What can we learn from the "silent women" of literature?

“There's really no such thing as the 'voiceless'. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.”

This quote from Arundhati Roy is one I’ve turned over in my mind a great deal as a reader, and I wonder if it explains my fascination with a certain kind of character that I’ve noticed cropping up in all sorts of literary forms from novels to plays to classical epics.

Specifically, I’m talking about the characters I’ve come to think of as the "silent women" of literature—those whose presence haunts the edges of all sorts of stories; those who are denied voices of their own.

In fact, my favourite novel contains one such figure. In Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca, despite being important enough to name the whole book, we never actually meet Rebecca except in flashbacks and third person accounts. Despite this, her influence looms large, and in her absence, many of the answers to the book's key questions swirl tantalisingly just out of reach.

If she's really the monster that some of the novel's living characters paint her as, for instance, then why does she inspire such loyalty and love?

Rebecca was one of my first lessons in perspective—how we can all easily become the villain if we let other people tell our stories. And once I started looking, I found these "silent" women everywhere, still managing to speak volumes beyond imprisonment, madness and even death.

Du Maurier seems to have a particular fascination with this idea. Another of her novels, My Cousin Rachel, similarly positions its titular character as an enigma seen largely through the lens of others, leaving us the decision of whether to accept things at face value or look deeper.

I wonder if we see these silent women sometimes, particularly in historical literature, because female authors like Du Maurier were engaged in their own struggles to be heard. Shielding themselves behind male pseudonyms or accepting judgement and ridicule were part and parcel of putting pen to paper for many women writers, so perhaps it’s unsurprising that these themes of the importance of voice crop up in their stories too.

The first Mrs Rochester from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, the original "madwoman in the attic", is another meditation on this subject. On the surface, she is beyond rationality—a terrifying, mindless creature, stripped of language and humanity, standing in the way of Jane and Mr Rochester's happily ever after.

But then, if you'd been imprisoned far from your home, with an unsympathetic husband and little warmth or comfort for years, wouldn't you be desperate and frenzied too? (Wide Sargasso Sea, a novel that explicitly tells Bertha's story, is well worth a read.)

And yet, once again, despite the way in which she is denied a voice, Mrs Rochester "speaks" throughout the book anyway. While the fire that she sets at its conclusion can be viewed as yet another unhinged act, for me, it is more representative that sometimes simply enduring can be an act of courage. And that sometimes, what little agency we have left leaves us with no "good" choices.

There are others, too. For a "face that launched a thousand ships", poor Helen of Troy gets very little opportunity to give her account of events across the Trojan War and beyond. A stark illustration that perhaps, in the end, being understood and heard matters more than being admired or desired. And she’s not the only woman in Homer’s original tale denied a voice; there’s a reason that amongst the spate of modern retellings Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls, explicitly acknowledging the repression of female voices and perspectives first time around.

Another of my favourite books is Toni Morrison’s Beloved, in which a mother’s trauma and unspeakable tragedy is literally given a voice and a character all of its own. Fleeing from slavery, Sethe kills one of her children to try to prevent them from being returned to an existence of such miserable brutality. Years later, a strange young woman named Beloved (the same epitaph Sethe has put on her child’s gravestone) appears in her life, and Sethe becomes increasingly convinced it is her lost daughter somehow returned to her.

It’s such a clever way of articulating a horror that goes beyond language and although Beloved meets the definition of a "silent woman" in that we never know her true origins or intentions, through her Morrison still manages to say so much about the endurance of both love and pain.

Finally, no discussion of silent women could be complete without mentioning Ben Jonson's Renaissance play Epicoene, itself also known as The Silent Woman. The great joke of the play, which engages with ideas of gender as performance throughout, is that the "silent woman" turns out not to exist at all…she is a boy in disguise. 

How strangely fitting—and perhaps an important reminder that these apparently "silent" characters have so much to teach us in the end, if we can only learn to listen.