By Marie Eaton

Psychologist Carol Gilligan may be best known for her book In a Different Voice, published in 1982. In it, Gilligan opened the field of psychological research to women's voices, drawing on her observations of the ways preadolescent girls, pressured by societal expectations, learn to stifle their innate wisdom and exuberance to ask questions about the silencing of women's voice in our society. This groundbreaking work influenced a generation of those who work with girls and young women and it reshaped conversations in the field of human development.

Twenty years later, in The Birth of Pleasure, Gilligan again looks to childhood experiences to explore the difficulty of finding and sustaining love in adult relationships. She describes the shifts that children and adolescents exhibit in relationships as they adopt the socially proscribed attributes of "manhood" or "womanhood." She questions whether our ability to love may be compromised by the social narratives we accept.

The book's title is from the ancient story of Psyche and Cupid, whose dramatic, near-tragic courtship ultimately gave birth to a child named Pleasure. Gilligan uses the myth to organize questions about Western civilization's deeply ingrained adherence to "a tragic story . . . where love leads to loss and pleasure is associated with death."

More Controversial

This new book is even more controversial than her earlier work, perhaps in part because it relies heavily on the intersections between literary analysis and qualitative research. According to The New York Times reporter Emily Eakin (March 30, 2002), some of this conflict may be the response of conservative thinkers who doubt Gilligan's research and seek to undermine her feminist findings. Yet even those who were largely supportive of her earlier work may find themselves frankly uncomfortable with this mingling of the poetic and literary voice in academic research and the intuitive leaps Gilligan makes as she moves from anecdotal observations to conclusions.

However, although the author draws on her past academic research, she acknowledges from the start that the book is really a personal record, weaving together discussions of new research in child development, fragments of her dialogues with couples in counseling and a wide range of literary references (from Anne Frank, Proust and Emily Dickinson to Michael Ondaatje, Arundhati Roy and Toni Morrison). Through these, she charts her own developing understanding of the diminution of joy that typically accompanies growing up. Her narrative makes provocative reading and raises interesting questions that are worth examining closely.

There are interesting implications for those working with children and youth, despite the fact that the majority of the book focuses on adult love relationships.

Love relationships in our society, Gilligan contends, are shadowed by the legacy of a loss with roots in the loss of voice in childhood. She noticed that young boys already have learned lessons about appropriate "boy" behavior and begun covering their emotions, just as preadolescent girls know not to say what they really think and feel. " 'If I were to say what I was feeling and thinking, no one would want to be with me, my voice would be too loud,' 17-year-old Iris says." Gilligan says that this silencing impairs the ability to sustain intimate relationships.

Gilligan says, in an interview published at www.ac.wwu.edu/~scholars/carol_gilligan.htm:

"If the only way we can maintain relationships is by not showing what we are feeling or not saying what we are really thinking, then we end up giving up relationships for the sake of having relationships. The absurdity of this, when you think about it, is countered by the fact that we often accept it as inevitable. And I think this is one reason why many people are unhappy in love, because what is said to be love often feels like constraint."

Girls and boys, she contends, both face the dilemma of choosing between being in relationships and having relationships. As they become socialized, they become more indirect, more inauthentic. (One young woman asked Gilligan: "Do you want to know what I think, or do you want to know what I really think?") Boys feel they must conceal the parts of themselves that are not manly or heroic. Brutal consequences befall those who resist or do not adapt to these cultural codes. Boys may be called "sissy" or "pansy;" girls may be called "tomboy" or "dyke." Both face being ostracized from the developing social networks.

A New Map

The Birth of Pleasure doesn't provide guidelines for parents, teachers or youth workers about how to work differently with children. But, by raising questions, Gilligan begins sketching a map toward a different destination.

Her contribution is to complicate our thinking about the nature of childhood and how we learn to love. It is an important addition to the growing literature on human development, and it raises good questions about how society's expectations for boys and girls may have lasting and potentially damaging effects on the sustenance of deep, loving relationships.

Marie Eaton is professor of Humanities and Education at Fairhaven College, Western Washington University, where she teaches courses on death and dying, childhood in the American society, and songwriting.

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