College Literature

This essay examines the role of female withholding in three novels spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Nathanial Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, and J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace, texts that at first glance appear to have little in common. All three, however, feature heroines who elect silence as a response to trauma, crisis, or duress, despite the negative consequences for themselves. Through comparative analyses of these novels and their heroines, Hester, Lily, and Lucy, and by drawing on a range of narrative and feminist theory, this essay argues that silence constitutes a form of resistance for the characters, a means of contravening the tragic plots that have been prepared for them. Thus, while silence has been a historically deprecated term in feminist thought, these novels suggest that withholding, far from telegraphing defeat, might instead serve more varied and strategic functions for female subjects in fiction.