Sex, Lies, and Manuscript: Refiguring Aspasia in the History of Rhetoric

Abstract

fellow rhetorician recently gave me a nineteenth-century print entitled and Aspasia. In beautiful detail, French artist J. L. Gerome (best-known for transfusing his journeys to the East with an exotic and erotic charm) presents Aspasia reclining seductively on Alcibiades, her hand cupping his breast, her head suspiciously near his stomach and wide-spread legs, while Alcibiades looks away from her and reaches out to grasp Socrates' hand. Thus Aspasia comes down to us as an odalisque, while Alcibiades, the object of her attention, comes to us wreathed in laurel.' For the past 2500 years in Western culture, the ideal woman has been disciplined by cultural codes that require a closed mouth (silence), a closed body (chastity), and an enclosed life (domestic confinement).2 Little wonder, then, that women have been closed out of the rhetorical tradition, a tradition of vocal, virile, public-and therefore privileged-men. Women's enclosed bodies provide lacunae in the patriarchal territory of rhetorical practices and displays, a gendered landscape, with no female rhetoricians clearly in sight. But just as recent feminist scholarship has begun to recover and recuperate women's contributions in the broad history of culturemaking-in philosophy, literature, language, writing, societal structure, Christianity, history, education, reading, psychology, and gender-so too have feminist historians of rhetoric begun to re-map rhetorical history.' In her Opportunities for Feminist Research in the History of Rhetoric, Patricia Bizzell accounts for various disruptions that could realign and regender the rhetorical terrain and anticipates the consequences of refiguring the role of women on that terrain.4 And in Coming to Terms with Recent Attempts to Write Women into the History of Rhetoric, Barbara

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