2. – Culham, P. (1985) “Ten Years After Pomeroy” p.11
“It is necessary…for feminist scholars to avoid
inflicting on women what has been called ‘double
ontological shock,’ the state of realising that what
has happened is not what was claimed to be
happening, coupled with an inability to tell what has
happened. If scholarly language diverges too far
from the daily speech of common sense empiricism,
communication in either direction will be
impossible…feminist scholarship will be unable to
support modern women either by supplying them
with a validation of their own experience and
interpretation or by bringing them into contact with
their own past.”
3. “DOUBLE ONTOLOGICAL SHOCK”
• Post-Modern Historiography
• Hayden White
• Psychohistory
• Key: “coupled with an inability to tell what has happened.”
• “One must try to get behind or beneath the presuppositions
which sustain a given type of inquiry…” White, H. (1974) The
Historical Text as Literary Artefact.
4. COMMON-SENSE EMPIRICISM
• What is “common-sense”?
• Technical language
• (1999) Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science
• Why use scientific language? Why use difficult language?
• Scott, J. (2012) The Incommensurability of Psychoanalysis and History
• Should we avoid technical language?
• Culham: Avoid alienating our language from experience
5. VALIDATING EXPERIENCE
• Should academia validate our experience?
• Validation ≠ confirmation
• A “new” Historiographic Principle
• Recognition of the influence of the present
• NOT assuming sameness/similarity of mind
• Awareness of how we formulate questions about the past
6. CONTACT WITH THE PAST
• “bringing them into contact with their own past”
• Can you validate another’s experience?
• Can men validate women’s experience?
• Axiom of Classical scholarship: elite males don’t speak
for everyone.
• Identity, status and gender colour what someone says
7. FORMULATING THE QUESTION
• Writing Women
• “Freedom with respect to women is harmful to the character
of citizens and to the happiness of the state”(Pol.1269b10)
• “Positive” Views of Women
• Xenophon (to some extent), Plutarch
• Where are the women here?
8. PLUTARCH
• Biographical Details
• Lived c. 46-120 CE
• Priest of Apollo at Delphi
• Platonist
• The Parallel Lives
• “It must be borne in mind that my design is not to write histories, but lives. And the
most glorious exploits do not always furnish us with the clearest discoveries of virtue
or vice in men; sometimes a matter of less moment, an expression or a jest, informs us
better of their character, than the most famous sieges, the greatest armaments, or the
bloodiest battles whatsoever.” (Life of Alexander 1.2)
9. PLUTARCH ON WOMEN
• Important problem for Studying Women in Parallel Lives:
• “virtue or vice in men”
• Moralia
• Coniugalia Praecepta
• Lacaenarum Apophthegmata
• De Mulierum Virtutibus
• “So, when Leontis, that most excellent woman, died, I forthwith had then a long conversation
with you, which was not without some share of consolation drawn from philosophy, and now,
as you desired, I have also written out for you the remainder of what I would have said on the
topic that man's virtues and woman's virtues are one and the same.” (1.1)
10. SPEECH AND DISCOURSE
• How does Plutarch Write?
• Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel”
• Key Ideas: Heteroglossia, Dialogism
• Heteroglossia
• The ‘stratification’ of language
• Silencing the heteroglossia
• “[underlying unitary language is] a world view…a concrete opinion ensuring a maximum of
mutual understanding in all aspects of ideological life…[and] developing in vital connection with
the processes of sociopolitical and cultural centralisation…it is a language of truth.”
• Importance for study of Women?
11. –Plutarch, De Virtutibus Mulierum 1.1
“For the fact is that the virtues acquire certain
other diversities, their own colouring as it were, due
to varying natures, and they take on the likeness of
the customs on which they are founded, and of the
temperament of persons and their nurture and mode
of living. For example, Achilles was brave in one
way and Ajax in another; and the wisdom of
Odysseus was not like that of Nestor…nor Eirene
fond of her husband in the manner of Alcestis, nor
Cornelia high-minded in the manner of
Olympias…But, with all this, let us not postulate
many different kinds of bravery, wisdom, and
justice — if only the individual dissimilarities
exclude no one of these from receiving its appropriate
rating.”
12. PLUTARCH’S UNITARY
LANGUAGE
• “let us not postulate different kinds of bravery, wisdom and
justice”
• Virtue is the same—manifests differently
• Key: Approach defines the product
• Programatic Definition of Women’s Virtue
• “ nor [is] Eirene fond of her husband in the manner of Alcestis,
nor Cornelia high-minded in the manner of Olympias.”
13. PLUTARCH’S UNITARY
LANGUAGE (CONT’D)
• Male virtues: Bravery (ἀνδρεία), Wisdom (φρόνησις) and Justice (δίκη)
• Female virtues: “Man-loving,” (φίλανδρος) High-minded (μεγαλόφρων)
• Gendered Virtue?
• Hypsicratia—Concubine of Mithridates (Life of Pompey 32.8)
• Women of Chios—Bravery
• Women of Phocis—Wisdom and Justice
• The Last Resort
• Women of Chios—Slave-marriage
• Women of Phocis—Ἀπόνοια
14. FURTHER DIRECTIONS
• Speaking for Women?
• Plutarch: short-hand for diverse forms of virtue
• Generalisation=silencing
15. Bibliography
Primary Source
Bakhtin, M. (1981) “Discourse in the Novel” in Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson
(tr.) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. University of Texas Press. 259-422
Secondary Source
Castelnérac, B. (2008) “Life of Lycurgus and the Philosophical Use of Discourse” in
Anastasios G. Nikolaidis The Unity of Plutarch’s Work. Walter de Gruyter. 429-444
de Certeau, M. (2000) “Writings and Histories” in Graham Ward (ed.) The Certeau
Reader. 23-36
——“History: Science and Fiction” 37-52
Davidson, J. (1993) Bakhtin as a Theory of Reading. University of Illinois.
Haynes, D. (2013) Bakhtin Reframed. I.B. Tauris
Morson, G.S. (2011) “The Worlds of Others: Implications of the School of the Dialogue
of Cultures” in Journal of Russian and East European Psychology 49.2: 6-15
Hägg, T. (2012) “Plutarch and His Parallel Lives: Ethical Biography” in The Art of
Biography in Antiquity. 187-238
Walcot, P. (1999) “Plutarch on Women” in Symbolae Osloenses 74. 163-183
