SPEAKING FOR

WOMENExperience, Validation and

Virtue in Plutarch’s Essays on

Women

– Culham, P. (1985) “Ten Years After Pomeroy” p.11

“It is necessary…for feminist scholars to avoid

inflicting on women what has been called ‘double

ontological shock,’ the state of realising that what

has happened is not what was claimed to be

happening, coupled with an inability to tell what has

happened. If scholarly language diverges too far

from the daily speech of common sense empiricism,

communication in either direction will be

impossible…feminist scholarship will be unable to

support modern women either by supplying them

with a validation of their own experience and

interpretation or by bringing them into contact with

their own past.”

“DOUBLE ONTOLOGICAL SHOCK”

• Post-Modern Historiography

• Hayden White

• Psychohistory

• Key: “coupled with an inability to tell what has happened.”

• “One must try to get behind or beneath the presuppositions

which sustain a given type of inquiry…” White, H. (1974) The

Historical Text as Literary Artefact.

COMMON-SENSE EMPIRICISM

• What is “common-sense”?

• Technical language

• (1999) Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science

• Why use scientific language? Why use difficult language?

• Scott, J. (2012) The Incommensurability of Psychoanalysis and History

• Should we avoid technical language?

• Culham: Avoid alienating our language from experience

VALIDATING EXPERIENCE

• Should academia validate our experience?

• Validation ≠ confirmation

• A “new” Historiographic Principle

• Recognition of the influence of the present

• NOT assuming sameness/similarity of mind

• Awareness of how we formulate questions about the past

CONTACT WITH THE PAST

• “bringing them into contact with their own past”

• Can you validate another’s experience?

• Can men validate women’s experience?

• Axiom of Classical scholarship: elite males don’t speak

for everyone.

• Identity, status and gender colour what someone says

FORMULATING THE QUESTION

• Writing Women

• “Freedom with respect to women is harmful to the character

of citizens and to the happiness of the state”(Pol.1269b10)

• “Positive” Views of Women

• Xenophon (to some extent), Plutarch

• Where are the women here?

PLUTARCH

• Biographical Details

• Lived c. 46-120 CE

• Priest of Apollo at Delphi

• Platonist

• The Parallel Lives

• “It must be borne in mind that my design is not to write histories, but lives. And the

most glorious exploits do not always furnish us with the clearest discoveries of virtue

or vice in men; sometimes a matter of less moment, an expression or a jest, informs us

better of their character, than the most famous sieges, the greatest armaments, or the

bloodiest battles whatsoever.” (Life of Alexander 1.2)

PLUTARCH ON WOMEN

• Important problem for Studying Women in Parallel Lives:

• “virtue or vice in men”

• Moralia

• Coniugalia Praecepta

• Lacaenarum Apophthegmata

• De Mulierum Virtutibus

• “So, when Leontis, that most excellent woman, died, I forthwith had then a long conversation

with you, which was not without some share of consolation drawn from philosophy, and now,

as you desired, I have also written out for you the remainder of what I would have said on the

topic that man's virtues and woman's virtues are one and the same.” (1.1)

SPEECH AND DISCOURSE

• How does Plutarch Write?

• Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel”

• Key Ideas: Heteroglossia, Dialogism

• Heteroglossia

• The ‘stratification’ of language

• Silencing the heteroglossia

• “[underlying unitary language is] a world view…a concrete opinion ensuring a maximum of

mutual understanding in all aspects of ideological life…[and] developing in vital connection with

the processes of sociopolitical and cultural centralisation…it is a language of truth.”

• Importance for study of Women?

–Plutarch, De Virtutibus Mulierum 1.1

“For the fact is that the virtues acquire certain

other diversities, their own colouring as it were, due

to varying natures, and they take on the likeness of

the customs on which they are founded, and of the

temperament of persons and their nurture and mode

of living. For example, Achilles was brave in one

way and Ajax in another; and the wisdom of

Odysseus was not like that of Nestor…nor Eirene

fond of her husband in the manner of Alcestis, nor

Cornelia high-minded in the manner of

Olympias…But, with all this, let us not postulate

many different kinds of bravery, wisdom, and

justice — if only the individual dissimilarities

exclude no one of these from receiving its appropriate

rating.”

PLUTARCH’S UNITARY

LANGUAGE• “let us not postulate different kinds of bravery, wisdom and

justice”

• Virtue is the same—manifests differently

• Key: Approach defines the product

• Programatic Definition of Women’s Virtue

• “ nor [is] Eirene fond of her husband in the manner of Alcestis,

nor Cornelia high-minded in the manner of Olympias.”

PLUTARCH’S UNITARY

LANGUAGE (CONT’D)• Male virtues: Bravery (ἀνδρεία), Wisdom (φρόνησις) and Justice (δίκη)

• Female virtues: “Man-loving,” (φίλανδρος) High-minded (μεγαλόφρων)

• Gendered Virtue?

• Hypsicratia—Concubine of Mithridates (Life of Pompey 32.8)

• Women of Chios—Bravery

• Women of Phocis—Wisdom and Justice

• The Last Resort

• Women of Chios—Slave-marriage

• Women of Phocis—Ἀπόνοια

FURTHER DIRECTIONS

• Speaking for Women?

• Plutarch: short-hand for diverse forms of virtue

• Generalisation=silencing

Bibliography

Primary Source

Bakhtin, M. (1981) “Discourse in the Novel” in Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson

(tr.) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. University of Texas Press. 259-422

Secondary Source

Castelnérac, B. (2008) “Life of Lycurgus and the Philosophical Use of Discourse” in

Anastasios G. Nikolaidis The Unity of Plutarch’s Work. Walter de Gruyter. 429-444

de Certeau, M. (2000) “Writings and Histories” in Graham Ward (ed.) The Certeau

Reader. 23-36

——“History: Science and Fiction” 37-52

Davidson, J. (1993) Bakhtin as a Theory of Reading. University of Illinois.

Haynes, D. (2013) Bakhtin Reframed. I.B. Tauris

Morson, G.S. (2011) “The Worlds of Others: Implications of the School of the Dialogue

of Cultures” in Journal of Russian and East European Psychology 49.2: 6-15

Hägg, T. (2012) “Plutarch and His Parallel Lives: Ethical Biography” in The Art of

Biography in Antiquity. 187-238

Walcot, P. (1999) “Plutarch on Women” in Symbolae Osloenses 74. 163-183