Subversive Silences: Nonverbal Expression and Implicit Narrative Strategies in the Works of Latin American Women Writers (review)

In response to the growing interest in Latin American and Latina authors, Helene Carol Weldt-Basson’s latest study looks at how these writers from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have successfully appropriated the concept of submissive silence to question and refute the impositions of the dominant patriarchal society. By examining seven contemporary female authors, Weldt-Basson suggests that these women utilize a thematic and stylistic silence in the form of implicit narrative strategies to counter the normative masculine perspective and create a feminist viewpoint in their texts. Throughout the book the critic effectively identifies a “poetics of combative silence” among authors such as Marta Brunet, Isabel Allende, and Sandra Cisneros, and this she divides into six distinct types: paradoxical, coded, hyperbolic, symbolic, parodic, and cultural (226).

Organized into nine chapters, this book focuses on women writers who consciously or subconsciously employ a use of silence that reflects the specific time period, epoch, and country in which each text was written. Offering a general overview of the relationship of language and silence in feminist studies, in her first chapter Weldt-Basson discusses the main currents of feminist approximations in muted-group theory, French feminism, and sociolinguistic theory. She competently explains her reasoning behind the selection of authors analyzed in this study, claiming that “they epitomize different employments of silence as a communicative strategy,” which constructs a feminist perspective related to the development of the feminist movement in Latin America (31).

Accordingly, in her second chapter the critic investigates the unique production of works by Marta Brunet and the representation of paradoxical silence. Borrowing from Nancy Miller’s theory of “overreading,” Weldt-Basson proposes to “overread” examples of silence in Brunet’s short stories and in her novel María Nadie (1957). She suggests that this approach demonstrates how Brunet makes use of silence both in a traditional sense (as a sign of female oppression) and in a more contemporary sense, “as a weapon against male domination and a metaphor for women’s (nonverbal) ‘writing’ or expression” (38). Since Brunet fluctuates between two types of subversive silence, passive and combative, Weldt-Basson labels this use of silence as paradoxical.

Focusing on works of María Luisa Bombal, Weldt-Basson opens her third chapter explaining that, like Brunet, Bombal also uses a paradoxical silence in her novels La última niebla (1935), The Shrouded Woman (1938), and in her short story “El árbol” (1939). Weldt-Basson highlights the unique relationship between the women’s movement in Chile and the nature of Bombal’s work, echoing the inability of women to attain equal rights with men. Her reading suggests a convincing argument. She explains that the paradoxical elements in Bombal’s and Brunet’s texts “were specifically directed toward the implicit readership of the time, which was not ready to receive overt, radical, feminist messages” (77).

Weldt-Basson begins her fourth chapter examining the encoded silence of Rosario Castellanos’s work. Drawing from Joan Radner and Susan Lanser, she addresses the various techniques that Castellanos employs to covertly express a feminist message. This “textual silence” must rely on the reader’s ability to construct a meaning encoded between the lines of Castellanos’s work (81). Weldt-Basson persuasively argues that Castellanos uses this technique both to express and to disguise her ideas, because she wrote in the late sixties and early seventies, the beginning of the feminist liberation movement. Along the same lines, the fifth chapter concludes that three of Isabel Allende’s most famous works, The House of the Spirits (1982), Of Love and Shadows (1985), and The Stories of Eva Luna (1989), which rely on irony and hyperbole to emphasize the active, subversive value of silence that in turn allows the reader to view her text from a feminist perspective. According to the critic, Allende succeeds by creating allusions to major events in Chilean politics of the 70s and 80s...