The Siren (1904) | Louis Loeb | Smithsonian American Art Museum / CC0
In an influential 1992 essay “The Gender of Sound,” the poet and classicist Anne Carson traced how Western culture has historically gendered sound, treating the female voice as excessive, disorderly, and sexual while associating masculine speech with reason, self-control, and civic order. Carson moves from Greek myth, tragedy, psychoanalysis, and philosophy to show how, from antiquity to present day, women’s voices had been treated as a dangerous eruption of body into language.
Carson first considers ancient Greek and Roman writers who treated the woman as if she had “two mouths”—a speaking mouth, linked to a genital mouth. These classical authorities believed “that an excess or blockage of blood in the uterus will evidence itself as strangulation or loss of voice, that too much vocal exercise results in loss of menses.” She also describes the ancient rituals of women shouting obscenities in controlled spaces. In certain civic festivals, women were allowed to shout insults, dirty jokes, and abusive remarks, becoming someone who discharges unspeakable things “on behalf of the city.”
These ancient theories and practices Carson then connects to Freud and Breuer’s famous treatment of hysterical nineteenth century women through what the Viennese doctors called the “talking cure.” In both cases—ancient ritual and modern psychoanalysis—female sound is treated as something excessive and pathological, but also curable if released in the right container. So the “talking cure” becomes, in Carson’s reading, a respectable clinical or psychoanalytic version of ritual obscenity: women are full of trapped, unprocessed sound:
As if the entire female gender were a kind of collective bad memory of unspeakable things, patriarchal order, like a well-intended psychoanalyst, seems to conceive of its therapeutic responsibility as the channeling of bad sound into politically appropriate containers. Both the upper and the lower female mouth apparently stand in need of such controlling action.
Why, Carson wonders, has patriarchal culture been so invested in regulating the female voice?
Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski’s 1991 film The Double Life of Véronique might be a perfect cinematic embodiment of what it’s like to live under this ritual regulation. The film is about two miraculously identical women, played by the same French actress, Irène Jacob, supposedly born on the same day and both suffering from some sort of heart condition, simultaneously growing up in two different countries, Weronika in Poland and Véronique in France.
The Polish Weronika is a soprano in a choir, while Véronique is a music teacher with a beautiful voice. Both seem to have lost mothers in early childhood, and both have tender relationships with their fathers. Besides a heart condition, they share a mysterious emotional bond and a love for music. But for most of their lives, they are unaware of each other’s existence.
Their paths cross only once—in Krakow in 1990, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall and subsequent collapse of the Iron Curtain, when Weronika stares at Véronique on a tourist bus snapping pictures, and when Véronique subsequently recognizes her apparent double on a contact sheet of the photos from her Polish trip.
“I have a strange feeling,” Weronika tells her father, “I feel that I’m not alone. That I’m not alone in the world.”
In the book Kieslowski on Kieslowski—a compilation of interviews conducted with the director by the film critic Danusia Stok—the Polish director explains that The Double Life of Véronique is about “sensibility, presentiments, and relationships which are difficult to name, which are irrational.” In a making-of documentary, he adds “The main theme of Véronique is ‘live more carefully’ because you don’t know what the consequences of your actions may be. You don’t know what they will do to people whom you know or don’t know. You don’t know how your actions may influence them. Live carefully, because there are people around you whose lives and well-being depend on your actions.’’
The film opens with two childhood images. One little girl in Poland is shown the winter sky. Another little girl in France is shown a leaf. We first follow Weronika—she sings with a choir during an outdoor performance. A rainstorm begins, people run, but she continues singing with ecstatic, joyful, almost reckless intensity. Later, as young choir women run laughing through the rain, a truck passes, carrying away a huge statue of Lenin, marking the end of a political order. History is in the street, but it seems to remain peripheral compared to the sensuous life that is moving past it. The film then cuts to Weronika kissing Antek, her boyfriend, in a passageway—with the same intensity with which she had just sung.
We follow her to Kraków to visit her sick aunt. While there, she joins a choir rehearsal almost by chance and is noticed for her voice. “You sing well,” the music teacher tells her. “Your voice is…a very unusual voice.” She is invited to audition, and her uncannily high tessitura (voiced by Polish soprano Elżbieta Towarnicka, renowned for her otherworldly upper extension) earns her a featured solo in an upcoming concert.
On stage, Weronika dies in full vocal flight, apparently from a heart attack. In a wide shot, we see the audience and chorus moving toward her in a wave after she has fallen.
After a fade to black, the film jumps from Krakow to Paris and from Weronika to Véronique. After mysteriously sensing the death of her double, apparently on the same day—it is Christmastime—Véronique visits her music teacher to tell him that she has decided not to pursue a professional career.
When he asks why, she says, “I don’t know. But I know I have to quit… now.” The man grows frustrated and almost shouts, “You’re wasting your talent. No one has the right to do that. You deserve to be dragged into court.”
“Yes,” Véronique says. “No one has the right to do that.” Then she leaves.
It’s unclear in the moment why Véronique is so firm in her decision to abandon her vocation. But we, as viewers, can see this much: Véronique somehow knows that her survival depends on it—as if cultivating a virtuosic woman’s voice might risk an “uncontrolled outflow,” as Anne Carson calls it.
Throughout the film, lawyers are surprisingly prominent. In one scene, Weronika is telling her aunt joyfully about Antek and their kiss. But Weronika’s impassioned account is interrupted by the doorbell ringing—a lawyer has arrived to help the aunt revise a will. In a subsequent scene, Véronique visits Catherine, a friend caught in a bitter divorce from her husband. Catherine needs someone to testify falsely in court that he had slept with another woman—and Véronique impulsively agrees to do so.
The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan—one of Anne Carson’s touchstones—defined the Law not as a “particular piece of legislation but to the fundamental principles which underline all social relations.” It is the symbolic-linguistic structure that places the subject inside culture, language, kinship, prohibition, and desire. In other words, it is one of the components that make up the fabric of symbolic reality. But feminist theorists have questioned whether this Law is truly universal—whether Lacan is describing a neutral condition of language and subjectivity or a symbolic order already organised by patriarchy. Luce Irigaray, a French feminist and psychoanalyst, writes, “What meaning could the Oedipus complex have in a symbolic system other than patriarchy? But that order is indeed the one that lays down the law today. To fail to recognize this would be as naive as to let it continue to rule without questioning the conditions that make its domination possible.”
After her audition to become a concert vocal soloist, we see Weronika walking through Krakow. Suddenly short of breath, she clutches at her chest before sitting down. At this moment, on an otherwise empty street, an elegantly dressed older man approaches, opens his coat, and exposes his penis to her.
At the very moment we first understand that Weronika’s health is fragile, in the midst of a storyline saturated with fate, destiny, and the sublime, the phallus appears in its most ridiculous and degraded form.
In “The Gender of Sound” (New Directions 1992), Anne Carson, in one suggestive passage, wonders “if there might not be another idea of human order than repression, another notion of human virtues than self-control, another kind of human self than one based on dissociation of inside and outside. Or indeed, another human essence than self.”
If The Double Life of Véronique dramatizes some of the ways that patriarchal perversions and the Law in its repressive form afflicts women who are overflowing with passion, it also imagines how parallel lives—a doubling of oneself and another—might also represent “another human essence than self.”
