Filling in what was left out : voices and silences in contemporary novelistic reconfigurations of biblical women

TLDR: In this paper, a selection of six contemporary novels reconfiguring biblical women perceived to be largely confined to the gaps of the Scriptures is devoted to the Silenced Feminine?, which reveals how, in the selected corpus, each female protagonist gives herself a voice through which she can define herself as speaking subject, a voice that not only rests on language, but also on silences.

Abstract: This thesis is devoted to a selection of six contemporary novels reconfiguring biblical women perceived to be largely confined to the gaps of the Scriptures: Michele Roberts’s "The Wild Girl" (1984), Margaret Atwood’s "The Handmaid’s Tale" (1985), Michele Roberts’s "The Book of Mrs Noah" (1987), Emma Tennant’s "Sisters and Strangers" (1990), Anita Diamant’s "The Red Tent" (1997), and finally Jenny Diski’s "Only Human" (2000). It shows how, in the selected corpus, each female protagonist gives herself a voice through which she can define herself as speaking subject, a voice that not only rests on language, but also, crucially, on silences. After succinct theoretical prolegomena in which the two fundamental concepts of "voice" and "silence" are defined, the first part of this doctoral research, entitled “The Silenced Feminine?,” concentrates on the common starting point of the six novels. It shows that all the selected biblical rewritings are rooted in the same two fundamental forms of silence – the "implicit dimension" and "silencing" – and adopt a complex, ambivalent approach to the Scriptures and the Judeo-Christian tradition, both feeding on them and challenging what is perceived as their almost systematic confinement of women to the silent background. Brief first explorations of the novels foreground the various ways in which the protagonists’ freedom of expression is depicted as drastically threatened or limited. The second, and most substantial part, “Voices Draped in Silences,” describes the way in which each heroine, as an answer to her silencing, strives to define herself by playing on the infinite possibilities offered by language and silence. It is divided into three sections presenting the case studies in pairs to better emphasise how two novels based on the same forms of silence exploit them in unique ways. The first section is devoted to "The Red Tent" and "The Wild Girl," where the protagonists’ struggle against their silencing is tightly interwoven with a celebration of the goddess, whose name is equally in danger of being forgotten, and where silence – in the form of the "ineffable" for "The Wild Girl," and of "eloquent silence" in both "The Wild Girl" and "The Red Tent" – is described as a path to the other and to self-knowledge. The second section concentrates on "The Book of Mrs Noah" and "Only Human," which hinge on "voice blurring" and "spectral silence." The third section focuses on "The Handmaid’s Tale" and "Sisters and Strangers," which are exploited as examples of the silence called "reticence." Finally, the third part, “Closing Silences Voicing Openness,” examines to what extent the biblical women truly make their voices heard or if the silences that they choose, or that are newly imposed on them by the end of their tales, risk silencing them again. It reveals striking similarities in the denouements of the selected works, based on the motif of the granddaughter who hears and transmits her female ancestor’s – partly – lost or buried voice. By revealing the six selected novels’ elevation of silence to a highly effective means of meeting and communicating with the other, and, as importantly, of self-definition, this thesis is meant to contribute to the (re)instatement, as a profoundly meaningful and relational phenomenon, of silence, which is too often overlooked or rejected on account of its conventional status as the opposite of language in the binary oppositions structuring Western thought.