Silence as Resistance: Gendered Trauma and Narrative Fragmentation in Postmodern Women's Writing

This paper examines the role of silence as a resistance and not oppression strategy in post modern women writing Beloved by Toni Morrison, The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy and Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys. Using feminist trauma theory and looking at postmodern narrative techniques, including fragmentation, less-than-trustworthy narration, and use of metafiction, the study reinvents the very idea of silence as commonly understood as the lack of speech and brings it to light as the powerful arsenal of resistance available to female characters.‎In all these writings, silence is turned into a subversive language: it is the language of survival and self-agency when the act of speech has resulted in punishment or even more harm. These novels have used non-linear plots, disruption in the plot, and fragmented chronology to show the aesthetics of the postmodern images, as well as the psychological separation that accompanies trauma. The techniques of such narratives do not only represent any trauma, they represent it, which places the idea of silence as a choice and a resistant rhetoric within the context of postmodern literature as a whole.