Gender Roomours I

by Kai Merten, University of Kiel, Germany

1      "I consider defamation principally as a mode of social exchange which operates on the basis of the spoken word - hence my overall focus on oral defamation, or slander." (1) Recent tabloid, i.e. paper, battles over celebrity love affairs would thus clearly seem to be beyond the scope of Ina Habermann's book - and not only for historical reasons. However, what makes her concisely argued and well-written study fascinating also for anyone interested in the contemporary politics of gendered defamation is the way in which it traces the topic in a period no less obsessed than our own with individuality, reputation and social as well as erotic prowess. Early modern England differed in many respects from present-day Britain but the problems of self-fashioning and of the husbandry of one's own economic and social position that Habermann examines are not only similar to today's culture of self-realisation but can also be read as an archaeology of contemporary forms of subjectivity.

2      The principal 'archaeological' difference of the English Renaissance is exactly that it experienced an intensive confrontation of (older) oral and (more recent) written forms of communication. Therefore, textuality's competition with and anxiety about orality is what permeates Habermann's book, and she impressively demonstrates how this confrontation was acted out particularly in connection with the phenomenon of slander, traceable through a range of oral and corporeal practices and present in texts of all genres including legal and religious treatises. 'Slander', however, is not only where text and theatricality, pen and tongue, come together, it is also the field where the sexes and - importantly - the constructions of gender meet. Habermann offers the model of a "slander triangle" (2) including slanderer, listener and victim, and it becomes clear throughout her study that, although positions may change within this constellation, women are mostly the victims in what is chiefly a discourse of male exploitation of and self-assertion against women. Women may have been widely depicted as slanderers in early modern culture, but this depiction is in itself mainly a slanderous one.

3      The study pays particular attention to the theatre, the "performativity" (4) of which, according to Habermann, offers a unique perspective on social situations, thus enabling audience and critic to observe the psychology and sociology of slander before anyone (except the slanderer, that is!) has become aware of slander taking place. However, within the concept of performativity, Habermann also takes issue with the uncritical equation of performance with illocution and argues for a fresh look at the differentiation between illocution and perlocution. It is exactly in slander and its rhetoric of persuasion and manipulation that the fundamentally perlocutionary character of language becomes apparent. Language may acquire illocutionary power, i.e. the capacity to act through words directly, but only from the principally unstable and precarious position of perlocution. In this context, drama is of particular relevance to Habermann's argument not least because of its traditional connection with rhetoric and the law. Aristotle already described poetry, especially tragedy, as negotiating "between the general and the merely incidental" (5), thus connecting it to the notion of equitable jurisdiction - the modification of the law to make it more justly applicable to individual cases. Habermann therefore considers drama as "equity", a site of "the dynamic and unpredictable exchange indispensable for true inquiry and exploration" (6) comparable to juridical negotiations (which were in fact often practised in theatrical format at the London inns of court). Slander, however, functioned as the dark and no less theatrical reverse to equity's "ethics of fair judgement and good faith" (7).

4      Chapter 1 applies this to the more general relation of language to slander and posits slander as a kind of dark rhetoric, a sinister but nevertheless competent use of persuasive speech. In the period under scrutiny, language was considered necessarily rhetorical for it was only through the (social) practice of language that the gap between word and thing, or between saying and meaning, could be bridged. Language only functioned - indeed existed - as usage.

5      Habermann explores this notion further in her reading of Othello in chapter 2 by showing that manipulation of this gap can be effective but only in a violent way. Iago welds word and deed together when he makes others turn his evil speech into crimes. However, it is exactly the difference between illocution, i.e. unproblematic acting through words, and perlocution, i.e. an effective, emotionalising and manipulative usage of words, that enables the slanderer, by merely talking about violence, to persuade others to carry out his crimes: Iago's linguistic actions are not straightforward, let alone generally transparent, but they gain fatal effectiveness through his magisterial use of the indirection and contextuality of any use of language. At the same time, language's perlocutionary precariousness - and the potential exploitation of this precariousness - become the (theatrical) normality of the world in Othello. From the perspective of the early modern period, then, there could be no ignoring the linguistic gap, it could only be bridged, either by means of violence and manipulation or else by means of social sanctions. This led to an attempt to control language through the legal system and ultimately to a splitting up of rhetoric into an official, 'male' version and a 'female' one, unruly, dangerous and marginalised.