There has been an important scholarly turn to studies in silence and erasure since at least the 1970s by those eager to uncover hidden, marginalised, and underrepresented voices of the past. UK Research and Innovation currently list Hidden Histories as an area of investment and support. Tillie Olsen’s Silences (1978) revolutionised the study of silence and agency in literature. Her book considers the circumstances that surround writers’ periods of silence, focussing on factors that particularly impact marginalised groups such as women, people of colour, and the working class. Her book makes a distinction between “natural” and “unnatural” silences, deeming the former as ‘that necessary time for renewal’ and the latter as the ‘unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot’. These ‘unnatural’ silences are primarily caused by specific social circumstances that accompany being a marginalised individual e.g. for women, an obligation to family and home.

The Victorians were particularly concerned with matters of voice and agency. Throughout the nineteenth century, numerous reforms were introduced to grant more rights and autonomy to women, children, animals, and those considered insane. These concerns inevitably found their way into Victorian fiction. Drawing on numerous advancements in the understanding of the human mind and psychology as a discipline, as well as emerging social and cultural anxieties regarding empire, the Victorians created new methods of representing marginalised groups, their voices and their silences. From literal refusals to speak, to blank spaces, to monstrous figures, these works of fiction ask us to consider methods of communication that were adopted when restrictions were placed on the speakable.

This study day wishes to contribute to the robust conversations regarding voice, silence, and agency that are very much relevant today. It is the hope of the hosts that participants will leave with a better understanding of the institutions and mechanisms that worked in tandem to regulate and control marginalised voices and agencies in the Victorian era. We also hope to encourage participants to re-evaluate the idea of silence as strictly an absence, specifically an absence of agency.

Programme:

8TH JUNE

11.45am-12pm: Welcome
12pm-1.30pm: Unspeakable Post/colonialism(Chair: Rosie Blacher)

Alice Victoria Harling (Chinese University of Hong Kong): Metaphors of Slavery and Uncongenial Labour in Jane Eyre (1847): The Metaphors and Mind Style of ‘Bertha Mason’, Silenced and Sacrificed to the Sub-Text (10 min Flash Paper)
Emma Kirby (Cardiff University): Neo-Victorian Hidden Histories: Colonial Unspeakability in Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger
Chandrica Barua (University of Michigan): Imperial (Re)Visions and the Spectre of Brown Femininity
Tinka Harvard (Åbo Akademi University): True Love: The Silence of Black Victorian Women, Who They Were and Why It Matters

1.30pm-1.45pm: Break
1.45pm-2.45pm: Hush, Hush (Hardy)(Chair: Chandrica Barua)

Barnana Baidya (independent): Tradition and Unconventionality in Hardy’s Portrayal of Women in Jude the ObscureTracy Hayes (independent): ‘Tongued or Dumb': Einfühlung and Thomas Hardy's Loving-Kindness’

2.45pm-3pm: Break
3pm-4.15pm: Non-human Voices(Chair: Megha Bhattacharyya)

Eleanor Gillespie (independent): Margaret Plues’ Rambles in Search of Ferns and the fictional scientific voice
Liayana Jondy (Queen’s University): The Animal Speaks: Edith Carrington’s Literary and Activist Writing on Animals
Finlay Beatson (University of Dundee): ‘One no longer touched the body’: The Stolen Voice of Renfield

CPNCURRENT PANEL: Silence and Gender
(Chair: Hayley Smith)

Lorraine Dubuisson (Middle Georgia State University): ​​“Her Lips Kept Their Silence to the Last”: Silence in Ouida’s Folle-FarineMiranda Argyros (Stony Brook University): Wicked Wallpaper: Resistance, Subversion and the Male Gaze in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Fiction and Advertising Art
Abigail Ted (Bishop Grosseteste University): The Unspoken Story of Amelia’s Bedroom: Allusions to Female Sexuality and Womanhood in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848)

4.15pm-4.30: Break
4.30pm-5.30pm: Keynote

Briony Wickes (Royal Holloway London): On Being A Nuisance in Victorian Fiction

5.30pm-6.15pm: Lunch/ Dinner

6.15pm-7.30pm: : ‘The Love that Dare Not Speak its Name’: Queer Silence/ing
(Chair: Ethan Evans)

Tyler Clark (University of Massachusetts): “(K)nown (A)s (M)ale (P)rostitute”: The Unspeakable Camp of London’s Mary-Anns and Rent-Boys
VJ Rene (University of East Anglia): ‘Couldst thou not watch with me?’: Orientation and Unresponse in Swinburne’s ‘A Wasted Vigil’
Inês Sousa Marques (University of Lisbon): “What cannot be loved does not exist”: The 19th century, silence and queer existence in Ludwig Feuerbach

9TH JUNE:

12pm-1pm: Silence, Women, and Class
(Chair: Barnana Baidya)

Adiba Qonita Zahroh (Universitas Gajdah Mada): Mrs. Hudson’s Redefinition and the Resurgence of Silenced Voices in Pastiche Adventures
Georgina O Brien Hill (independent): The Speech and Silence of Working-Class Women in Margaret Harkness’s A Manchester Shirtkmaker (1890)

1.15pm-2.15pm: Silence and Psychiatry
(Chair: Lorraine Dubuisson)

K. Subramanyam (Shri Vaishnav Vidyapeeth Vishwavidyalaya): The Degenerate Madman: Reading Insanity and Degeneracy in Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Beth Sherman (Queen’s College): The (Partially) Mad Stepmother in St. Martin’s Eve: Excluded from the Canon

2.15pm-2.30pm: Break

2.30pm-3.45pm: Silence, Pain, and Memory

(Chair: Finlay Beatson)

Rebecca Easler (Trinity College Dublin): Silenced by Grief in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist
Hande Tekdemir (independent): Representation of the Irish Famine in Victorian novel
Riley McGuire (Worcester State University): The Fiction of Fluency: Braddon’s Professionalization of the Mute Role (10 min flash paper)
Asa Brunet-Jailly (independent): “The Ghetto Speaks:” Jewish Voices in Victorian Slum Literature (10 min flash paper)

CONCURRENT PANEL: Unspeakable and Erased Bodies
(Chair: Beth Sherman)

Megha Bhattacharyya (Presidency University): The Odd Women at A Cross Line: Representations of Victorian Women in the Works of Gissing and Egerton
Bridget Morgan (Aberystwyth University/University of Bristol): ​​Charlotte O’Conor Eccles, The Rejuvenation of Miss Semaphore (1897) and the (Un)Silencing of Female Middle Age
Rebecca Hamilton (University of Aberdeen): ‘Violence-that-disappears’: The Erasure of Sexual Violence in Dracula and Modern Anxieties

3.45pm-4pm: Break

4pm-5.15pm: Silence in Wilkie Collins
(Chair: Riley McGuire)

Esther Reilly (Trinity College Dublin): ‘The Mysterious Foundling!’: A Circus Deaf-Mute in Hide and Seek (1854)
Marissa Bolin (Longwood University): Married Women’s Legal Silence in Wilkie Collins’ Man and Wife
Tessa Sierra (independent): Shadows of the Self: Silenced and Erased Within an Insane Asylum in Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (1859)

5.15pm-6pm: Lunch/ Dinner

6pm-7pm Keynote

(Chair: Rebecca Hamilton)

Alexandra Valint (University of Southern Mississippi): “I must drop the pen”: Disability, Narration, and Silence in the Multinarrator Novels of Wilkie Collins