Prime Minister Teresa May, the most authoritative person in the British parliament, loses yet another vote on her government’s plan for the arrangements through which the UK will leave the EU by the process known as Brexit. She also loses her voice.
She comes into the great hall of the commoners in Westminster. She speaks to her colleagues, some of whom are political suitors. She is summarily dismissed, in a modern re-telling of Homer’s treatment meted to Penelope by Telemachus, her son, as recounted by historian Mary Beard.
The process starts in the first book with Penelope coming down from her private quarters into the great hall, to find a bard performing to throngs of her suitors; he’s singing about the difficulties the Greek heroes are having in reaching home. She isn’t amused, and in front of everyone she asks him to choose another, happier number. At which point young Telemachus intervenes: ‘Mother,’ he says, ‘go back up into your quarters, and take up your own work, the loom and the distaff … speech will be the business of men, all men, and of me most of all; for mine is the power in this household.’
Teresa May persists in presenting a plan, which has been voted down twice and may yet endure another voting down, before someone cries “enough already.” Is she experiencing what Mary Beard describes as a long-standing practice in Western culture?
…it’s a nice demonstration that right where written evidence for Western culture starts, women’s voices are not being heard in the public sphere; more than that, as Homer has it, an integral part of growing up, as a man, is learning to take control of public utterance and to silence the female of the species. The actual words Telemachus uses are significant too. When he says ‘speech’ is ‘men’s business’, the word is muthos – not in the sense that it has come down to us of ‘myth’. In Homeric Greek it signals authoritative public speech (not the kind of chatting, prattling or gossip that anyone – women included, or especially women – could do).
Or is she simply hoarse, from long hours of working, travelling and negotiating? She quips that her opposite on the EU has also lost his voice.
With the loss of her voice, will the loss of her job soon follow?
Possibly.
Her counterpart on the EU-side is more of an official and so less vulnerable in the short-term. He is also a man and thus less vulnerable in the long-term. A woman with a hoarse voice is weak. A man with a hoarse voice is strenuously and admirably exerting himself.
The voice that rises above the babble and hiss of the House of Commons is sonorous and affected. It is in the ascendancy now and it sounds like it is from the Ascendancy. The Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, barks and scowls in a voice of such pantomimic affectation that he manages to sound like the head boy of a posh school who’s had too much of the headmaster’s sherry.
Mary Beard understands this.
We find repeated stress throughout ancient literature on the authority of the deep male voice. As one ancient scientific treatise explicitly put it, a low-pitched voice indicated manly courage, a high-pitched voice female cowardice. Or as other classical writers insisted, the tone and timbre of women’s speech always threatened to subvert not just the voice of the male orator, but also the social and political stability, the health, of the whole state.
She also situates this authority in the ‘ways and means’ protocols of the House of Commons.
Again, we’re not simply the victims or dupes of our classical inheritance, but classical traditions have provided us with a powerful template for thinking about public speech, and for deciding what counts as good oratory or bad, persuasive or not, and whose speech is to be given space to be heard. And gender is obviously an important part of that mix.
The current British Prime Minister is reportedly sad that she didn’t get to be the first woman in that role, something Margaret Thatcher achieved. She took pains to present a manly demeanour, even going as far as changing her voice.
Those who do manage successfully to get their voice across very often adopt some version of the ‘androgyne’ route, like Maesia in the Forum or ‘Elizabeth’ at Tilbury – consciously aping aspects of male rhetoric. That was what Margaret Thatcher did when she took voice training specifically to lower her voice, to add the tone of authority that her advisers thought her high pitch lacked.
Would voice lessons save Teresa May’s voice and keep her yet longer inthejob she craves? She previously worked as Home Secretary and headed up an onslaught on immigrants under the ‘hostile environment’ banner, an onslaught she has carried over into her current role as the Reluctant Brexiteer. Shewill make the severance happen on her terms and the rest of us can just lump it. That’s a fairly ‘manly’ stance to take.
For a female MP to be minister of women (or of education or health) is a very different thing from being chancellor of the exchequer (a post which no woman has ever filled). And, across the board, we still see tremendous resistance to female encroachment onto traditional male discursive territory, whether it’s the abuse hurled at Jacqui Oatley for having the nerve to stray from the netball court to become the first woman commentator on Match of the Day, or what can be meted out to women who appear on Question Time, where the range of topics discussed is usually fairly mainstream ‘male political’.
Mary Beard, in analysing the origins of the horrendous treatment, she, and other women, receive from internet trolling and other on-line abuse, senses that, while gender is significant in the targeting, the scale and the violence of the abuse, other factors contribute, notably the false promises of the democratisation of power the on-line world was supposed to bring us.
When I’m feeling charitable I think quite a lot comes from people who feel let down by the false promises of democratisation blazoned by, for example, Twitter. It was supposed to put us directly in touch with those in power, and open up a new democratic kind of conversation. It does nothing of the sort: if we tweet the prime minister or the pope, they no more read it than if we send them a letter – and for the most part, the prime minister doesn’t even write the tweets that appear under his name. How could he? (I’m not so sure about the Pope.) Some of the abuse, I suspect, is a squeal of frustration at those false promises, taking aim at a convenient traditional target (‘a gobby woman’). Women are not the only ones who may feel themselves ‘voiceless’.
Recently, Teresa May made a direct appeal to the ‘voiceless/voteless’, in a US-Presidential style address from her own home at 10 Downing Street. Her voice held and she sounded steady and commanding. However, the ploy of opening her next election campaign – and who’s to say that’s not what she was doing? - by blaming her fellow MPs at the same time as she is touting for their support to her Plan A, while not having a Plan B, seems to have back-fired.
The voiceless/voteless are grumbling and have a Plan C, or at least the inklings of one, with a large demonstration in London last weekend. Getting your voice heard in a floundering parliamentary democracy, such as the UK at present, where the rich and the political elite have thrown the baubles out of the sedan chair and the rest of us may be about to topple the sedan chair, is a vital next step in making sure this horrendous Brexit process, or anything like it, is never repeated.
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