Subversive Silences

Book excerpt: Weldt-Basson (Spanish, Wayne State U.) investigates how seven Latin American women writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have used the concept of submissive silence in their works as a sign of women's rebellion against the passive silence imposed by patriarchy. Using different theoretical perspectives in each chapter, she demonstrates how Marta Brunet, Maria Luisa Bombal, Rosario Castellanos, Isabel Allende, Rosario Ferre, Laura Esquivel, and Sandra Cisneros have used silence thematically and stylistically through hyperbole, coding, irony, parody, and cultural symbol and how silence reflects different time periods and countries.