Women's Discourse and Literature—The Question of Nature and Culture

I AM AWARE THAT THE AMBITIOUS TITLE of my communication, "Women's Discourse and Literature: The Question of Nature and Culture, " embraces an extraordinarily vast field of research and reflection. As I address the issue as to whether the difference in woman's expression is exclusively due to culture and not to nature, I want immediately to say that my simple aim is to advance several considerations and to sharpen the focus of some initial questions. Right away I admit that the vastness of my chosen subject makes me uncomfortable, reminding me of the anecdote of the driver who asked directions from a Vermont farmer and was told: "Well, now, if I wanted to go where you want to go, I wouldn't start from here."1 Speaking for myself, I can start from where I am and from what I've got, with the restless solace that my thinking on my subject continues to change.

Nature vs. art, a dichotomy dominant in Greek and Roman thought as well as in Renaissance culture, has now evolved into nature vs. culture, a challenging antithesis for all contemporary social sciences. We all are familiar with the aporias encountered by investigators who try to arrive at laws or principles which are not culture-bound, and we can readily think of the glib generalizations and naive assumptions of former ages in their facile descriptions of the so-called innate in the human being and the harmony of that innateness with world order. Disillusionment about such preordained order and harmony, Freud told us, imposed three narcissistic wounds on the human race. The first was the heliocentric finding by Copernicus in the sixteenth century, which demonstrated