notes toward a Literary Daughteronomy,” Critical Inquiry 11, no. 3 (1985): 355–84.

5. The Iliad of Homer, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1974), 73: hereafter cited in the text as Iliad.

6. Page duBois, Centaurs and Amazons: Women and the Pre-History of the Great Chain of Being (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1982); and William Blake Tyrrell, Amazons: A Study in Athenian Mythmaking (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984); cited in the text as Amazons. DuBois writes that marriage, “in Lévi-Strauss' sense, the exchange of women between men of the same kind, was culture for the Greeks” (41).

7. Tyrrell, p. 29, citing Simon Pembroke, “Women in Charge: The Function of Alternatives in Early Greek Tradition and the Ancient Idea of Matriarchy,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 30 (1967): 26–27.

8. Compare Shakespeare's use of magic to quell unruly female desire in A Midsummer Night's Dream, in which Amazon power—embodied in Hippolyta, whom Theseus wooed by his sword and won while doing her injuries—also symbolizes disruptions to marriage caused by female solidarity and independent female desire. Shakespeare resolves the conflict between Oberon and Titania over the changeling her votaress left her in favor of patriarchal rule by the violence of a figure: the magic flower upon which Oberon's power depends.

9. Ann L. T. Bergren analyzes Helen's ambiguous status in Greek culture as object of exchange and agent of her own desire. Gorgias, defending Helen, poses three readings of her flight with Paris—abduction by force, persuasion by speech, and capture by love—all of which represent her as compelled “not otherwise than if she had been raped” (“Language and the Female in Early Greek Thought,” Arethusa 16 [1983]: 69–95, esp. 83). But such a defense also denies Helen the agency of her own desire, circumscribing it within the male ethical scheme attendant upon the marriage structure. Priam's exoneration of Helen—“You are not to blame, / I hold the gods to blame” (Iliad, 73)—similarly exemplifies the attempt to circumscribe female desire within the male ethical scheme attendant upon the marriage structure, which maintains its eminence in pronouncing her “guilty” or “innocent.”

10. Sherry B. Ortner, “Is Female to Nature as Male Is to Culture?” in Women, Culture, and Society, ed. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1974), 67–87, argues that childbearing and attendant social responsibilities and psychic structures cause women to be seen as closer to nature than men. Further, as the Iliad suggests, the founding texts of Western culture manifest an active antagonism to female desire, social power, and language—in a word, to female culture making. If, as de Beauvoir, Dinnerstein, and others have argued, it is woman as nature that male culture seeks to bring under control, the effect of men's and women's equal involvement in “projects of creativity and transcendence” (Ortner, 87) would be not only to dissolve the male culture/female nature dichotomy but to transform the “nature” of culture.

11. See Sigmund Freud, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier, 1963), 96: “He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his finger-tips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.”

12. See Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, trans. and ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), 22:120n. (editor's note).

13. Max Schur, Freud: Living and Dying (New York: International Universities Press, 1972), 104.

14. Anna Freud, cited in Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984), 113. This view has prevailed among psychoanalysts, but since Freud was already discovering the unconscious, infantile sexuality, and symbolic process in treating hysterics, it does not appear to be well-founded.

15. See Luce Irigaray, Speculum de l'autre femme (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1974); Alice Miller, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society's Betrayal of the Child, trans. Hildegarde Hannum and Hunter Hannum (1981; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984); Herman with Hirschman (n. 4 above), chaps. 1, 4; Marie Balmary, Psychoanalyzing Psychoanalysis: Freud and the Hidden Fault of the Father, trans. Ned Lukacher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982; originally published in France in 1979), chaps. 5–7; Florence Rush, The Best Kept Secret: Sexual Abuse of Children (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1980), chap. 7; and Masson (n. 14 above).

16. Sigmund Freud and Marcel Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, in Standard Edition, 2:100–101n.

17. Freud, Origins, 215–16. Balmary supplies the italicized phrase, omitted in Origins, from the 1975 German edition of the Freud/Fliess correspondence.

18. Jane Gallop, The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982), 144–45. While I have found Gallop's treatment of father/daughter seduction provocative and enlightening, both my approach and the sociological and literary texts I consider place more emphasis than she does on the damaging effects of seduction on the daughter, who is by virtue of age, family role, and gender far weaker than the father.

19. Balmary powerfully reinterprets the oedipal myth, recovering aspects suppressed in Sophocles' and Freud's accounts that reveal Oedipus's crimes to be an unconscious repetition of his father's, as well as biographical materials, also suppressed, that uncover the sudden, unexplained disappearance of Jakob's second wife Rebecca and the likelihood that Freud was conceived before Jakob married Freud's mother Amalie, his third wife.

20. Marcel Breuer and Sigmund Freud, “The Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena,” in Standard Edition, 2:7.

21. Feminist critiques of “Female Sexuality,” “Femininity,” and the Dora case engage the issue of femininity in Freud's treatment of hysteria; see esp. Catherine Clément and Hélène Cixous. La jeune née (Paris: UGE, 1975), and the essays collected in In Dora's Case: Freud—Hysteria—Feminism, ed. Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).

22. Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (New York: Bantam Books, 1971), 11; hereafter cited in the text as I Know Why.

23. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955). 144–45. See Patricia Joplin, “The Voice of the Shuttle Is Ours,” Stanford Literature Review 1 (1984): 25–53 for an excellent study of the complex inscription of cultural violence against women in the Philomela myth.

24. A parody of castration, this scene, like Priam's thoughts of Amazons, projects the war between the father's desire, represented by the penis/sword, and the daughter's, represented by a phallus-like tongue with power to tell her story. The ambiguity of father figures in Ovid's retelling points to the fact that the father's ownership of his daughter gives him privileged sexual access to her, whether or not he avails himself of it. Herman (n. 4 above), 98 notes that incest victims frequently report that men find their histories arousing, as though they too envy the place of the bad father; see also Susan Brownmiller, who concludes that the cultural taboo against acknowledging the high incidence of father rape arises from the “patriarchal philosophy of sexual private property,” of which children are an extension (Against Our Wills: Men, Women, and Rape [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975], 311).

25. Maya's identification with Lucrece conceals by revealing, exemplifying Freud's view of the hysterical symptom as “a compromise between two opposite affective and instinctual impulses,” one trying to bring to light and the other trying to repress (“Hysterical Phantasies and Their Relation to Bisexuality,” in Standard Edition, 9:164). Freud posits a conflict between homosexual and heterosexual desire as the symptom's cause, but, as Maya's case shows, the conflictual nature of the symptom is better explained by the social danger in which the victim finds herself. See Coppélia Kahn, “The Rape in Shakespeare's Lucrece,” Shakespeare Studies 9 (1976): 45–72, for the earliest treatment of rape in the poem.

26. Alice Walker, “Writing The Color Purple,” in In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), 356.

27. Compare the incest victim in Herman's study (n. 4 above) who “wrote private letters to God.” 99.

28. Balmary (n. 15 above), 159 ff.; see also Herman with Hirschman (n. 4 above), 178 ff.

29. See Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise (New York: Harper & Row, 1976); and Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).

30. Walker, “Writing The Color Purple,” 356. Compare the title of Jacob's essay, “‘Does History Consist of the Biographies of Great Men?’” in Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room (1922; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 39.

I thank Paul Wallich, Elizabeth Abel, Margaret Ferguson, Margaret Homans, Patricia Joplin, Claire Kahane, Adrienne Munich, Julie Rivkin, and Patricia Spacks for helpful readings and comments.