Strategies of Reticence: Silence and Meaning in the Works of Jane Austen, Willa Cather, Katherine Anne Porter, and Joan Didion (review)
Think back a few years to the television classic All in the Family. Recall Archie Bunker's domineering commands for Edith to "stifle it!" and you will have pictured a rough vignette that approaches the much more refined and authoritative critical perspective of Janis P. Stout in Strategies of Reticence. Beginning with the observation that the stifling of women's speech denotes both repression and victimization, Stout examines the ways in which four female authors have used a lack of speech (silence), or minimal speech (reticence), for rhetorical effect: specifically, as strategies to subvert traditional masculine power. Austen, Cather, Porter, and Didion employ such signifying spaces in their work and then turn that silence "back on their repressors as a weapon." Stout's volume is an exemplary critical study: a fresh and challenging thesis, a justifiably diverse selection of authors, an abundance of cogent examples, and a conclusion that graciously invites further critical contributions.