When Gilligan uses the figure of Demeter at the end of the first chapter of In a different voice, it is to serve as an allegory of a feminine experience and vision that differs from that of men, and which would not have not been heard or recognized in dominant thought and language. According to her, this feminine sphere covers a universe of values and a vision of human development that are specific to women – which she designates as an ethic of concern, attachment and attention to others (according to the different meanings of the notion of Care). Thus, Gilligan assigns to women a characterization which seems to reconnect with the Rousseauist vision of a harmony between the sexes which is based on the partition into two distinct naturals and which assigns to women irrationality, emotion and artifice – values that the feminists of the 1970s will reverse to make these sub-values counter-values.
Yet, in her reading of the myth, Gilligan seems to essentialize and reduce the voice of women: the philosopher ignores the plurality of women’s conditions that is displayed in the text of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. We can re-read it by proposing another vision of Care, which degenders it, from the perspective developped by Joan Tronto in Moral Boundaries or Elsa Dorlin in Dark Care: de la servitude à la sollicitude. We will then offer another vision of Care, which supposes another definition of voice, as a practice of reading instead as an art of listening.
Our reading, focusing on the narrative and stylistic particularities of the Homeric Hymn, can feed theories of materialist feminism while putting into practice a conception of reading as an experience of otherness, both an exercise in empathy and an attention to literary ambivalence.
Like most critics, Gilligan reduces the complexity of the story told by the Homeric Hymn: not only does she leave aside the literary complexity of a story with multiple narrative threads, but she also pays little attention to the complexity of the various female characters within the story. Against a reading which essentializes a feminine experience of the world supposed to be outside civilization (in the line of nineteenth-century essentialism, relying on Bachofen’s misogyny, Engels’ maternalism, or Lou Andréas-Salomé’s cosmic mystic), this myth can be read as a display of the plurality of feminine experiences, which articulates, in a very complex way, sex, age, class (and race – we will see that the question of genos is also an important underlying theme in the hymn).
Instead of an ethics of feminine solicitude, the Homeric Hymn calls us to reconnect with an ethics of attention to language, attention to its ambivalence and to the interpretation that we make in the language and through the forms that the experiences of “minoritized” subjects take or receive in language. The Homeric Hymn also invites us to think about the place of literature in contemporary philosophies, based on a reflection on the relationship between voice, dis/identification and responsibility that myth makes particularly complex. In undoing our usual ways of reading, it debunks norms more than it explains their order. The blurring goes even further, since the writing of the hymn, devoid of authorship, also blurs our habit of a subjectivized relationship to language: with the myth, must/can we think a voice without origin, and without genre?