Silence, voice and power are the main themes in this essay. The purpose is to analyze how the silence is used as an instrument for control, and how it can be used strategically to take power, but also as a resistance against the power. The novel The Vegetarian by Han Kang and the autobiography novel on verse, brown girl dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson are the core of this essay. This essay focuses on how the characters break the silence, and how they use the silence strategically to find their voice in a society that systematically works to keep women, children and men silent. The silence works in specific ways in all kinds of situations, to explore the complexity of the power dimensions a comparative analysis allows the themes to emerge and enlighten each other’s diversity. With help from Rebecca Solnit in Alla frågors moder, Audre Lorde in Your silence will not protect you and Michel Foucault’s Diskursens ordning, among other voices, the essay aims to search for how the silence can work as a strategy and what it means to speak. The essay shows how the oppressing silence is broken in brown girl dreaming, and how the voice becomes the power, but also how the silence was used in the African-American Civil Rights Movement as an act of resistance. The essays also analyze the female main character in The Vegetarian, who makes a journey from an oppressed woman where the patriarchal men violate her silence and forcing her to speak, to an existence where silence, life and growth thrives. The silence has its own language and sometimes, it’s louder than words.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:umu-156220 |
| Date | January 2018 |
| Creators | Guldbacke Lund, Linnéa |
| Publisher | Umeå universitet, Institutionen för kultur- och medievetenskaper |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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