George’s article, “Mr. Burke, Meet
Helen Keller”, introduces us to an idea that we have already brought attention
to in this course; women and the previous restraints placed on them as agents.
Campbell’s essay, through her propositions made us question whether women could
be agents. Through her story of Sojourner Truth we were able to come to the
conclusion that women can be agents but with constraints. Heilbrun also made us
look at women as agents through her discussion of writing a women’s life. We
were again able to come to the conclusion that women can be agents but they
will never has as much power as men do. George now brings into discussion Helen
Keller, who is not only a woman, but a disabled one as well. Thus, I think the
idea of women as agents needs to be looked at again, as well as the idea of anyone
that is an “other” as agents.
Obviously all of us (or at least I
hope) are aware of who Helen Keller is and the trials she faced during her
life. Although the more I think about it all I know about her is her disability
and the incredible way she overcame it. Until reading George’s article I had no
idea that Keller was “living and writing rhetorical theory” or even that she
wrote any sort of literature (George 340). George points out that Keller never referred
to herself as a rhetorical theorist but we certainly can place her under this
title because she produced literature that “predates Burke’s and rivals it in
sophistication” (George 340). However, Burke’s theory is what society looks and
is aware of, not Keller’s.
Regardless of her disability,
Keller was first and foremost a woman living in a society that was dominated by
men. On top of that she was also disabled so her literature was called "unauthentic, unreflective and
strangely disturbing" (George 345). Keller often defended herself because she
did have the “ability to make informed judgments as well as the sighted,
explaining that she learned about things as they do not firsthand but through
texts” (George 340). Keller was trying to point out that her disability didn’t
define her intelligence and neither did her gender, because we all learn the
same way, through texts. Regardless of this though people still believed that
she was unable to have “first-hand
knowledge of what is going on in the world,” therefore she could not dare have
the same knowledge of the world that Burke possessed (George 345-346). Keller can
be seen as an “other” that came along
with a lot of criticism and intellectual shaming because of this classification.
In Butler’s “Gender Trouble” she states that women constitute the
unreprestable because they existed within a language pervasively masculine, a phallogocentric
language (Butler 13). The defense that
Keller had to provide for her literature was because she was a woman and she was
disabled, therefore she was categorized as an “other”. Thus, anyone that is
also a woman or disabled is also unrepresentable. George was not saying that
Keller should be canonized; he used her as an example to show that there are
women out there that should, he was bringing attention to the fact that there
is no “other”. Women as agents though still clearly do not have the same power
as men because “the canon of modern rhetorical theory is dramatically and
almost exclusively male” (Butler 346). People considered to be “others” also do
not process the same power. People that do not fit into the category of a white
male will always be unrepresentable in rhetorical theory because they are
always being represented by the political system that was supposed to
elevate and emancipate them. So how can a woman be represented as agents when
that very definition is coming form the people that prevent their full agency.
As Butler says, it is a defeating process.
- Cailyn Callaway
Hi Cailyn,
ReplyDeleteI also explored the role of agency in women and how these readings effectively tie back to previous theorists we read about earlier in the semester, particularly Campbell and Heilbrun. When you used the quote, “women constitute the unrepresentable because they existed within a language pervasively masculine, a phallogocentric language,” I can’t help but relate this back to Heilbrun. She had consistently argued that women were unable to officially express their voices in writing due to the pressures of male dominance, even if they technically were taking part in the action of writing. They were forced to maintain a voice that wasn’t necessarily personal to their experiences due to the social constraints placed on them; it was more about what was expected of them. I think this effectively ties in with Butler’s reading, because she argues that a male-dominated language is what ultimately shields women from expressing themselves, as you state in your last paragraph.
I can certainly agree with your statement that while a woman may be an agent, she does not necessarily hold power in comparison to that of a man. I wonder then, what truly makes a woman an agent? I think it can be argued that Hellen Keller was certainly an agent of her writing due to her political activism. While she may have been considered an “other,” she still held the capability to make a type of mark in history, and she effectively made several claims that defined her as a rhetorical theorist. As Campbell points out with her example of Sojourner Truth, Keller is certainly an agent as well. And it can be argued that she does hold power as a woman. She may not have been considered "powerful: at the time she was writing due to the male dominance that was strictly emphasized, but she is now a historical figure that we all are highly familiar with due to her achievements. How, then, can she not hold power as an agent?
-Vanessa Coppola