Silence as Political Strategy in Art: A Study of Susan Sontag’s Alice in Bed

Abstract

ABSTRACT The paper explores the politics of silence as a language of resistance through the prism of feminist discourse in Susan Sontag’s Alice in Bed (1993). Silence marks an essential presence in Sontag’s writings ranging from her essays to her creative oeuvres. Sontag’s initial approach to silence has been that of a modernist aesthete where she understood silence as an aesthetic prospect in art. However, her unwavering belief in the ‘aesthetics of silence’, that came out as a theme of whatever she has written after her 1967 essay of the same name, led Sontag to explore first the moral response (as seen in her essays like Bergman’s Persona and Fascinating Fascism) and ultimately the political strategy behind the use of silence. The politics of silence in the play Alice in Bed becomes quite elusive and strategic. The imperative of silence as a performative aesthetics is recognised in the exemplary decisions of the women characters in the play that choose silence to reflect the abuses and deceptions of patriarchal language and resist the patriarchal disservices inflicted upon women’s intelligibility and emotionality.