Inner speech as right to speak

As a master’s student I was interested in Vygotsky’s notion of inner speech and how it eventually would manifest in outer speech. Because of their overlap, Bakhtin and Vygotsky were often read together. What I want to do here though is relate Bakhtin (and to the extent that I can, Vygotsky’s) idea of inner speech to what we studied in last week’s readings—the right to speak.

Let me start here. I was harsh when it came to Christine de Pizan. My main criticism of Pizan came from the idea that through her rhetoric she reinforced the power structures of the day—just with a different embodiment. As some of you pointed out in your response, I was being too hard on her. She did, after all, do something novel in a time when women simply did not have a voice. I still maintain that the voice she spoke with was not entirely hers.

The material words Pizan spoke with in the Bakhtinian sense belong to the greater social context—that of a male-dominated oligarchy. For Pizan to join the discourse (which I often remind myself that Bakhtin might refer to it as a dis-chorus), she needed to internalize the word of society created through the various pressures of heteroglossia and reflect and refract it to bring about a new reality—one in which women spoke (1211). According to Bakhtin’s logic this initial act of Pizan’s speaking the word opens the door for further discourse: “Even if a word is not entirely his, constituting, as it were, the border zone between himself and his addressee—still, it does in part belong to him” (1215). The border zone in Pizan’s case was more closely linked with her gender identity. While this remains an issue through the rest of the readings about right to speak, we also see the border zone grow on one side of the discourse to include “popular assemblies, the bar, and the pulpit.” The discourse could only progress that far through a heteroglossic dialogue wherein women borrowed the word, used it, made it their own, internalized it, redefined it, and spoke again. Eventually speech became less influenced by male hegemony, and giving rise to the voice of women rhetors.

We see this struggle between the inner voice in Woolf’s “Professions for Women” when she describes killing the angel. The struggle between her voice and that of the male-dominated society is nearly palpable when she says,

“[Y]ou cannot review even a novel without having a mind of your own, without expressing what you think to be the truth about human relations, morality, sex. And all of these questions, according to the Angel of the House, cannot be dealt with freely and openly by women; they must charm, they must conciliate, they must—to put it bluntly—tell lies if they are to succeed.” (1254)

I have to agree with Woolf. In order to gain access to the public, in order to have a voice, women had to acquiesce for a long time, starting with Pizan and making very gradual progress. And the progress came through “finding common ground” and very slowly moving that common ground. When it comes to Woolf’s time, the decision to speak or not rests with her—she has to decide to kill the angel. My question is, are we past this yet? To speak what angels are we killing? What about the academy—what do we do to keep other inner voices silent and what are the costs of letting them out?