Silenzi e parole. L'esercizio dell'autoaffermazione femminile in Orgoglio e Pregiudizio

Abstract

The essay focuses on the main character of Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen, Elizabeth Bennet, who possesses beauty, virtue and intellect and who uses silence, historically intended as a form of gender and social repression imposed by the social system to women, discoursively constructed as an essential component of women's behaviour and social experienced, and aimed at silencing them, as an instrument to path to her auto-assertion. The young woman, through her strategical discoursive skills based both on words but especially on silence tells the story of a heroine who must learn, over the course of her narrative, how to harness the powers of discoursive sophistication in order to circumvent her culture's rigid expectations of moral perfection, giving birth to a oerfcet harmony between familiarity and subversiveness.