The Silent Duchess - Teaching Notes - Book Review

Radical Teacher, Winter, 2002 by Arlene Holpp Scala

By Dacia Maraini. Translated by Dick Kitto and Elspeth Spottiswood. New York: The Feminist Press, $14.95.

The Silent Duchess by Dacia Maraini is an excellent novel for an exploration of patriarchy and the female voice. It can be read in Women's Studies and literature courses. Students in my Women's Studies capstone course at the William Paterson University of New Jersey read this 1990 Italian novel in translation. Since the focus of the Women's Studies Department is diversity this international selection about a woman with disabilities was ideal.

When the novel opens, Marianna Ucria, the main character, is a seven-year-old deaf and mute aristocratic child living in Palermo in Sicily in the 1700s. As a child with disabilities, Marianna lives her life in the margins in her family and in society.

Her father, Duke Signoretto Ucria, takes her to the public hanging of a twelve-year-old boy, thinking that the trauma might shock her into speech and hearing. His plan doesn't work, and at the age of thirteen she is married off to her mother's brother, Duke Pietro Ucria, whom she refers to as "uncle husband." When she returns to her family after being raped by Pietro, her mother and the church remind her that it is her duty to stay with her husband. Her family is ashamed of her "undignified behavior." Her father returns her to Pietro, only asking that he not be too severe with her because of her age and disability. In other words, some abuse is expected! Marianna's father represents patriarchy. He is unemotional, authoritarian, and cruel.

Marianna uses a writing pad affixed to her waist to communicate. Ironically, Marianna's handicap frees her from the stifling everyday life of noble women. Each of her sexual encounters with uncle husband is a rape. Marianna gives birth to five children. Sadly, she replicates her own fate when she doesn't fight hard enough to put off the arranged marriage of her oldest daughter at age twelve. After Pietro's death, Marianna learns the secret behind her deaf and mute condition when she questions her brother Carlo, a monk. He doesn't answer her questions, but Marianna has the ability to read people's minds, and while in her brother's presence she becomes knowledgeable about the horrendous truth about her rape. Carlo thinks about the rape and its cover-up as an "affair between men." Marianna violates the social order when she refuses to mourn her husband and decides to do as she pleases. Freed by the death of her husband and her knowledge, she chooses to travel with her servant Fila, who had been given to her as a gift from her father. Marianna, who questions the right of anyone to gift another with a human being, supports Fila's desire to leave her and marry.

Students write journals while reading The Silent Duchess. The novel is rich in issues pertinent to Women's Studies courses. Some of these issues include infanticide, child abuse, incest, forced marriage, marital rape, classism, ableism, and sexism. In a journal, one student pondered, "How could her parents love Marianna and be so willing to marry her off at the age of 13 to a man three times her age. Her parents really married her off to her uncle because it was economically beneficial for them to do so."

I also assign a student the task of facilitating the class discussion about the novel. Students are angered by the blatant preference for male children in The Silent Duchess. Marianna gives birth to three girls before birthing a boy. When her son Mariano is born, family members pass the newborn from hand to hand "as if he were the Infant Jesus." Students are impressed by Marianna when she starts to assert herself. Following the death of her fifth child, her much beloved Signoretto, Marianna rebuffs her husband's sexual advances. One student remarked, "I feel that this occurrence was actually a turning point in Marianna's life, and actually came to empower her."

Ironically, as a "Silent Duchess," Marianna learns much. As a woman with a disability, she is viewed as inferior by others in her social class. Her disability has given her insights that others do not seem to have. She is aware of the foibles of the aristocracy and how sons are initiated into sex by using servant girls. She is marginalized, and she cultivates a rich interior life, a life nourished by her avid reading and her observing eyes.

In conjunction with reading this novel and exploring the issue of a woman's voice, I show The Piano, a film about a nineteenth-century English woman, living in Australia, who is mute. Students compare Marianna with this mute woman. We also read "The Laugh of the Medusa" by the French feminist Helene Cixous, an essay that discusses the importance of the female "voice." Cixous says that women need to write themselves into existence. I also show the film A Room of One's Own, a dramatic monologue based on Virginia Woolf's essay by the same name. Responding to the film, one student wrote, "It inspired me the same way that Cixous' work and The Silent Duchess did, encouraging me to write for me, for myself." Another student connected a line from the film about not being able to lock up one's mind with The Silent Duchess: "It reminded me about how Marianna's mind refused to be locked up."