ABSTRACT
The convergence of critical attention on certain point foregrounds a basic experience that cuts across cultural lines in the United States: community is often a matter of recuperating what has been overshadowed or destroyed by official public definitions. Women writers are especially good at challenging such fixity because women have been constrained by public definitions even as we are asked to maintain and perpetuate them. Subjectivity is several, social, and it is embodied. Strands of speech and silence are interwoven in these texts, and they condition the possibility of selfhood for both writers and characters. If silence is the prescription of the patriarchal mainstream for women, 'voice' is a manifestation of resistance to that mainstream – a manifestation of psychic energy in the service of self-formation. Speech is, then, an antidote to isolation, and its metaphoric instantiation, 'voice', runs throughout this fiction and its criticism.
