The
Birth of Pleasure contains no chapters, no section headings, and no
footnotes. Despite the fact that
psychological studies, novels, poems, lyrics, and myths are abundantly cited,
Gilligan does not provide much in the way of a typical scholarly apparatus even
when she is directly quoting from a text. 
Moreover, the book is written in a seemingly random fashion. It moves from a psychological study of
13-year olds to a myth, and then to a song by the Indigo Girls—without
transition. One is given little
indication of where the text is going, or where it has been, or why it is going
where it seems to be going. The prose itself is sometimes well-written,
sometimes a horrible combination of psychobabble and incoherent metaphors, and
often veers into a repetitive mantra of “harmony, love, togetherness” versus
“rupture and loss due to the bad patriarchy/hierarchy.” For instance— “But we also see the power of
love to unglue hierarchy, as association opens the way to undoing dissociation”
(pg. 161).

This stylistic decision, one
assumes, is supposed to harmonize with the topic matter of the book: love,
pleasure, suffering, family dynamics, relationships, developmental psychology,
and the patriarchy. It might also be an
attempt at “a different voice” (the work that made Gilligan famous is her
20-year-old book In a Different Voice).
A different voice is needed to express the complexity of these highly emotional
themes.

In
a Different Voice came at a time in feminist theory when the traditional
struggle for equality was being questioned. 
Were feminists implicitly considering “equality” in exclusively
masculine terms? In a Different Voice charts the manner in which young girls and
boys reason. Gilligan notes that girls
focus more on relationships and consequences, whereas boys act based on
rules. Contra traditional psychological
categories, where adherence to moral rules is a higher stage of development,
Gilligan praises the girls manner of moral reasoning and suggests that girls’
“voices” have long been suppressed.   
This helped to spur a growing divide in feminist theory over whether or
not certain styles of reasoning are inherently
masculine and others inherently feminine. 
More radical claims, to which Gilligan does not subscribe, on the side
of a “feminine reason” argue that language and logic themselves are male
enterprises, namely, “tools” of the patriarchy.

Gilligan does not directly pick up
this argument in The Birth of Pleasure,
but the theme of the patriarchy/hierarchy is omnipresent. Although the style of the book renders it
resistant to succinct summarization, I will provide an overview one of what I
take to be the main thrust of the text.

Gilligan argues that, due to the
patriarchal/hierarchical structure of society, certain relationships between
parents and children develop into pathologies (i.e., the Oedipus
conflict). For boys, the conflict
occurs most deeply in early childhood and, thereafter, boys concern themselves
with being part of the patriarchy. For
instance, young boys understand themselves as either “good guys” or “bad guys”
and form their social identities accordingly. 
They lose the ability to find their own voices and form relationships on
terms outside of their social roles. 
For girls, the pathological conflict with parents and society occurs
later in puberty. Girls are encouraged
not to take up the role of protector, as boys are, but of the self-sacrificing
lover, or the tyrannical mother who forces her daughters to behave accordingly
to the norms of a patriarchal
society. Thus, love is inherently
problematic because it asks for a bond that disrupts the social roles one is
demanded to play. Love is too
democratic for the hierarchical nature of society and the fixed stereotypes men
and women embody. Gilligan treats
everything from myths to group therapy as revealing that individuals find love
to end in suffering, rather than pleasure, because of the conflicts it always
entails. She suggests that if one exposes how society creates these conflicts,
one can find a love that can give birth to pleasure if the couple overcomes
their restrictive roles.

Much of the book smacks of a kind of
teenage romanticism. Is love really
about two individuals fighting against the evilness of society’s hierarchical
and patriarchal norms? The myth of
Psyche and Cupid is interwoven, in a very beautiful manner, throughout the
book. At the end of a story fraught
with lies, battles, and family drama, Psyche and Cupid finally come together as
equal lovers and “give birth to Pleasure.” 
It is a lovely myth and certainly meddling family members have destroyed
many a great love, but what does it tell us about the patriarchy or love
itself? It privileges the concept that
romantic love is the non plus ultra
of love relationships, a concept that strikes the reviewer as narrow, teenage,
and Western. Is pleasure uniquely the child of romantic love? Is the high divorce rate in the U.S.A. a
sign of an inability to love in a patriarchy, or is it a sign that human
romantic love is simply a more fleeting, passing affection than we would like
to admit?

More disturbing in Gilligan’s book is the idea that
these myths reveal something essential about human love. One could easily read love myths as
indoctrinating young people into the concept that what life is about is to have
a romantic love (and that, without it, you will be doomed to unhappiness). Sure, many love myths have this tragic end
Gilligan describes, but the tragedy is itself a beautiful, admirable
thing. The characters are half-gods or
impossibly beautiful princesses and princes who live rather useless, selfish
lives. This kind of story, whether the
ending is a happy one, such as in Psyche and Cupid or unhappy, seems to be
precisely the kind of silly, unrealistic story any skeptical individual would
take issue with. These are not real
people with real loves; they are entertaining stories that, like most
contemporary films, repeat ad infinitum the idea that the point of life is a
perfect romantic love with a perfect individual who solves every need and
desire you have. Certainly, these
stories tell us volumes about human nature, but it appears that Gilligan
herself is arguing that if one does away with the “powers that be,” we can live
in this perfect, Hollywood world where we will engage in fully satisfying,
perfect relationships, and—by the way—also raise our children in a perfect,
conflict-free manner. To the reviewer,
it would appear that precisely these idealistic stories of love do far more to
suppress young women than a lack of self-confidence.

Nonetheless, despite this
overwhelming romanticism, Gilligan points to two interesting theses. One is to note the difference in kind
between how boys and girls create their social roles. Gilligan writes that boys
do indeed, in a more or less Freudian fashion, go through the Oedipal stage in
early childhood. Girls, on the
contrary, do not split themselves into the “real me” and the “society me” until
puberty, at which point they also display greater illness, more social
discomfort, etc. Since girls are older,
they are also much more sensitive to the larger social context in which their
relationships are forming. In order to
satisfy the demands of parents and the social group, girls learn to lie about
their feelings. Gilligan writes about
how her own conflicts with her mother were often about her mother encouraging
her to do and say the “right”—i.e., socially acceptable—things, not to be
honest about how she felt. Naturally,
her mother wanted her to be successful in a patriarchal society; lying is
required for success. Second, and
related to this theme, Gilligan does a fine job of pointing out the
complexities of familial relationships and the investments that parents have in
their children. Parents too have social
norms they must live up to, and this affects their parenting skills, often to
the detriment of the children.

There are some non-contentious parts of Gilligan’s
text. Bad families and repressive societies do limit the ability for
individuals to love who they want. 
Although the therapy discussed is exclusively for the middle/upper class
individual (how many families can afford to send their daughter to confidence
building groups, or how many women can attend drama workshops?), it would
probably be beneficial to promote confidence building groups and workshops for
young persons.

However, beyond these kind of vague
calls for more love, less repression, and familial harmony, the larger point of
the text seems to ultimately repeat/reiterate a tried-and-true
romanticism. I was unconvinced that
true romantic love would somehow undermine the patriarchy. Not to mention, I could never figure out
what the patriarchy is to Gilligan. Is
it just the status quo? Is it the same in all countries? All classes? All
times? Does it just indicate that men
are in power, have the money, etc.? Or is the patriarchy some kind of subtle
use of “male” reason that goes far beyond who controls the purse-strings? Does patriarchy mean the same thing as
hierarchy (since Gilligan used the words interchangeably)? I was surprised to
find that it appears that Gilligan thinks it was a universal description of
“love in a patriarchy” since her conception of love seem so Western and
bourgeois.

Despite my ultimate dissatisfaction
with the book’s themes, the book is an engaging read. Although the prose is heavy and awkward, I enjoyed reading a book
with a different style in comparison to dry academic texts. One can hope that the next text of Gilligan’s
will continue to look for a different voice and to move beyond hackneyed
conceptions of love.

© 2002 Talia Welsh
 

Talia Welsh is a Ph.D. student
in Philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. She is
writing a dissertation on Merleau Ponty’s psychology.

Categories: General, Relationships