You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Passions of the Voice is a powerful synthesis and elaboration of Claire Kahane's prior contributions to the field of feminist psychoanalytic criticism. Developing the historico-theoretical interest in hysteria announced in Kahane's co-edited collection In Dora's Case (Bernheimer) as well as the maternal fantasms set forth in the equally influential volume, The (M)other Tongue (Garner), Kahane's new single-authored book maps the aesthetic, historical, and theoretical vectors linking the problem of voice to the formal and pathological outlines of hysteria in late Victorian and early modernist literature. Kahane's title phrase “passions of the voice” names the suffering and fragmentation undergone by the female subject as she enters into and falls out of the symbolizing possibilities of speech. The concept of “voice” here covers much terrain, offering a flexible category that accommodates Kahane's associative interpretive style: it includes narrative voice, the speech of the mother in infancy, the “talking cure” of psychoanalysis, the cry of the child, and the rise of the female orator in the suffrage movement, as well as the shifting oppositions between speech and writing, hearing and seeing, and music and poetry. The result is an evocative, often masterful recreation of a world of discourse marked by the trauma of maternal loss, the catastrophe that both motivates and stymies the search for a viable feminine subject position within the Oedipal order.
The book is least successful in its attempt to “historicize” this subjective crisis. The opening chapter linking the rise of modern feminism to that of hysteria as a clinical category relies almost exclusively on recent secondary sources for its account of medical and political developments in the period; as with so many recent historicist approaches, Kahane relies on a series of exhausted citations and stereotypes that threaten to reify the epistemological and political complexities of Victorian medical and political cul