Re/dressing histories; or, on re/covering figures who have been laid bare by our gaze

Abstract

Women! This coin which men find counterfeit! laments Euripedes' Hippolytus.' Why, why, Lord Zeus, did you put them in the world, in the light of the sun? If you were so determined to breed the race of man, the source of it should not have been (11.616-20). Phaedra is, as all women, the counterfeit coin. Her exchange rate is never quite legitimate. She is never quite legitimate. As the gold standard is Man, is Truth, Woman never measures up. She is always found lacking Truth-the Truth that is man-and is thus, like Phaedra, a counterfeit coin. But she is a coin imprinted with His signature, bearing His name, nevertheless. With his imprint, Woman's exchange rate is secured. Like a coin, she changes hands-from father to husband.2 Woman, the counterfeit coin, the site of false words and deeds, is inscribed with guilt; indicted with deception, penned as the Unspeakable and Undiscernible Lie, sentenced to silence. Woman is the text that paradoxically cannot speak but nevertheless speaks in its silence. Her silence is the message; it desires to be read. And now we-as historiographers of maleauthored texts concerning women, as feminists, as proponents of the Discourses of the Other-desire to (re)cover and (re)read Phaedra's, Diotima's, Aspasia's silent message.3 But why? What motivates our desire to read these women? What propels our desire to make these women readable? Are we not, perhaps, attempting to reinvest these women with value? Are we not trying to redeem them from charges of counterfeit? Are we not, then, merely making Woman into a legitimate coin, a proper currency, a respectable asset? Are we not, then, merely increasing her exchange rate, but without questioning the very standard-the phallogocentric standard of Truth-that finds her lacking, that is responsible for her devaluation? It is my argument that our attempts to (re)read women, to (re)cover women, to (re)present women, and to therefore (re)cast history, are insidious acts of (re)appropriation. Everyone knows that the exchange rate of a dog of papered lineage-of legitimate birth-is exponentially greater than that of a mongrel. To provide

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