Beyond What\u27s Missing: Silence in Women-Authored Novels from Wollstonecraft to Shelley

This dissertation responds to and intends to subvert binary interpretations of silence, particularly women’s silences, as representing either submission or resistance to oppressive institutions and societal expectations. I examine five women-authored novels from British Romanticism. The first half of this dissertation focuses on three radical works of the 1790s, Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman, Mary Hays’s The Victim of Prejudice, and Charlotte Smith\u27s The Old Manor House. The second half discusses two well-known early nineteenth-century novels, Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Through examinations of these novels, I discuss how silence functions within institutional and social silencing, nostalgic resistance to social and political change, social intimacy, and grief and narrative identity. These examinations draw from interpretations of silence as related to visibility and communication and within disciplines such as law (criminal conversation trials and confessions) and counseling psychology (parallel processes and grief responses) in order to demonstrate the varied capabilities and meanings of silence outside of a response to power structures. Beyond representing what is missing (speech, power, knowledge) or unknown, silence is a presence significant to communication, particularly self-expression, and intimacy that can serve as a necessary site of negotiation and transformation, of our fears, our desires, and our stories