‘Back from the silence with something to say’: Ursula Le Guin’s Lavinia and silence as classical reception

Abstract

This article explores the power of silence in the feminist recovery of classical women and texts to open up engaged spaces for women’s creative reworkings, taking as a case study Lavinia and her reception in Ursula Le Guin’s 2008 novel of the same name. By re-evaluating silence in dialogue with feminist scholarship, I argue that Le Guin is able to bring a different angle to the reception of classical literary women, focusing on the gaps and spaces in Lavinia’s character that provide a medium for engagement with the Vergilian text. The open, interpretative space of silence thus becomes a locus in which Le Guin can transform Vergil’s passive personification of Lavinia into a generative vision of literature and reception — so that, ultimately, Lavinia is able to absorb and embody the poem within herself.