Making Silence Speak: Women's Voices in Greek Literature and Society.

• Author: Haskins, Ekaterina
• Position: Book Reviews

Making Silence Speak: Women's Voices in Greek Literature and Society. Edited by Andre Lardinois and Laura McClure. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001; pp. xiii + 296. $55.00; paper $ 17.95.

The revision of women's place in the history of rhetoric and literature has become, in recent years, an interdisciplinary project. In Making Silence Speak, Andre Larclinois and Laura McClure aim to present a comprehensive account of women's voices from Greek antiquity by bringing together studies of both familiar and lesser-known ancient texts from diverse historical periods. The contribution of this collection is not only its scope--it ranges from Homeric epics to letter writing in the late second century C.E.--but also its willingness to entertain theoretical and critical issues facing scholars across the humanities.

Traditional histories have habitually excluded or ignored women as speaking subjects, and those that did mention women's contributions focused mainly on exceptional women who transcended their gender through education and creativity. Rhetorical and literary accounts of Classical Greek antiquity have typically valorized poet Sappho and rhetorician Aspasia, but paid little attention to a diverse range of women's discursive practices in their historical context, as well as to the dynamics of representation of women's speech in male-authored texts. Such a focus is due, in part, to an internalized dichotomy "woman-silent-private: man-vocal-public," which has long dominated scholarly accounts of women's role in ancient Greece (Cohen 1991). Consequently, the issue of women's power and powerlessness has been cast in terms of this seemingly strict separation between the private and the public. Over and against this approach, the essays in the volume suggest that the association of social influence with public performa nce obscures a whole range of women's discursive practices that contributed, however obliquely, to the political and social life of the Greeks. The book's scope--it addresses both surviving textual traces of actual women's "voices" as well as representations of women's speech in traditionally "male" genres (epic, drama, oratory, and epistolary practice)--is intended to broaden the discussion of what it meant to speak (or write) like a woman in ancient Greece and later, in Greek-educated Rome. The essays pursue this general theme with a dual goal of recovering (to the extent possible) authentic women's expression and...