While women in stories are not always meant to be real, they mirror the things that women experience at the time that the story was written, they mirror cultural values and customs, they give us a glimpse of the reality that women lived. Stories tell truths. One of those truths, one of the realities that women have lived is silence, and being silenced. In fact, this experience of silence (silencing, being silenced) is not all that far removed from the reality of women’s lived experiences now. Something that I’ve found instructive as of late is to use myth as a lens or a mirror, a way of checking my own experience as a woman against others’ experiences, of gauging the experiences of women around me. The accepted expectation for women is that they remain silent, and this can be seen especially, at its harshest, in ancient myth, where women are either silenced, never allowed to speak, or transformed into an object that is incapable of speech. And yet, I find myself looking for these silences and digging deeper to see what messages might be there, what these mythological women might be saying with or through their silences.
In some myths, women are able to say what they want, or what they need to. Daphne wants to run with Diana, to remain a virgin forever, and she tells her father as much. Iphis wants to marry Ianthe, and says so, but then also struggles with her identity. Lucretia, although her actions show it and she does not say it, wants no one to think of her as defiled, but as a faithful, chaste wife. Procne wishes to see her sister that she left behind. The voicing of desire is out of the ordinary. Women do not usually get to claim their own desires. While myths are often stories that deal in universals or origins, these small claims go a long way when trying to analyze whether or not a woman wants something. And, of course it is desire that drives each story. Only the man’s desire is usually what wins out, and forcefully.
I am listening to what we usually categorize as silence, the absence of speech. Where men are known for their speech, their ability to speak publicly, to deliver a speech to an audience, these very abilities make their talents rhetorical; women are known for their silence, and are praised for such, are expected to be silent. There are other ways to communicate. Ways that have not always been considered rhetorical. Ways that prioritize non-verbal communication. Where oratory and the male voice were valued as rhetorical, women’s non-verbal communication in mythology is also rhetorical. Although it is often ignored because women aren’t expected or in some cases allowed to speak, and so their messages are not counted. In ancient myths, women create art, they weave, they tell stories, they draw in the sand, they translate. When taken with the situation surrounding the non-verbal communication, the audience, the message, they are rhetorical in the same way that an oratorical speech is. So, while I am looking for silence, I am looking deeper, for non-verbal communication, for the alternative ways that women have had to share their messages.
Silence is all too familiar for women in myth. Medusa, a monster and a victim of rape, is at mercy of translators and artists to tell her story. The very fact that she is killed, her head severed, shows that she does not have the chance to speak. She is a popular and well-known figure, however it’s not until Nina MacLaughlin’s retelling of some of Ovid’s Metamorphoses that an interpretation of her story allows her to speak for herself. Leucothoe is transformed into a flower. Galatea is transformed from statue to human, however, she is silent as both, stuck with the misogynistic Pygmalion. Daphne never speaks the word ‘no’ to Apollo, and she is turned into a tree.
In the myth of Io, the young woman, turned into a cow, is unable to speak, to expose herself or her plight. When, in her cow form, she sees her father, she is able only to write her own name “Io” into the sand, which shares the message of her identity with her father. To write in this instance, shares a very specific message with her father. With only her moos she would not have been able to communicate with her father, but with her ability to write in the sand, to use language, she shares the message with her father. Philomela, whose tongue is cut out after a brutal rape to keep her from telling the story or identifying her rapist, uses weaving to write her story and sends it to her sister. Her sister, Procne, reads the message and the brutal story is set in motion all because of Philomela’s need to tell the truth of her experience.
Traditionally, this kind of non-verbal communication by women has not been counted as rhetorical, but looking closer now, I see that these women are speaking, they are arguing, and sharing messages, and they are doing it differently, but just as effectively. In some cases, the women in these stories write or weave stories that also draw a line between life and death, safety and risk. (While Tereus returns again and again to rape the speechless Philomela, her weaving, read and interpreted, by Procne means that Philomela is brought to safety.) In this way, women finding ways to speak, verbally or non-verbally, share messages that resonate with audiences, that show the continued power of finding alternative ways to communicate, and that show one way that silence is not alway silent, is not complete absence of communication.
Alexandra Sladky 