The famous psychologist and author of ‘In a Different Voice’ has written a novel. Why?
Carol Gilligan’s new novel, Kyra (Random House) is tastefully erotic in a glum, Bergmanesque way. But Gilligan (see related article) has dressed up standard romantic fiction – with its fantasies of wish fulfillment and revenge – in a thickly padded coat of learned allusions and erudite lectures. I might call Kyra “professorial chick lit,” except that the heroine of chick lit is always lovably flawed and funny, and Gilligan’s narrator is perfect and humorless, not only a brilliant and acclaimed lecturer at A-list conference venues from Cambridge to Vienna, but also, as her lover tells her more than once, “incredibly beautiful.” Kyra also knows binaries like female/male, private/public, inside/outside, and commitment/independence. That’s a lot of baggage for a first novel to carry, and Kyra buckles under the weight of Gilligan’s ambitions.
Why write a novel after a splendid career as a social psychologist at Harvard and New York Universities, and the University of Cambridge? Gilligan first made her academic reputation in 1982 with the enormously influential but controversial In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Harvard University Press), which argued that girls and boys had a different moral development and ethical concerns. For girls, she maintained, entering adolescence meant sacrificing an authentic self and genuine voice to the urgent need for relationships, thus developing a female ethics of care more complex and conflicted than a male one. In addition to a small number of interviews with 12-year-old boys and girls, Gilligan drew many of her examples from literature (she had majored in English at Swarthmore College), including the work of Anton Chekhov, Joseph Conrad, Margaret Drabble, George Eliot, Robert Frost, Henrik Ibsen, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Mary McCarthy, Toni Morrison, Shakespeare, Stendhal, and Virginia Woolf. In her most recent psychological text, The Birth of Pleasure (Knopf, 2002), Gilligan argued that tragic love stories are patriarchal, defining love as loss and pain, whereas a female-centered love story would allow both protagonists the happy ending of equality.
In 2002, Gilligan also wrote a dramatic adaptation of The Scarlet Letter, produced at Shakespeare & Co., in Lenox, Mass., a tale that illustrated her idea that the tragic love story is a rigid and inflexible genre that denies men and women pleasure by insisting on obedience to patriarchal codes. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s treatment, the protagonist Hester Prynne believes in a future that “would establish the whole relation between men and women on a surer ground of mutual happiness,” but Hawthorne refuses such a utopian ending. In Gilligan’s play, Hester’s daughter, Pearl, speaks magically from the 21st century to describe how a happy ending can be achieved by contemporary feminists, but that is a didactic postscript to the characters’ dilemma.
It’s not surprising then, that Gilligan has been drawn to fiction, where imagination can be untrammeled by the need for actors and stages. Rather than choose a plot of moral and ethical conflict, demonstrating the different values of young women in difficult situations, she has followed up on The Birth of Pleasure, rewriting romantic tragedy in feminist terms to show how to have love and freedom. Set in the 1980s, Kyra is based on the mythic love story of Dido and Aeneas, and on their respective cities of Carthage and Rome, which Gilligan interprets as contrasting female and male principles. Kyra is an architect teaching at Harvard and working on the Carthage Project, “to design a new city on a small scale,” a modern Carthage that would allow a “fluidity of boundaries, between inside and outside, private and public spaces.” Carthage was a “city devoted to arts and commerce rather than to conquest and imperialism,” and Kyra’s city, which will have an outdoor theater as its anchor, will “symbolize an alternative to Rome and what it stood for: empire and war.”
Andreas is a widowed Hungarian conductor, “trying to do opera in a new way, also on a small scale,” who is directing an experimental Peter Brookish Tosca in a little theater in Boston’s South End. He wears a leather jacket and Italian shoes and has “blue-gray eyes, the color of river stones.” They meet at a party and immediately play a highly symbolic game of chess. In the battle between the feminine Carthage and the masculine Rome, he has to be Rome, although he is the artist of the two, and as he rather cheesily tells her, “Roma spelled backward is amor.” The affair between Kyra and Andreas seems idyllic; they both like white wine, oysters, dark iconic Cambridge bars, Mozart, Samuel Beckett, Bach, and Bergman films. Kyra signs on to design the sets for Tosca; Andreas accompanies her to the island where she is building the Carthage Project.
But how will they maintain their relationship when he is committed to starting a theater in Budapest, and she has to do her own work, which involves academic squabbles at Harvard and frequent flying to other meaningful cultural spaces like Thailand? He wants to call the whole thing off because he “is past the point where I can accept your love on any terms other than permanently, and I am not at the point where I can accept it permanently.”
In another symbolic structure of the novel, Gilligan moves between three islands; Cyprus, where Kyra grew up and saw her husband shot by fascists; Nashawena, the privately owned island near Woods Hole where she is building the Carthage Project with financing from a rich patron; and Bardsey, a tiny, chilly, desolate, and extremely depressing island off Wales. The lovers go there at the end of the novel to open up to each other and to possibilities for a negotiated settlement of their differences.
Gilligan’s most awkwardly incorporated theme is about breaking the structures of Freudian psychoanalysis. When Andreas leaves her abruptly to return to Budapest, Kyra has a breakdown and cuts herself, an act some would call a suicide attempt but one that she insists is actually an epistemological gesture “because my feelings had come back, so strong, overwhelming, and I needed to see beneath the surface, to know if they were about something real.” Kyra finds a wise and sympathetic female therapist named Greta, but before too long, she concludes that psychotherapy is also structured around the traumatic plot of patriarchal romantic tragedy. In order for it to work, the patient has a transference – falls in love – with the analyst and then must accept the one-sided and temporary nature of the affair as the therapy ends. “I can’t work this out with you if you continue to hide within this therapy structure,” Kyra tells Greta. “You said that women have to change the structures. What about you?” Since this is a novel intellectually committed to happy endings, they find a way, which does not require a trip to another island.
Many academics would like to write a novel, but very few actually do it. Carol Gilligan deserves credit not only for succeeding, but for her abilities to craft dialogue, describe settings, and sketch in historical background. Gilligan can also do academic satire, as she shows in a few brief scenes of department meetings. Although the main characters are set into motion to illustrate her ideas, even that could have worked if she had not decided on a first-person narrative, which blurs the line between author and heroine, or at least makes ironic distance more challenging. But the love story in Kyra is more soap opera than opera; there is too little at stake for the contest between the lovers to live up to the academic arias that accompany it. Next time, I hope, Gilligan will write a better novel “in a different voice.”
