Held in Silence: Trauma and the Ethics of Response in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and Ali Smith’s Summer

It is a critical truism that in early modern England female silence was not simply the absence of speech but also a cultural signifier, a political instrument and a gendered ideal embedded in the fabric of patriarchal society. As Catherine Belsey observes, ‘To speak is to possess meaning, to have access to the language which defines, delimits and locates power. To speak is to become a subject. But for women to speak is to threaten the system of differences which gives meaning to patriarchy.’1 Within this cultural logic, women were not only enjoined to silence and discouraged from public or assertive speech but also denied any secure place from which to speak for themselves.