Part 4. Theory and Practice: Carol Gilligan Hears a Different Voice
Political & Psychological Resistance in Young Women
Preview: “How can women stay with girls and also teach cultural traditions? How can girls stay with women and also with themselves? What can women teach girls about living in a world which is still governed by men?” – Carol Gilligan
Context
This is the third and last example of how Reader-Response can be used in a humane, student-centered, cognitively enriched way, a way sorely needed in our current political and social climate. Including this entry a range of age groups and settings has been represented, from a university classroom to tutoring in an elementary school to the present study of girls from an elite high school, suggesting a wide relevance and applicability of playing as close attention to our students’ responses as to the text itself. Gilligan’s “Joining the Resistance: Psychology, Politics, Girls, and Women” was delivered as the Tanner Lecture at the University of Michigan in 1990, and is a fitting way to end this series, weaving together the personal and the institutional, the individual reader and the community, the present situation and the possible.
As an undergraduate, Carol Gilligan majored in English; when asked by an interviewer, “Did you want to write novels?” she replied “Yes, which is what I’m doing now (in my research).” Not only is this piece now under consideration studded with literary allusions from Aristophanes to Jorie Graham, but the presentation moves by a series of juxtapositions and associations rather than clear narrative or logical lines. This posting will be concerned here mainly with the last section, “Women Teaching Girls,” which focuses on a high school student, Anjli, reading “To His Coy Mistress” and the responses of her teacher, Nancy Franklin, and other teachers in the same school.
Anjli in the midst of writing her analysis—listening to the tone of the poem in her house late at night—suddenly begins writing in the first person as she takes in what she is hearing: the voice of an older man bent on overcoming a young woman’s resistance (“Had we but world enough and time, / This coyness, Lady, were no crime”). And Nancy Franklin, taking in Anjli’s voice, feels the power of the poem anew and also the force of what Anjli is hearing. Anjli writes, her teacher recalls, “I am writing this paper and it is late at night, and I am terrified because this is such a morbid poem (“Thy beauty shall no more be found, / Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound / My echoing song: then worms shall try / That long preserved virginity, / And your quaint honor turn to dust, /And into ashes all my lust”). This is such a frightening poem.
Nancy Franklin submitted this paper to six other woman teachers for a cross-grading exercise, “designed to insure consistency of standards.” One of these other teachers wrote, “She doesn’t understand carpe diem. Why doesn’t she know this term? This is not a college level paper”; another wrote, “She misunderstands Marvell’s playfulness.” These other teachers’ responses are not deeply felt, but more like the “correct” answers on a multiple choice test, placing the poem in the context of literary convention but hearing neither the poem’s voice nor Anjli’s. Their responses are a small case study of how the conventional teaching of literature compartmentalizes and anaesthetizes its potential force. Anjli both hears the voice of the poem and responds to it in her own voice, a reminder, perhaps, that Gilligan’s important early book is In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development, which suggests that adolescent girls are more in touch with their own feelings than they may ever be in their adult lives. The sadness of the paucity and emotional flatness of the other teachers’ responses is counteracted by the hope contained in the fact that Nancy Franklin, Anjli’s own teacher, can hear the student’s voice, learn from it, and respond to it.
Franklin caught momentarily by the standards of her colleagues and then resisting their disconnection from Anjli and their dismissal of her reading says ‘this paper was beautiful, and it made me see the poem in a new way.’ Sustaining this connection, she draws out its implications for Anjli, for herself, and also for society. . . This is a young girl; this is a seventeen-year-old, very innocent but bright girl. Reading this, Lord knows, you go back and read that poem at two o’clock in the morning. And she was terrified—the voice of an older man speaking to a young girl. And the comments she got on this paper. . . . Now there’s the educational system at work. What did it tell her? Go underground to survive, at least until you get out of this system. Or worse.”
The situation here is complex; we read Gilligan’s response to Franklin’s response both to Anjli’s response and the response of other teachers in the school. The last situation is typical of much conventional instruction; the teachers have an official response in their own heads—their own “moral”—the shorthand for which is a Latin tag, carpe diem, and if the student does not have a similar response she is penalized, downgraded. Ironically, a sense of carpe diem is what the Robin Williams’s character in Dead Poets Society is trying to get his students to experience by having them meditate on class photos of bright eyed young alumni now dead and gone. The other teachers reading Anjli have no room for their own authentic response before they short circuit her reading with their institutional and conventional answer. Their need to calibrate their grading in their group reading exercise exemplifies that push towards uniformity, towards trying to quantify what cannot be quantified, epitomizing what traditional education does to students and texts. Anjli would not do well on a multiple choice test on this poem.
Later Franklin does with Anjli what Crosman does with Stacy and what Lewis in retrospect wishes she has done with Rick, discuss further with the student his or her responses; Franklin shows Anjli the “official” reading, puzzling over with her the difference between this and their own. To quote Gilligan quoting Franklin:
Anjli read the grader’s comments discussed, them with her teacher, and remembered hearing about carpe diem, reread the poem, and, Nancy Franklin writes, “found that indeed she could see it both ways. She knows that “she could rewrite the paper now that she understands the way she was supposed to react saying what she is supposed to say . . . ‘If you were a guy,’ she says smiling, ‘It might be really funny.’ But Anjli also cringes at the poem’s morbid images: ‘I don’t think,’ she concludes, ‘a class full of girls could really laugh at this.’ What is puzzling then, given Anjli’s perspective, and also politically treacherous, is the position of woman graders; Anjli assumes that she will be understood by girls, but cannot assume such understanding from women.
We have, then, a group of teachers squelching Anjli’s response obtrusively and perhaps harmfully but one teacher responding with sensitivity and empathy, letting her student’s response add another dimension to her own feeling for the poem. Gilligan is a psychologist with an acute sense of what is lost in young people in the process of education as well as gained. John Dewey also had a keen sense of this reciprocal dual motion and wrote that while we should be giving student mastery over concepts and skill that will help them in the world, as teachers we should also refresh in ourselves qualities that we ourselves have let harden or atrophy in the process of our own educations: “With respect to sympathetic curiosity, unbiased responsiveness, and openness of mind, we may say that the adult should be growing in childlikeness.” Beneath Gilligan’s fierce social critique of what school do to young people, especially girls, there is a radical utopian vision of schools as transformative and even redemptive, expressed with eloquence and force. Gilligan writes:
School—the microcosm in children’s lives of the public world, the public space which Hannah Arendt sees as the crucible of democracy, the place where the natality and plurality, the ever new and always difference nature of the human condition can flourish.
Could women, as Madeline Grumet envision, turn the practice of teaching—a relational practice—from “women’s work” into the work of women,” so that instead of leading what Grumet calls “the great escape” from the daily rhythms of the maternal order to the clock time of the paternal state, women would institute a new order (using private means in private as Woolf would have it) by teaching a different knowledge and creating a different practice of human relationships?
It is this vision of transformation of the schools and of society through the schools that many of us shared in the 1960s and 1970s, and it seems to also have gone the way of Reader Response.
But Gilligan makes us feel this hope is still present in the remaining substratum of our youthful possibilities and in our own bodies; we just have to rediscover it and bring it again to the surface.
Women teaching girls. . . may discover that they are harboring within themselves a girl who lives in her body, who is insistent on speaking who intensely desires relationships and knowledge, and who, perhaps at the time of adolescence went underground or was overwhelmed. It may be that adolescent girls are looking for this girl in women, and feeling her absence or her hidden presence. And it may be that women, in the name of being good women, have been modeling for girls her repudiation—teaching girls the necessity of a loss or renunciation, which girls question. Perhaps there is a new cycle that, once beginning, will break up an old impasse in women’s development and affect men as well.
This seems a long way from how to read a poem by Andrew Marvell yet it resides in these small but deep interactions—the way we read poems and read each other reading poems can be an alliance, a locus for humane learning and teaching.
One of the reasons the Gilligan piece is instructive for those of us in literature is that it shows us how perspectives beyond our own horizons that can contextualize, extend and otherwise enrich our work. In looking back over the recent history of Reader Response, I could find few theorists in literary theory who were aware of the parallel developments in philosophy and psychology of what came to be known as Constructivism, and the possibilities of putting the two in dialogue. It took Janet Emig, a professor of English education, to call attention to this mutual ignorance on both sides in a piece titled “Our Missing Theory” (1990) which begins with her description of a conference she attended on teaching literature:
I was asking a question about feminist theory, about its marrow, by which I meant “How does feminist theory enter your classroom, inform your teaching, and stay?” I persisted; I asked about Carol Gilligan, about women’s ways of knowing—growing visibly angry as friends told me who were too far across the room to tug me back into my chair. Her reply? “I’m not a psychologist.”
Not all of us are as constricted as Emig’s adversary, but there is still a lingering disposition to keep within our own bailiwick, both of higher education and the academy. In her article, Emig makes the point that both literary and educational theorists use “theory,” but while ours tends to be more synchronic, and focused on individual acts of reading, psychologists and K-12 teachers are more diachronic, more concerned with cognitive and emotional growth over time. At their best, psychologists like Gilligan are more aware of the whole person in developmental and social contexts and the constant dialectic between the individual and the group, between private consciousness and cultural symbols. We at the university level are more inclined to write down our positions than become aware of how we live or do not live them in every moment of our teaching lives.
Some final thoughts on all three articles
One of the common factors among all three articles—Crosman’s “How Readers Create Meaning,” Lewis’s “Give People a Chance,” and Gilligan’s “Joining the Resistance”—is that they are firmly rooted in the situation and texture of teaching by analyzing the specific interactions between a student and teacher. All generalizations and implications are anchored in these specific interpretations and lead back to them in ways that clarify them further. This notion of relating the concrete to the abstract is crucial not only to the structuring of the three texts but also to their styles; they channel their conceptual energy through a prose that is energetically clear, often eloquent, and free of the jargon of overspecialized academic knowledge. I want to be clear that the series does not simply raise the banner of Reader Response against other theoretical and pedagogical approaches. Instead, they advocate a radical change in our entire approach to our work, toward a more engaged, collaborative, and democratic relationship among our students and colleagues, to make all of us theorizers and reflective practitioners at once, each role feeding into the other. All three show how, by making our interactions with students more empathic and transactional, we can raise the cognitive and responsive levels of both students and teachers.