ABSTRACT
A day spent learning about personal voice theory perhaps calls for an autobiographical note from me. Here’s a bit. I started Latin in school over fifty years ago – the world in which I began my studies was positively antediluvian – did classics in college, and got a PhD at Harvard. This last completed my qualifications for that most detested of creatures in contemporary American academia, a WASP male of the monied class with a Harvard PhD. But then at the time I entered the field so was almost everyone else, or at least in the Ivy League which set the tone for the field. Those who were not worked energetically to appear so. Thus, taking one definition of the personal voice as I seem to have heard it today, I would say that for most of us in those days to speak with our personal or individual voice was to speak with the generic voice as well. Conformity is, of course, a characteristic of any group. The WASP male in addition has always practiced anonymity. It is one of the effective WASP strategies for controlling others, for creating and maintaining power. Just as impersonality, for instance, was the mode my parents employed in dealing with the servants, it was the mode desired by most academics for the teacher-student relationship, and this extended into scholarly activity. Anonymity and impersonality were emphasized and reinforced in the early years of teaching. I can well remember that academics who might on occasion stop by the office with a child in tow were given the horrified looks one would have thought reserved for lepers. To be a father or a husband other than at the annual departmental picnic simply was not on. Bradford Welles of Yale’s Classics Department handled the husband/ scholar dichotomy most originally by having hot dogs and the trimmings on the lawn for those junior faculty who were silly enough to bring their wives and children to the annual get-together while martinis and hors
d’oeuvres were served to the others in the quiet and dignity of the Welles’ home. Years ago when I used to lecture around the country a lot, one of the most frightening and tedious aspects of the visit to other campuses was the obligatory dinner after my talk when, seated male/female, male/female as one was in those days, I found myself between two wives, spouses of my professional colleagues, in those days housewives, usually with unused PhDs and no careers, usually rather drunk, generally quite angry, whose confessional conversations were so much at variance with the performance in social relations effected by their husbands as to make the experience of the evening entirely schizophrenic. Maybe it is this schizophrenia that the adherents of personal voice theory are getting at.
