Speech, Silence and Female Adolescence in Carson Mccullers' the Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and Angela Carter's the Magic Toyshop‪.‬

Abstract This paper examines the relationship between adolescent female characters and silence in Carson McCullers' The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) and Angela Carter's The Magic Toyshop (1967). The established body of criticism focussing on McCullers' and Carter's depictions of the female grotesque provides the theoretical framework for this paper, as I explore the implications of these ideas when applied to language and speech. In a white Western society, where a woman's sexuality, appetite and articulation are controlled and suppressed, this paper asks: what options for expression are there, for women whose speech is always limited to their body, and whose body always speaks alterity and abjection to male interpretation?