Strategies of Reticence : Silence and Meaning in the Works of Jane Austen, Willa Cather, Katherine Anne Porter, and Joan Didion

This work examines the unspoken in the work of four women writers - Jane Austen, Willa Cather, Katherine Anne Porter, and Joan Didion - as a consciously employed feminist rhetoric.

Acknowledging that reticence is often enforced by patriarchal silencing of women.

Stout argues that each of these writers turns that traditional limitation into a weapon of mockery of assault against masculine society.

She shows a continuity extending from Austen to the other writers and explores differences in their use of a rhetoric of reticence.

Austen, the fountainhead of the strategically reticent style in the novel, used irony to criticize covertly her society's treatment of women while seeming to observe its constraints.

Cather, motivated both by her personal need for disguise and by her commitments to a Jamesian aesthetic of indirection, also developed techniques for conveying more than she actually said, persuading readers of gender injustice.

Porter employed an Austenian style of clarifiction and a rhetoric of discretion, but her indignation at the anguish of women's lives is apparent.

Didion's writing is terse, stripped, and intensely, angrily aggresive. All four writers avoid anti-patriarchal oratory, instead working subversively to question and at times to assault power structures based on gender.

Stout points to the necessity of reading women's fiction in both an aesthetic and a social context in order to catch the elusive undertones of their style and also the need to recognize the common concerns of women writers from different national literatures.