Narrative as Possibility
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Description
Carol Gilligan's methodology, like her subject matter, is complex. I will talk about only one aspect of it: the use of myths and literary works to explore how people come to terms with themselves and the world. This includes Gilligan's reading of the tale of Psyche and Cupid; of the myths of Oedipus and the patriarchal quartet that Gilligan speaks of as "Odysseus and Aeneas, Abraham, and Agamemnon"; and of five novels: The Scarlet Letter (1850),Annie John (1985), The Bluest Eye (1970), The God of Small Things (1997), and The English Patient (1992) (Gilligan 2002). Even this one aspect of Gilligan's methodology resists reduction to a single procedure, for Gilligan is doing several things at once with these narratives. She is invoking or evoking them in the tradition of Freud as evidence of human psychological processes that she finds mirrored in them. Conversely, in the tradition of anthropologist Géza Róheim, she is explicating the stories themselves, interpreting their meaning by reference to basic movements of the human mind or spirit that they encode. The psychological processes that Gilligan sees reflected in the stories are, of course, quite different than those that Sigmund Freud or a Jungian such as Marie-Louise von Franz saw in the same or similar stories, and Gilligan's interpretations of the stories are quite different than those of anthropologist and psychoanalyst R6heim or those of a contemporary Freudian analyst of myths like Richard Caldwell. But the purposes for which Gilligan is examining the stories include those that led earlier insightful theorists of human behavior to attempt to understand it better by studying stories, as well as those that led earlier insightful literary critics to attempt to understand stories better through studying psychological theory. These purposes are ambitious, each in its own right. But I mean to put them aside and to focus on another use that Gilligan makes of stories—a use that is more distinctive and radical. This is Gilligan's use of stories to transform what is into something that could be in order to enable a counter-transformation of something else that could be into something that is. Elementally, Gilligan dissolves the incommensurability between two planes of existence: our experience of life as it is, which we ordinarily take to be life as it must be, the inevitable human condition, and our vision of some better world that, lamentably, we were not born to inhabit. By translating both of them into the lingua franca of narrative, making stories out of both of them, she enables us to see that we are free to choose between them.
Source Publication
Enacting Pleasure: Artists and Scholars Respond to Carol Gilligan’s New Map of Love
Source Editors/Authors
Peggy Cooper Davis, Lizzy Cooper Davis
Publication Date
2011
Recommended Citation
Amsterdam, Anthony G., "Narrative as Possibility" (2011). Faculty Chapters. 2072.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/2072
