Personification's gender

Rhetorica - Journal of the History of Rhetoric

Volumn 16, Issue 2, 1998, Pages 149-179

  Paxson, James J ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA   (United States)

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EID: 61949094384     PISSN: 07348584     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/rh.1998.16.2.149     Document Type: Article

References (98)

1. The Pilgrim's Progress from this World to That which is to Come, ed. Roger Sharrock, 2nd ed. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1967).
2. Along with Christian, the poem's male protagonist, we have dozens of male figures who even bear the title "Mr"; others are caricatured, hyper-masculine toughs (Faint-heart, Mistrust, and Guilt of Dead-man's lane) who beat and rob weaklings (Little-faith). See Thomas H. Luxon, Literal Figures: Puritan Allegory and the Reformation Crisis in Representation (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995) pp. 190-93, 204-05, for a discussion of these hyper-masculine figures not so much as "realistic" reflections of the seventeenth-century street world, but as ingredients in Bunyan's self-reflexive allegory of the crisis in seventeenth-century hermeneutics and theology.
3. A comprehensive though concise study of personificational deities in late Roman religion is still Harold L. Axtell, The Deification of Abstract Ideas in Roman Literature and Inscriptions (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1907; rep. New Rochelle: Aristide D. Caratzas, 1987).
4. See Prudentius, vol. 1, trans. H. J. Thompson, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949) pp. 280-81, 286-91, 319-23.
5. See Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts, vol. 2, ed. and trans. William Harris Stahl and Richard Johnson with E. L. Bürge (New York- Columbia University Press, 1977) pp. 19 and 64.
6. See how in Book 2 we encounter the only plausible exception to the rule of female personification in early allegory: the figure Amor appears as a male (p. 98), although his ontic status oscillates between traditional pagan deity (Cupid) and abstraction (Love). Stahl's translation is based on Martianus Capella, ed. Adolph Dick (Leipzig: Teubner, 1925; rep. 1969).
7. The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. with intro. Richard Green (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962);
8. original text is available in Boethius: Tracts and De Consolatione Philosophiae, ed. H. F. Stewart and E. K. Rand, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1918; rep. 1973).
9. The Plaint of Nature, trans. James J. Sheridan (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1980);
10. original is available in Patrologia Latina, ed. J. P. Migne, vol. 210, cols. 431A-482C;
11. Anticlaudianus, or the Good and Perfect Man, trans. Sheridan (Toronto: Pontifical Institute, 1973);
12. original available in PL vol. 210, cols. 488-514.
13. The Cosmographia of Bernardus Silvestris, ed. and trans. Winthrop Wetherbee (New York Columbia University Press, 1973);
14. original available in De mundi universitate libri duo sive megacosmus et microcosmus, ed. Carl Sigmund Barach and Johann Wrobel (Innsbruck: Wagnerschen Universitäts-Buchhandlung, 1876; rep. Frankfurt am Main: Minerva, 1964).
15. The Romance of the Rose, ed. and trans. Charles Dahlberg (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973; rep. New England University Press, 1983). See pp. 319-38 for Jean de Meun's depiction of Genius, a male personification who is Nature's "priest" but is clearly equal to her in ontological as well as narrative terms.
16. W. Langland, Piers Plowman: The B Version, eds George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson (London: Athlone Press, 1975). Langland goes so far as to translate the traditionally female Natura into a male figure, Kynde.
17. 3.10.31-36, in The Rhetoric and the Poetics, trans. W. Rhys Roberts (New York The Modern Library, 1954) pp. 190-91.
18. e Siècle, ed. Edmond Faral (Paris: Honore Champion, 1924) p. 173.
19. 5.265, in Demetrius, On Style, trans. and ed. W. Rhys Roberts, The Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927; rep. 1982) pp. 460-63.
20. Rhetorica ad Herennium, trans. and ed. Harry Caplan, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954) 4.52.66, pp. 398-99.
21. Morton W. Bloomfield, "A Grammatical Approach to Personification Allegory", Modern Philology 60 (1962-63) p. 164.
22. R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991).
23. Aware of the initial theoretical reprisals launched against Bloch from feminists in the field, I furthermore opt to engage what Thomas Hahn has identified as the still institutionally sound and useful core of Bloch's project. Hahn writes: "Instead of reproducing medieval misogyny, as a misogynist or as an "objective" scholar, Bloch uses his immense framework to resituate medieval texts, and so to de-naturalize gender. Bloch's arguments result in a discursive definition of femininity, seen in relation to social practices and relations, rather than an anatomical definition based upon expressive records of experience." Thomas Hahn, "The Premodern Text and the Postmodern Reader", EXEMPLARIA: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 2 (1990) p. 10.
24. See the Medieval Feminist Newsletter 6 (1988) pp. 2-15, for the series of responses to the initially published findings, which led up to Bloch's book on misogyny.
25. For a survey of classical and medieval definitions of personification, see James J. Paxson, The Poetics of Personification (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) pp. 8-34.
26. From my brisk survey one finds that the many pronouncements on allegory, personification, and other related tropes or figures found in classical and medieval treatises yield little that's useful to the modern task of strucruralizing tropes in terms of gender. I should reaffirm that the institutionalized discourse of such self-reflexive theorization in rhetoric, poetics, and grammatica had not yet arisen, i.e. not in the Foucauldian sense of new knowledge production possible only through epistemic evolutions and revolutions. The epistemic system that had arisen and become fixed during the first millennium was the institution of grammatical, rhetorical, and hermeneutical practices and enterprises central to the emergent "culture of the book" rather than the culture of the personal. The most impressive treatment of this genealogy is Martin Irvine, The Making of Textual Culture: "Grammatica" and Literary Theory, 350-1100 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). See pp. 1-8 for a general overview of Irvine's operating thesis: the medieval grammatical curriculum, an entire cultural apparatus that inculcated the creation of a literate culture trained to pen, copy, read, decode, and collate texts, both promoted and derived from a macrometaphor of text as culture and culture as text. Individual documents as well as tropes would have been conceptualized always as the mutually constitutive building blocks and the end products of an all-pervading grammatical institution with practicality always underlying its self-conception. This essay, "Personification's Gender", proceeds to make a broad sketch of how gender and the cognitive aporia, not the efficacy, of rhetoric served as the comparable (but latent) macrometaphors in a trope-fixated system of textual production.
27. The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, trans. H. E. Butler, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920) 6.1.25-27, vol. 2, pp. 398-401.
28. The dissemination of Quintilian's text and, in particular, his famous definition of prosopopeia involved the text's "mutilist" medieval history; see James J. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: A History of Rhetorical Theory from Saint Augustine to the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974) pp. 125-26.
29. Jody Enders, Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992) pp. 56-60, 65.
30. Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1986) p. 48.
31. Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984) p. 241.
32. See Stephen W. Melville, Philosophy Beside Itself: On Deconstruction and Modernism, foreword by Donald Marshall (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986) pp. 124-25.
33. Catachresis, the trope whereby the name of an idea or thing gets improperly used, could be seen as modern theory's metatrope, as Foucault proclaimed it to be; see Hayden White, "Michel Foucault", Structuralism and Since, ed. John Sturrock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979) p. 94.
34. The same point about catachresis has been made by Judith Butler regarding Luce Irigaray's quasi-Platonic concept of the femimne; see Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York and London: Routledge, 1993) pp. 37-38.
35. See also Jane Gallop's similar claim regarding Lacan's semantic reassignment of the term phallus, that is "his desire to separate phallus from penis", in Thinking through the Body (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990) quoted in Butler, p. 57.
36. Moreover, it is useful to note that de Man's own distinction between "anthropomorphism" and "trope" (as in prosopopeia) is catachretical; see above, note 16.1 add finally that the collapse in distinction between the rhetorical terms "trope" and "figure" (a move that I am guilty of) marks another discursive and institutional catachresis; for a brilliant historical analysis of the trope/figure conflation in nineteenth-century rhetoric, see Shirley Sharon-Zisser, "A Distinction No Longer of Use: Evolutionary Discourse and the Disappearance of the Trope/Figure Binarism", Rhetorica 9 (1993) pp. 321-42. Let it be noted, however, that Sharon-Zisser's use of the term "binarism" throughout her article could itself be taken as catachretical.
37. See Victor J. Vitanza, "An After/word: Preparing to Meet the Faces that 'We' Will Have Met", Writing Histories of Rhetoric, ed. Vitanza (Carbondale: University of Southern Illinois Press, 1994) pp. 241-44.
38. Few de Manians have tried to modify his theories of tropes such as prosopopeia in light of gender implications. Paramount among such few attempts, however, has been Barbara Johnson, A World of Difference (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), especially her essay "Disfiguring Poetic Language", pp. 100-15, and the brief segment on personification (pp. 45-46)
39. in her essay "Deconstruction, Feminism, and Pedagogy", pp. 42-48.
40. Adolf Katzenellenbogen, Allegories of the Virtues and Vices in Mediaeval Art (London: The Warburg Institute, 1939; rep. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1964) p. 1.
41. The most cogent argument that Prudentius' allegorical agents are literary representations of residual, pre-Christian deities or demons drawn from Roman and Etruscan worship is Kenneth R. Haworth, Deified Virtues, Demonic Vices, and Descriptive Allegory in the "Psychomachia" of Prudentius (Amsterdam: Adolf M. Hakkert, 1980).
42. Hannes Vatter, The Devil in English Literature (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1978) p. 44 reviews the demonological commonplace concerning the affective, positive value of demons to "scare straight" early medieval Christians.
43. Joan Ferrante, Woman as Image in the Middle Ages: From the Twelfth Century to Dante (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975) pp. 37-64.
44. Helen Cooper, "Gender and Personification in Piers Plowman," The Yearbook of Langland Studies 5 (1991) p. 31.
45. Chester F. Chapin, Personification in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry (New York: King's Crown Press, 1955) p. 52;
46. and see Joseph Addison, "Dialogues upon the Usefulness of Ancient Medals", Miscellaneous Works, vol. 2, ed. A. C. Guthkelch (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1914) p. 298.
47. E. H. Gombrich, Symbolic Images: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance II (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1972) p. 125.
48. Maureen Quilligan, The Allegory of Female Authority: Christine de Pizan's "Cité des Dames" (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991) pp. 24-25.
49. See Cooper, p. 23, who also argues that Piers Plowman's irregular personificational procedures - that is, the creation of a preponderance of male personified abstractions - reveal Langland's careful homage to medieval rhetorical tradition as seen in the writings of Conrad of Hirsau. Cooper argues that Langland employs the notion of metonymy rather than prosopopeia per se, maintaining logical consistency between the human template "container" (the protagonist named Will) producing its allegorical dreams and the projected or subordinate abstract components or "contents" existing therein (pp. 42-43). In short, Cooper's formulation, although convincing and important, amounts to another version of ontological consistency or correspondentialism ("if male consciousness, then male components") of the sort I describe below.
50. For a concise review of this articulation, see Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing, intro. Sandra M. Gilbert (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986) pp. 63-64.
51. Otto Jespersen, The Philosophy of Grammar, intro. James D. McCawley (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1924; rep. with intro. and indexes, 1992) p. 228.
52. See Denis Baron, Grammar and Gender (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986) pp. 93-94.
53. The best overview of the late medieval practice of grammaticizing sexuality and sexualizing grammar is Jan Ziolkowski, Alan de Lille's Grammar of Sex (Boston: Medieval Academy of America, 1985).
54. Deconstruction may be defined as the systematic dismantling or inversion of the cognitive dualities literal/figurative, logical /rhetorical, grammar/ rhetoric, proper/ figurative. Paul de Man's primer text that covers the fates of these programmatic pairs is still "Semiology and Rhetoric"; see Allegories of Reading: Figurai Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979) pp. 3-19.
55. See too de Man's opening essay in The Resistance to Theory, pp. 3-20, for his famous pitting of grammar against rhetoric in the arena of contemporary critical production and its social responsibilities.
56. The pragmatic interchangeability of tropes and figures first appears in Quintilian (see Institutes 6.2, 6.3 and 9.2), although it most strongly characterizes the enterprises of the late neo-classical rhetoricians
57. (see Pierre Fontanier, Les figures du Discours, intra. Gérard Genette [Paris: Flammarion, 1968])
58. and their successors, the modern structural rhetoricians (see Jean Dubois et al. eds, A General Rhetoric, trans. Paul B. Burell and Edgar Slotkin [Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981]).
59. Hypochorism, the trope of pet-naming, can involve the whimsical referring to a human person by using the pronoun "it" rather than "he" or "she". Couched also as a diminutio or tapinosis, such a pronominal hypochorism simultaneously installs a pragmapeia or reification, the trope of depersonalization which stands as the structural opposite to prosopopeia or anthropomorphism.
60. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982) p. 228.
61. Tzvetan Todorov, Theories of the Symbol, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982) p. 73.
62. See respectively Richard McKeon, "Rhetoric in the Middle Ages", Critics and Criticism, ed. R. S. Crane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952) p. 260;
63. and Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, trans. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello, SJ (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977) p. 4.
64. Todorov, pp. 74-76.
65. Institutio oratoria, 2.5.11-12. Translation by H. E. Butler, n. 17 above.
66. Maud W. Gleason, Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995) pp. 160-61.
67. For a more compact yet overarching discussion of anti-masculinity, late classical rhetoric and theater, see Jody Enders, "Delivering Delivery: Theatricality and the Emasculation of Eloquence", Rhetorica 15 (1997) pp. 253-78.
68. Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967) pp. 35-39.
69. Timothy David Barnes, Tertullian: A Historical and Literary Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971) pp. 187-210.
70. Bloch, n. 15 above, p. 38.
71. In Principium Genesis, 1.2.22, II. 1791-95
72. in Bedae Venerabilis Opera, Part 2, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina, vol. 118A, ed. Charles W. Jones (Tumhout: Brepols, 1967) p. 56: "Quid necessarium ut, cum os quod de uiri latere sumptum est unde femina condebatur, in locum ossis non os sed caro suppleretur, nisi quia figurabatur quod Christus, propter ecclesiam infirmus, at uero ecclesia per ipsum esset firma futura?"
73. See also 1.3.16, II. 2155-58 (p. 67).
74. Tertullian, De Cultu Feminarum, 1.1.1-2, in Tertulliani Opera, Part 1, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina, vol. 1, ed. E. Kroymann (Turnhout: Brepols, 1954) p. 343; my translation.
75. See "On the Apparel of Women", The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 4, trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Buffalo: The Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885) p. 14;
76. cited in Bloch, p. 40.
77. For discussions parallel to my reading of Tertullian, see Eric Jaeger, The Tempter's Voice: Language and the Fall in Medieval Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993).
78. See Jon Whitman, Allegory: The Dynamics of an Ancient and Medieval Technique (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987) p. 269, for a semantic or lexical discussion of prosopopeia's semiotic implications in early philosophical discourse and for its connection to allegoria or, as it was known in Hellenic thought, hyponoia ("under sense").
79. See also Paxson, pp. 39-40, for discussion of the binary structure of the prosopopeia or personification figure;
80. and Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer's Sexual Poetics (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1989) pp. 20-21, passim, for the medieval connection between the figure allegory and the programmatic imagery of clothed bodies, undressing, seduction, and penetration.
81. Bloch, p. 5.
82. We must bear in mind influential historiographic alternatives to Bloch's model of misogyny: see Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988) esp. chapters 13 and 14, pp. 259-304;
83. and Jo Ann McNamara, A New Song: Celibate Women in the First Three Christian Centuries (New York Haworth Press, 1983).
84. Anthimeria, for instance, could be thought of as a "figure for figuration," as I've argued above; so could catachresis (see note 22) or even metalepsis, which, because it elides or collapses the individual steps in a complicated figurative image or conceit, lays bare figuration's cognitive structure in the first place. See Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 8.6.37-39.
85. Renato Barilli, Rhetoric, trans. Giuliana Menozzi (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1989) p. 15.
86. See Paxson, pp. 161-63, on metapersonification, a narratorial process that involves the mimetic imaging of prosopopeia's semiotic structure in a narrative.
87. J. Hillis Miller calls this self-reflexive mimetic effect "paraprosopopeia": see his Versions of Pygmalion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990) p. 228. I add that the detour through simile and metaphor at this moment will demand, in my subsequent work on the issue, accommodation of the Lacanian theory of rhetorical copula central to a semiotics of simile and metaphor. I thank Shirley Sharon-Zisser for this revelation and for the productive direction it enables in my own theory of gender and rhetorical troping.
88. Poetria Nova, 3.A, 11. 461-66: "Quinta coadjutrix, ultra protendere cursum, / Prosopopeia, veni. Cui nulla potentia fandi, / Da licite fari donetque licentia linguam. / Sic Phetonteos tellus experta vapores / Est conquesta Jovi; sparsis sie Roma capillis / Caesaris instrepuit lacrimosa voce sopori";
89. Faral, n. 11 above, p. 211.
90. Translation is available in Ernest Gallo, The Poetria Nova and its Sources in Early Rhetorical Doctrine (The Hague: Mouton, 1971) p. 39.
91. Butler, n. 22 above, pp. 27-31.
92. That is, the meta-rhetoric of the disciplines we call rhetoric and poetics helped shape the formation of the woman-as-trope topos in allegorical texts. But it's likely that the literary texts themselves in turn served as agents in remodeling consequent rhetorical (or theological and philosophical) knowledge about women in medieval Christian culture.
93. See Bloch, pp. 14-17.
94. Paxson, pp. 67-69. The Vices who suffer from demolished mouths or crushed and pierced throats at the hands of their slayers include Paganism (11. 33-35), Lust (49-51), Indulgence (421-26), and Greed (590-93). Pride has her head severed while facing, in prostrate posture, her slayers Patience and Humility who decapitate the Vice with a sword blow aimed at the throat (282-83). Wrath of course commits suicide (by throwing herself on her spear) after her assaults have no effect on Patience (153-54).
95. See Paul de Man, Wartime Journalism, 1939-1943, ed. Werner Hamacher, Neil Hertz, and Thomas Keenan (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988);
96. see also the essays in Responses: On Paul de Man's Wartime Journalism, ed. Hamacher, Hertz, and Keenan (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989).
97. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985) p. 142.
98. I wish to thank the Rhetorica submission referee for a careful and very helpful commentary on this essay. I also thank R. A. Shoaf and Jody Enders for help and encouragement. Material from roughly the middle third of this essay appears in The Yearbook of Langland Studies 12 (1998).