With Great Power Comes Great Disadvantage

“Power is the ability to take one’s place in whatever discourse is essential to action and the right to have one’s part in the matter” (Heilbrun 18).

This idea, applied to feminist criticism in Heilbrun’s Writing a Woman’s Life, is echoed in Barton’s essay “Textual Practices of Erasure” in terms of what she describes as “discourses of disability” (169). Both Heilbrun, in regards to women writers, and Barton, in regards to the ‘disabled’, address the rhetorical misrepresentation of these groups and make the claim that the truth of their experiences have been silenced. In examining these rhetorical practices, it is clear that agency, once created, is simultaneously destroyed.

In Writing a Woman’s Life, Heilbrun expresses her frustration with the autobiographies of women writers in that—despite their incredible known talent and ambition—they are always represented in terms of the patriarchal norms assigned to them. The true authenticity of their lives is what isn’t being said, and their experiences are suppressed. While they are able to write and publish their writing, their true self and their true experiences cannot be wholly expressed for fear of sounding “shrill” or “strident” (16).  This fear has caused a ‘cutting-off’ effect of language for women, only willing to showcase their “womanhood” in terms defined by the oppressive patriarchal society in which they are subsumed. They are being denied their right to power, even though they are physically able to write and publish. “What is depicted is not actual independence but action despite dependence” (17). This is done through historically analyzing the ways in which women have told their stories and recognizing the patterns within them. For instance, Heilbrun says, “nostalgia, particularly for childhood, is likely to be a mask for unrecognized anger” (15). Women were subconsciously censored in the ways that they wrote about themselves and their experiences, often taking refuge in “depression or madness” (15). To a greater extreme, “only the female life of prime devotion to male destiny had been told before” (26).

Barton’s examination of the representation of the ‘disabled’ differs slightly in that the subjects of discussion were not even remotely permitted in their own discourse. There was a complete and totalizing “erasure” of their experiences from their representation. Instead, the United Way campaigns of the 1950s advertised their charity through “a binary distinction between the able-bodied and the disabled, separating and distancing the disabled from the abled” (173). While economically effective, these campaigns set the precedent for society’s perception of those dubbed ‘disabled’. As is the case for women writers in Heilbrun’s text, “disability is not solely a medical condition but a complex social experience, one centered around the physical realities of the minority of individuals with disabilities but one constructed as an experience of difference by the majority of individuals without disabilities” (170). Put another way, the expression of their experience was being dictated by those not involved in the experience, more than that, by those who ‘Other-ed’ them in the first place. The roles in which the ‘disabled’ were assigned, and moreover the roles that women were expected to play, composed the lines that were told.

Whether they are being wrote about or writing about themselves, their lives and experiences can only be told and understood in terms of the social and historical constructions surrounding them. This may seem trivial, as language itself can only be literally understood in terms of their social and historical context; however, it is clear in these cases that societal constructions of oppression significantly impede on the agency of the writer. These impediments cannot usually be identified at the time, as the same social constructions that have caused them hinder their recognition. Thus, language, which enables us to communicate our deepest selves, is inevitably and inextricably linked with silence.

Barton, Ellen L. "Textual Practices of Erasure: Representations of Disability and the Founding of the United Way." Embodied Rhetorics: Disability in Language and Culture. Ed. James C. Wilson and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2001. 169-199.
Heilbrun, Carolyn. "Introduction." In Writing a Woman's Life. New York: Norton, 1988. 11-24.