Agency: Destroys and Empowers

I have never really considered agency as a paradoxical concept as we’ve unraveled the past few weeks - that idea seemed quite unlike my original definition for it. Agency for me had been previously defined as being able to withhold power and authority over one’s self, to be an agent that empowers oneself. However, the meaning of agent as we’ve discussed in class is one who facilitates action and I won’t reiterate what we have expanded upon the definition of agency/agent but what intrigues me is the idea that agency can be beyond a person. 

Agency can be a text or discourse in itself that creates agency as an agent. Heilbrun encapsulates the definition of agency pretty well with her definition of power as: “…the ability to take one’s place in whatever discourse is essential to action and the right to have one’s part matter.” (Heilbrun 18) But power or agency it seems can never be really acquired through one’s own means unless they have the privilege to do so. Variables that are socially prescribed such as gender, race, class, etc. inhibit or empower agents (or agency?). 

When considering the agency that is allocated to women through various means and various degrees, the medium or agent is extremely important to consider. Campbell’s examination of Sojourner Truth’s speech was very enlightening in seeing how an agent plays a role in not only empowering but also detracting agency from a person. Propped up against the aforementioned definition of power as delineated by Heilbrun complicates the degree of power Truth has because of the constraints inflicted by the externals: Frances Gage and the agents of discourse that surround Sojourner Truth’s words. Sojourner Truth has power in the intent of her original message and what shines through Gage’s translation of her speech. Although Gage manages to give this woman a “voice”, it is only but an essence of who this person was and what she articulated. Furthermore, the dialect in which her speech was presented is unfaithful to the nature of her actual orality and quite frankly it comes across as very demeaning. (Campbell 13) It’s very frustrating because without Frances Gage, Sojourner Truth’s words would be lost without Gage’s fictitious text but the nature of Truth’s agency relies heavily upon an agent’s text and not her own, directly. An unfortunate truth is what Campbell says, “we can never recover the authentic voice of the illiterate.” (Campbell 13) 

The concept of anonymity in the fiction writing created by women in an age such as the Victorian era (authors such as the Brontes and Mary Ann Evans) illustrate just how powerful the agent, in this case, the author’s name is. The previously mentioned writers picked pseudonyms to not only mask themselves but their womanhood. Charlotte Bronte went by the name of Currer Bell; Marry Ann Evans was the infamous Georg Eliot. These women picked male names because they were aware of the discourse that surrounded the concept of “women writers” was dissenting and critical. At the expense of claiming their own authorship they gained power by using male name as an agent to authorize their texts. It’s quite horrifying to think that some of the greatest English literature may have been passively overlooked because of gender bias, that a women’s work isn’t valued until it claims to come from a man. I think this slightly parallels Campbell’s analysis of Sojourner Truth in that an agent with privilege is taking a text and elevating it with agency. There is a loss in both instances but they differ in their nature of disempowerment. Agency gives almost as much as it destroys. 

Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs. "Agency: Promiscuous and Protean." Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 2.1 (2005): 1-19.

Heilbrun, Carolyn. "Introduction." In Writing a Woman's Life. New York: Norton, 1988. 11-24.