Why Is No One Talking about Muteness Envy?
A Retrospective on Barbara Johnson
KATIE KADUE
Lately, a lot of powerful people, especially men, have been loudly proclaiming themselves to be silenced, powerless victims. The phenomenon has become so widespread and predictable over the last several years that it can feel like its participants are following a set script. Think of Brett Kavanaugh’s tears during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings; of Kyle Rittenhouse sobbing before the courtroom; of Harvey Weinstein’s claim to shame when an accuser described his “deformed” genitals on the stand and photographic evidence was circulated amongst the jury; of the looped videos that interrupted Instagram feeds with superalgorithmic intensity of Johnny Depp silently shaking his head during Amber Heard’s testimony; of comedians taking the stage in soldout theaters or on widely streamed specials, not long after being “canceled” due to sexual assault allegations, to protest the suppression of their speech. Think of police officers and occupying soldiers insisting on their vulnerability as justification for shooting the unarmed; of presidents proclaiming themselves the victims of “witch hunts”; of tenured professors and securely employed staff writers for major publications wailing at the injustice of being “bullied” by adjuncts or trans people on the internet; of the general trend that the critic B. D. McClay has called the reign of “sore winners”— whiners who won’t admit they’re winners.
As the feminist deconstructionist critic Barbara Johnson demonstrated in her promiscuously wide-ranging yet coolly coy essay “Muteness Envy,” published in 1996, these performances of reticence have been happening for a long time. Johnson’s essay diagnoses this pathology of the powerful as an appropriation of femininized “muteness” that gains a special kind of voice and power precisely through silencing and disempowerment. And it’s been around, she helps us see, for centuries, even millennia, often as a lyric voice. Lyric, after all, has always been the favored genre for anyone looking to win by losing. Lyric is wish fulfillment for people whose wish is that their wish won’t be fulfilled. Muteness envy shows us that if lyric has lost its power as a literary genre, it lives on, immortal as a laurel, as our crypto-dominant cultural one. “Muteness envy!” I’ve exclaimed silently to myself every time I’ve encountered a powerful person exclaiming about being silenced over the past few years, and then, silently, or sometimes to the void of the internet, I’ve asked: “Why is no one talking about muteness envy?”
“Muteness Envy” exemplifies the attitudes that defined Johnson’s mature career as a critic: a commitment to “undecidability” as both a literary and a political category; a sensitivity to how differences of identity—gender especially, but also race—are constitutive of both literary and political discourse, despite and because of the fact that these constitutive roles are often effaced; and a privileging of lyric poetry as a primary, though not exclusive, interpretive field. (The qualifiers and ambivalences in this description are also defining characteristics of her work.) Over three decades, first as a graduate student and then as faculty at Yale in the 1970s and early ’80s, then at Harvard until her death in 2009, Johnson both carried on the legacy of the Yale School of deconstruction—her doctoral adviser was Paul de Man—and, beginning in the mid-1980s, served as its dangerous supplement. She criticized what she called the “Male School” for constantly and unwittingly putting women and femininity under erasure; she was also one of the first to put French theory in conversation with African American literature.
In essay collections with titles like The Critical Difference (1985), A World of Difference (1987), and The Feminist Difference: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race, and Gender (2000), she used deconstructionist techniques on authors like Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Adrienne Rich, and Lucille Clifton, as well as her own colleagues, to expose not only the limits on interpretability inherent to language but also the practical limits of a literary theory that consistently misreads or ignores the difference introduced by writers and subjects who are not white men. She even saw this occlusion in her own early work, calling herself out in a 1984 essay for her previous indifference to such difference, an indifference inherited from her academic fathers J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman, and de Man himself.
Johnson’s writing can feel pedagogical, even if it’s not always clear what you’re being taught. Sometimes it can even feel, to borrow her title from an essay on Molière, like she’s “teaching ignorance.” Which isn’t to say the “negative ignorance” of being kept entirely in the dark, but rather, “positive ignorance,” or the suspension of knowledge in undecidability—that deconstructionist mode that provoked so many accusations of nihilism or quietism but which Johnson saw as coextensive with interpretation. Even her decisive devotion to undecidability can be punctuated with a question mark: “Is a willingness to carry an inquiry to the point of undecidability necessarily at odds with political engagement?” she asks in the introduction to A World of Difference, a book that brazenly bridges academic theory with the “real world,” only to let those bridges casually collapse. It’s easy to come away from reading a Barbara Johnson essay—with all its witty turns of phrase, strategically positioned rhetorical questions, and often quite accessible style—feeling quite confident in having understood a flash of something, ready to face the world and make a difference. But even after having read and reread “Muteness Envy” over many years and having convinced myself that in it lay the key to literary theory’s political applicability, I found I still couldn’t say exactly what “muteness envy” was.
Lyric is wish fulfillment for people whose wish is that their wish won’t be fulfilled.
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So let’s try again. What is muteness envy? It’s not just about being a sore winner. It’s not exactly a form of penis envy just for the fellas, either, though Johnson does acknowledge her debt to Freud. It’s different from “womb envy,” when men feel they lack the biologically creative powers of women and claim intellectually creative superiority to compensate. (They’re not mutually exclusive, though: the Renaissance poet Philip Sidney’s complaint that he’s “great with child to speak and helpless in my throes” has the genetic material of both womb envy and muteness envy.) Nor is it a Nietzschean transvaluation of values, where the last situate themselves as first and the meek prepare to inherit the earth.
Rather, it’s a rhetorical or aesthetic trick by which the ambiguity between power and powerlessness—an ambiguity traditionally assigned to white female sexuality—ends up serving the (traditionally white male) powerful. It’s the conversion of the sore winner’s soreness into a generic form that grants cultural legitimacy, the same sleight of hand lyric poets have always worked. But in muteness envy’s modern instantiations, the authorizing force can’t be confused for the muse’s inspiration. It’s more like the parasitic click of a familiar cultural trope turning on in the brain.
Where did men learn that the best way to be listened to is to claim to be mute? They learned it, Johnson suggests, from women. They also learned from urns, which, as we can see in John Keats’s famous lyric poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” have a lot in common with women, especially young white women whose exteriors can be easily compared to ancient marble and alabaster, or to the blankness of unmarked paper. “Urns are containers,” Johnson announces near the beginning of “Muteness Envy,” as if she’s making a profound pronouncement about a storage solution, which maybe she is. Language, she points out, is a container too. At another point she says, “Urns are not so much anthropomorphic as humans are urnomorphic,” a sentence that makes me laugh and sometimes clangs noisily around my empty head. Another way to put it might be that when men need somewhere to put the seeds of life, death, or ambivalence, they usually look around and find, or invent, either a woman or an urn—both silent vessels that can hold a lot, that can take huge mental loads. Urns are not so much anxiogenic for men as male anxiety is urnogenic.
“Muteness Envy,” like urns, and like any essay, is also a container. It surveys an inventory of aesthetic and rhetorical exercises in self-exoneration and performances of ignorance ranging from lyric poetry (Keats, Wallace Stevens, Francis Ponge) to free speech crusaders (“Why are so many First Amendment defenders so eager to claim a share in the victimhood sweepstakes?”) to psychoanalysis (Lacan’s speculations about female desire) to film (Jane Campion’s The Piano, from 1993, and the heated debates about what its mute heroine meant for feminism). What brings all these examples together? Like Keats’s urn, the essay wears its contents on the surface, and yet, over the years, I keep finding myself shaking it, turning it over, trying to find out what, if anything, is inside.
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“Muteness Envy” came out of the same culture war as John Mowitt’s psychoanalytic account of “Trauma Envy” (2000), which starts from the insight that conservative men, particularly those Mowitt studied in men’s movements, felt the need to deflate feminism’s moral claims by asserting a wound prior to and deeper than that which penis-envious women are thought to suffer from: what Mowitt calls “castration envy.” Like Mowitt, Johnson sees the cultural valorization of perceived injury as engendered, somehow, by gender. But while for Mowitt the male desire to lay claim to injury stems from panic over the ceding of moral authority to feminism in the ’60s, for Johnson that loss is less discretely historical and more generic, even mythic. And it’s at least as old, and as difficult to decipher, as the Greeks. What Johnson’s analysis suggests is that post-MeToo male complaint, like its ’90s pre-iterations, can be traced back to the much older genre of Western lyric poetry, a genre obsessed with its own repetitions and genericness. The primal scene of “Muteness Envy” is one of that genre’s origin stories: the god Apollo’s failed rape of the nymph Daphne, most famously recounted in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a Latin epic poem from the year 8 CE.
In Ovid’s telling, a lovestruck Apollo, hit with Cupid’s arrow, falls for Daphne, who has become a devotee of virginity after being penetrated by Cupid’s lesser-known arrow of anti-eros. Apollo pursues Daphne through the woods; she flees; she’d literally rather die than sleep with him, and she cries out to her father, a river god, to “dissolve / my gracious shape, the form that pleased too well,” in Allen Mandelbaum’s translation. She turns into a laurel tree, her arms into branches, her hair into leaves. Apollo is undeterred. Himself turned tree hugger, “he feels the heart that beats beneath / the new-made bark; within his arms he clasps / the branches as if they were human limbs.” But rather than the metamorphosed Daphne returning his vegetable love, “it shrinks / from his embrace,” and so Apollo decides to make the best of a bad situation. “Since / you cannot be my wife, you’ll be my tree,” he declares, and announces that his hair and his poem-accompanying lyre will always be wreathed with laurel leaves—making him the first poet laureate—and so will the heads of Roman heads of state and of victorious armies. Let’s turn over a new leaf, Apollo seems to say: leave mourning for the losers, and turn a poetic profit out of what seems, for the would-be rapist, to be a loss.
There’s a long critical history of understanding Apollo’s experience as “consolation”: in now-classic lyric fashion, the immortal poetic figure—the evergreen laurel tree—substitutes for the beloved body we can’t possess. More recently, in campus canon conflicts of the past few decades, this episode from the Metamorphoses has become paradigmatically problematic. Undergraduates assigned Ovid’s poem have protested at being forced to read a story of attempted sexual assault that has been aestheticized to the point where rape is indistinguishable from romance, violence greenwashed into poetry. For Johnson, that’s precisely the point of this tradition, and female silence—from Ovid’s botanized Daphne to Keats’s unravished urn to Holly Hunter’s silent Oscar-winning performance in The Piano—is at the bark-bound heart of it: “The rapist is bought off with the aesthetic. And the aesthetic is inextricably tied to a silence in the place of rape.” What we do with the inextricability of aesthetics, rape, and the silence that binds them is a question Johnson more or less mutely leaves to the reader.
In Ovid’s tale, muteness has the last word. After Apollo’s final speech, the tree responds, or makes as if to: “With newmade boughs / the laurel nodded; and she shook her crown, / as if her head had meant to show consent.” The epic dramatizes what lyric tends only to intimate: Apollo, in the role of lyric speaker, reads the tree’s movement in the breeze as “consent”—in other translations, the laurel is said to have given “assent” or simply “nodded”—but we’re reminded this is mere appearance, from Apollo’s limited perspective (what Mandelbaum makes “as if” is rendered by others as “it seemed”).
Reading Ovid’s account, we’re invited to see Apollo’s interpretation of the metamorphosed Daphne as willfully self-serving, as willful and self-serving as any lyric speaker’s apostrophe, the poetic device Johnson defines in another essay, “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,” as “a form of ventriloquism through which the speaker throws voice, life, and human form into the addressee, turning its silence into mute responsiveness,” as willful and self-serving as Lacan’s interpretation of Bernini’s famous statue of the ecstatic-looking St. Teresa: “she’s coming, there is no doubt about it.” When Johnson writes, “In his efforts to collect reliable testimony from women about their pleasure, Lacan finally turns, astonishingly, to a statue,” we see the stoniness of the marble statue resonate in the “ston” of “astonishingly”—a kind of silent pun. “This is a very odd way to listen to women,” Johnson wryly notes, but also all too expected: women are most listened to when someone else is speaking for them.
There are “two things women are silent about,” according to Johnson: “their pleasure and their violation. The work performed by the idealization of this silence is that it helps culture not to be able to tell the difference between the two.” Johnson’s italics here seem to indicate something like a thesis statement. But what does an inability to determine the meaning of women’s “muteness” have to do with “envy” for it? What do men want? To feel pleasure and violation at the same time? To say no when they mean yes? Johnson still doesn’t say.
“Muteness Envy” is, in fact, full of undefined terms and unanswered questions—it refuses, we might say, to say anything. “Why does Keats choose to write about an urn?” Johnson asks after quoting some lines from his ode. She never quite answers this question, or the series of related questions about urns, jars, and jugs that follow, though she pretends to. (In a related essay, “They Urn It,” an entire paragraph, like a one-line stanza of a poem, reads: “It is no accident, I think, that ‘jugs’ is slang for ‘breasts.’” Okay.) Nor does she ever explicitly define “muteness envy.” What’s the deal with urns? Why does failed sexual assault so often translate into art? Why won’t Johnson tell us?
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At the risk of repetition: muteness envy is what happens when a culture needs a way to feel power and powerlessness at once, a wish that was once fulfilled by and recognizable as lyric. Now, at a nadir of lyric literacy, it’s harder for us to see and articulate it. When Apollo chooses to read what looks like Daphne’s resistance as “consent,” what he’s envious of is not her victimization, not exactly, but rather the ambiguity—the undecidability?—of power and powerlessness that her muteness so perfectly preserves: the power to make him love her and the powerlessness to make him stop loving her, the power to elude him but the powerlessness to do so while remaining herself. Apollo understands that to be truly powerless would mean not having the ability to make the poetic claim to powerlessness; lyric is what lets him, like deconstructionist literary critics, have it both ways. That women’s violation can look a lot like pleasure—both to men and to women, who learn as girls to say “I don’t know” about their own desires—helps culture. That the powerful can potentially be interpreted as powerless also helps culture. It gets you the sympathy vote. “Americans love both underdogs and winners,” McClay points out in her assessment of the rise of the “sore winner”; “these qualities cannot be combined without some serious fudging of the facts.” And nothing fudges facts like lyric, that fictional mode that often fails upward by refusing to respect the reality of time, history, and other people.
Lyric—perhaps especially love lyric in the Petrarchan tradition, which swept Europe from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries—is uniquely poised to serve as a site for sore winners. As the Renaissance literary scholar Roland Greene puts it, genres had been available since antiquity for clear winners (they got epic, the heroic stories of triumphant armies and imperial foundations) and clear losers (for them, romance, the tales of endless wandering without a clear redemptive endpoint, road trips to nowhere). But for those in between—those who really weren’t sure if they were winning or losing, or who wanted to hedge their bets between winning and losing—there was lyric. This suspension between winning and losing is part of why lyric feels like it falls outside of time. We never have to make up our minds quite yet. As long as we might be losing the culture war, we’re winning the chance to keep fighting it.
Johnson’s analysis thus expands on the commonplace that our current culture war is repeating that of the ’90s—debates about free speech, race, sexuality, feminism, and the literary canon recurring in barely altered form—by showing how it is also in part a repetition of ancient myth. This myth has historically repeated in psychoanalysis, journalism, and film, but especially in lyric. There’s something synchronic about muteness envy—something that keeps it on that dreamy vertical axis of metaphor and memory, as opposed to the diachronic, horizontal axis of the dutiful forward march of time—just as there is about lyric itself. This is something lyric has in common with psychoanalysis: despite long, strong traditions of politically engaged lyric and psychoanalysis, they’ve both been accused of (or commended for) a fundamental hostility or indifference to history. These two technologies of the self also share a sometimes compulsive commitment to repetition and an attachment to lack and loss as sources of meaning, as what makes us who we are.
When Apollo crowns himself with Daphne’s leaves, or when Petrarch, compulsively repeating and reversing Ovid, imagines himself turned into Laura’s leaves and branches, they’re simultaneously taking on the lost object’s identity and turning that loss into a gain. But one can do without turning into a tree; the substitution of the lyric utterance for the lost object can be what constitutes the self, the lyric subject who comes into being when he sings of what’s been lost. When Lacan, in an oft-repeated formulation, says that love is giving something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it, we might substitute lyric, a genre that’s all about not having your cake and telling everyone that you can’t eat it either. We might also substitute Johnson’s body of criticism, where an analysis of Baudelaire’s prose poem “Le Gâteau,” in a section of an essay subtitled “Let Them Eat Cake,” argues that the poem’s titular cake becomes a metaphor for interpreting metaphor itself by dissolving, in the end, into inedible crumbs.
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Part of what I can’t decide on about Johnson’s essay is her insistence on using lyric—the genre so often understood to be preserved from the vagaries of history, embalmed or enurned, embodying its own autonomous organic whole—to make a political argument, and to do so with reference not, or not only, to any explicit content of sexual politics but precisely to lyric form. The critical theorist Theodor Adorno, in a radio lecture later published as the essay “Lyric Poetry and Society,” argues that lyric is always enmeshed in the “bustle and commotion” of social life: “You experience lyric poetry as something opposed to society,” he says to his radio audience, an address preserved on the page as an apostrophe to no one in particular, but “the demand that the lyric word be virginal is itself social in nature.” For Adorno, the lyric speaker’s stubbornly isolated subjectivity is a reaction to the commodification of the modern world, and thus can’t be considered truly isolated—or unravished—at all.
But for Johnson, it’s not so much its response to modernity as its age-old investment in undecidability that gives lyric its urgent political relevance. In “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,” which includes analysis of legal discourse alongside poems by Baudelaire, Percy Shelley, Anne Sexton, and Gwendolyn Brooks, she disputes the criticism, so frequently leveled against deconstruction, that “undecidability” is inherently apolitical. The specific contours of the debate over abortion in the United States, she points out, depend on the undecidability of what counts as a person, a status afforded, in law and in lyric, by language that never perfectly coincides with its referent: “There is politics precisely because there is undecidability. And there is also poetry.” In “Muteness Envy,” Johnson interrupts herself to acknowledge that her subject matter, the objectification and silencing of women that leaves them opaquely unknowable, is “nothing new.” “But why,” Johnson goes on, “is female muteness a repository of aesthetic value? And what does that muteness signify?”
Only upon my most recent rereading of “Muteness Envy” did I realize just how much Johnson herself proceeds by a lyric logic, echoing Keats’s rhetorical questions with her own, or perhaps converting them, metamorphically, from poetic into critical elements, or even, as she elsewhere says of Mallarmé’s “poème critique,” refusing to differentiate the poetic from the critical. She refuses, too, to decide whether art should be about truth or beauty, or, in our contemporary idiom, about politics or morality on the one hand, aesthetics on the other. Lyric undecidability becomes critical open-endedness, questions that remain hanging in the air, still unanswered. In my most frustrated moments of rereading, I found myself asking, still undecided: Are you a critic or a poet? Can a critical essay proceed like this, paratactically, as a series of apparently unconnected questions? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? When Johnson slips into her mode of lyric address, we, her mute readers, can’t really answer. Or can we? Does Johnson want the same thing the male authors she critiques want: the purity of potential, the infinite deferral of definitive meaning, the freedom from having to say anything at all?
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Our resistance to the political power of lyric analysis comes perhaps from our sense that the lyric voice—or at least the presumptively white and male Petrarchan or Keatsian lyric voice—doesn’t speak to our time, not least insofar as it would seem to rather not speak at all. There’s nothing novel, after all, about lyric poetry. The tradition is old, its exemplars often stubbornly unrepresentative of reality, often subjective, individual, and inscrutable, even if we follow Adorno in finding this stubbornness to be fundamentally social, even if we take into account the countless lyric poems, from John Milton’s anti-Presbyterian sonnets to Claudia Rankine’s “American lyrics,” that insist on intervening in the present. John Guillory, the NYU English professor and self-appointed soothsaying doomsdayer of academic literary criticism, announced in his recent celebrated book that an emphasis on “topicality” has meant that lyric and other old poetic genres have been supplanted by new ones, resulting in “the contraction of the disciplinary field historically to modern or contemporary literature and generically to the form of representation—prose narrative—most amenable to interpretation within a political thematic.” Lyric has always been embarrassing, but now that embarrassment is embarrassingly out of fashion. A lyric poem may be the one kind of text an undergraduate would never call a “novel.”
But we are, in spite of all that, living in a lyric moment—and lyric is, after all, so often spurred by spite. The lyric moment is the age of sore winners (McClay’s piece starts off with Taylor Swift lyrics, a testament to white women’s recent success in claiming the historically male mantle of empowering powerlessness); of loud “silenced” men; of cope; of write offs; of wanting to “have it both ways,” which is, the lyric poet A. R. Ammons writes, “the only way / I want it,” or as Mallarmé insists, in Johnson’s gloss, “poetry makes nothing happen” but also “poetry makes nothing happen”: “a sophisticated example of wanting to have it both ways.” “I’m a loser, baby,” the lyric voice sings, though not always with Ammons’s or Mallarmé’s lyricism, “so why won’t you love me?”
We’ve been here for a long time. In “Muteness Envy,” Johnson describes the commentator Katie Roiphe’s dismissal of the speeches at ’90s Take Back the Night rallies as “generic,” and specifically as lyric. Roiphe complains in her book The Morning After that the speakers at these rallies, which were frequently held on college campuses as a show of solidarity and resistance against a creeping culture of sexual assault, “follow conventions as strict as any sonnet sequence or villanelle. As intimate details are squeezed into formulaic standards, they seem to be wrought with an emotion more generic than heartfelt.” Roiphe’s analysis of feminist speech acts could apply as well to a new category of anti-feminist speech act, the post-MeToo exoneration piece, which Moira Donegan has called, in a since-deleted tweet, “a genre unto itself, complete with its own conventions and cliches,” chief among them, in Petrarchan fashion, “a prolonged meditation on the accused’s suffering.” These cultural scripts have started to feel at once natural and artificial, as if written into the code of generative AI, the backlash following the backslash, a literary genre iterated out of its literariness. What is it about these generic utterances that seems to offer succor to Title IX activists, fourteenth-century male lyric poets, contemporary female singer-songwriters, and MeToo’d men alike? It might be that it’s easy: In this economy, who wouldn’t want to fall back on set scripts, scripts that let us have it all, cultural and moral authority at once, the power of muteness together with the power of speech? And is this easy way out—or of never having to find a way out—also the one that Johnson has taken?
That sounds more pessimistic than I mean it to. Maybe I’ve carried “Muteness Envy” with me all these years like a transitional object, D. W. Winnicott’s circumspect analysis of which is the subject of another Johnson essay. When Winnicott calls the transitional object a “paradox,” Johnson explains, he’s treating the concept like a child treats a beloved teddy bear: “The paradox of the transitional object functions like the transitional object itself, as a domain of play and illusion that allows an interpreter, like an infant, to accept and tolerate frustration and reality.” For the child learning independence, as well as for the grown-up critic, “accepting and tolerating the still-not-really-explained paradox opens the way for all of cultural life.” Is that what I’ve been doing with Johnson, working the pages of her essay over until they’re worn thin, cherishing and destroying it, using it to negotiate the relationship between theory and reality, and am I now finally ready to decathect?
Here’s another form of repetition: the rhetorical device of paradiastole, rephrasing a negative euphemistically as a positive, a way of losing paradise and having it too. Rhetoric, like lyric, lets us have it both ways, or no way at all. “The essays collected in this volume,” Johnson announces to close her introduction of A World of Difference, “are attempts to show that these”—the questions she’s just asked about whether literary theory is really as opposed to political action as it seems—“are not merely rhetorical questions.” Or are they? Is it a rhetorical question to ask if the lyric mode keeps real decisions in suspension precisely by making suspension out to be a real decision? Is it enough to argue through imitation of the object of critique, to withhold about withholding, and will holding on long enough let us eventually let go? I still can’t say.