Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence (review)

When silence occasionally punctuates the din of relentless discourse in Western culture, we usually don't want the ellipsis to last long. As Cheryl Glenn writes in Unspoken, "[S]ilence has long been considered a lamentable essence of femininity, a trope for oppression, passivity, emptiness, stupidity, or obedience" (2). However, a growing company of voices—including critical and feminist scholars—are calling for an interrogation of the idea that silence is oppressive at worst and empty at best. Lana F. Rakow and Laura A. Wackwitz say that feminists need to push past clichéd ideas about silence and voice, engaging "assumptions about silence equally with assumptions about voice in order to tease out what is needed for theoretical and political complexity" (Feminist Communication Theory:Selections in Context [Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2004], 95).

Cheryl Glenn's Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence is an important contribution to both the theory and praxis of silence. Along with other scholars of silence (among them Picard, Dauenhauer, Kalamaras, Jaworski, and Clair), Glenn views discourse and silence as reciprocal communicative powers rather than binary opposites. Like Glenn's Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), which writes women into the history of rhetoric, Unspoken is yet another redemption project. This time, Glenn joins George Kalamaras (Reclaiming the Tacit Dimension: Symbolic Form in the Rhetoric of Silence [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994]) in claiming that silence is a rhetoric; as such, silence is "a constellation of symbolic strategies" (xi) that can be employed intentionally in order to serve communicative purposes such as persuasion, invitation, or mutual understanding. Furthermore, even when silence is imposed, it still may "reveal positive or negative abilities, fulfilling or withholding traits, harmony or disharmony, success or failure. Silence can deploy power; it can defer to power" (xi).

After surveying the landscape of silence, replete with the rich observations of earlier scholars, Glenn proceeds with an analysis of power relations in the use of silence (chapter 2). She illustrates with the narratives of anonymous e-mail correspondents who shared their predominantly painful experiences about "the silent treatment" as a powerful means of exerting control and reifying hierarchy in academia.

Glenn turns next to another gendered site for the study of silence: women in the margins of political life. She documents the silence and discourse of Anita Hill and Lani Guinier, whose silences seemed to amplify their voices once they finally broke silence. Glenn also charts the waters navigated by the silences and voices of a group of rhetors dubiously dubbed "all the President's women": Gennifer Flowers, Juanita Broaddrick, Paula Corbin Jones, Kathleen Willey, Monica Lewinsky, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Chelsea Clinton. Glenn seems to imply that the combined employment of silence, silencing, and discourse by these women (and by Clinton himself) has assured an ignominious chapter in the Clinton legacy. Yet Glenn's focus at the conclusion of this section is on the unspoken: how the media amplification of these voices and silences resulted in the silencing of dialogue regarding "truly abiding and crucial national issues such as children's health care, national health care reform, the federal deficit, the social security system, welfare, workfare, tenure, teaching training programs, . . . the homeless" (105–6).

Using a contrasting research method, Glenn moves from the U.S. capital to the southwestern states, where she interviewed Indians—a term of identification that she chooses with a conscientious explanation—from a number of tribal backgrounds. Based on the foundational work of anthropologist Keith Basso (1970) as well as education researchers Susan Philips (1983) and Gary Plank (1994), Glenn's interviews focus on uses of silence in such contexts as greeting, courtship, ceremony, and return from boarding school. Although Glenn resists generalization, the colorfully textured reflections of her interview participants tend to affirm the uses of silence noted by earlier researchers. Finally, Glenn offers a challenge for scholars to continue exploring the geography of silence, suggesting locations such as listening...