INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MULTIDISCIPLINARY COMPARATIVE STUDIES (IJMCS)
Silence as Speech and Narrative Agency in Female Trauma in Sally Rooney’s Normal People and Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half
E-ISSN: 4089-4904
P-ISSN: 4279-4976
DOI: https://iigdpublishers.com/article/1585
This study examines the function of silence as both speech and a form of narrative agency in the representation of female trauma in two contemporary novels: Sally Rooney’s Normal People and Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half. While trauma often renders female characters voiceless within patriarchal and racialized structures, this paper argues that silence operates paradoxically as a deliberate communicative and resistant strategy. Employing feminist narratology and trauma theory, the study uses close textual analysis to interrogate how pauses, withheld speech, and narrative gaps articulate what direct discourse cannot. The analysis reveals that in Normal People, silence functions as Marianne’s embodied language for negotiating class shame, abuse, and intimacy, thereby reclaiming control over her own narrative. In The Vanishing Half , silence becomes a tool of self-preservation and identity reconstruction for Stella and Desiree as they navigate racial passing, erasure, and familial rupture. Furthermore, both authors deploy fragmented narration and focalization to position silence not as absence, but as a productive space where female subjects assert agency despite systemic violence. The study concludes that re-reading silence as speech disrupts conventional readings of victimhood and demonstrates how contemporary women writers transform muteness into a site of power, survival, and meaning-making, thereby contributing to ongoing conversations on gender, trauma, and narrative form in 21st-century fiction.
AZAN BABA JAMES PhD & HAUWA T. MUHAMMAD
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