A Book of Silence (29 page)

The silence of the forests is about secrets, about things that are hidden. Most of the terrains of silence – deserts, mountains, oceans, islands, moorland – have austere but wide views. They are landscapes that can be appalling in their openness, but at least you can see what is coming. The wide sky is bright above you, the clouds give you warnings of approaching weather and the land sweeps away into the distance. But the silence of the forests hides things; it does not open them out but closes them off. Trees hide the sunshine; and life goes on under the trees, in the thickets and tanglewood. Forests are full of surprises. It is not strange that the fairy stories that come out of the forest are stories about hidden identities, both good and bad. The princess looks like a goose girl, but the wicked stepmother looks like a beautiful queen. In the Grimms’ version of Cinderella the infamous ‘Ugly Sisters’ were not ugly – they were, indeed, ‘beautiful and fair of face, but vile and black of heart’. Snow White’s murderous stepmother was ‘the fairest of all’. The wolf could disguise himself as the sweet old granny.

The forests do not generate the huge god of the desert, nor the partisan, passionate, sexually active deities of the Greek mountains and islands. They produce little fragmented stories, of magic and human courage and dark plots, stories of secrets and silences. Over and over again in the old stories there is a silence: mysteries; hidden names; concealed identities; things not told, withheld, cloaked by silence. These tales have oral roots, so each time they are told they are told for a slightly different purpose. Do you want to soothe your baby towards sleep? Warn your child against wandering? Inspire your teenager to enterprise? Amuse your sulking adolescent with a
thrilling horror? Console the elderly or even get rid of your unwanted lover? You tell them a story and the story, like the forests it came out of, shifts to your need.

We know now that the Grimm Brothers themselves, despite their linguistic and ‘scientific’ intentions, shifted the stories, made them more Christian, more family-orientated; they emphasised the good but absent father (theirs died and it changed their lives from idyllic to penurious overnight) and the cruel malignant stepmother, who seemed under pressure to have changed from the sweet warm mother of their infancy. Bruno Bettelheim in his immensely influential and suggestive
Uses of Enchantment
¹²
sees the stories as offering liberation to boy children.
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I see them as offering empowerment to women. You can make of them what you will – they are shape shifters. We do not know where the stories came from, their roots are truly buried in silence. There is not and cannot be a single easily pinned-down meaning to fairy-story silence. It is more honest, perhaps, to recognise that there are a number of different sorts of silence in the forest.

There is the silence of secrets; the things that must not be told. In the stories this ‘secrecy silence’ has a very straightforward narrative function – it keeps the story going, allows things to develop, plots to work themselves through, babies to grow up into princesses. So characters in fairy stories are frequently bound to preposterous oaths not to tell, to keep silent about whatever has happened to them. In ‘The Goose Girl’ the princess has everything taken from her – her magical horse, her royal status and her princely fiancé – by her wicked servant, while she herself is driven out to keep geese. The whole story here depends on the princess keeping the oath that she was forced to swear ‘by the clear sky above her’ not to tell anyone about the maid’s behaviour. Since virtuous characters in these stories keep their promises regardless of the cost, the teller of the tale is now free to devise a complex narrative by which the truth is exposed without the princess breaking her word. In reality she has only to say, ‘I am a princess and this woman is my wicked maid’ and the whole story is resolved.

But I sense there is something more going on in this particular structure than simply a cunning plot device. These sorts of promises are nearly always extracted from younger people by adults who wish to oppress them in socially unacceptable ways. It is hard not to feel here something of the darkness of sexual abuse, in which the child is bound by the complicated mixture of shame and fear not to tell, and indeed can repress those memories so effectively as to be ‘dumb’ about them – the child not only does not speak, but cannot speak, and sometimes may not even remember. Remember in its literal origins means to put something back together again, to make it whole, to rejoin the members or parts into a single unbroken form. Psychotherapy in these cases urges patients to speak, to tell a story not just about events but also about the way the events were silenced.

There is also the silence of renunciation, often of penance. In these stories the young protagonists go or are driven into the forest. There they meet a hermit, or an old wise woman, who very often turns out originally to have been a warrior or princess. Either through choice or as punishment they had exiled themselves in the forest – and in silence learned wisdom. Now they can understand the language of the birds, or have a mastery of herbs and healing, which they use to assist and serve the young. The ancient custom of keeping a night vigil alone in a church before major life events – like setting out on a quest or crusade, or even being made a knight – might derive from these stories. Nor is it only men who retreat into silence to expiate past sins and emerge not merely absolved, but with a new depth of knowledge. Guinevere and Maid Marian both become nuns. Sleeping Beauty is consigned to the absolute silence of sleep as a punishment for her parents’ pride and forgetfulness – first they failed to invite all the magical powers to the child’s christening and then they thought they could circumvent a
curse. She sleeps for a hundred years while the thorns grow thick around her and the whole castle is silent with her. But she is awakened to love and joy when she has served her turn. In the face of oppressive power, silence is often a sound strategy, at least in the short term.

There is another related but different sort of silence in these stories. It is always perilous to tell of fairy things. If the hero or heroine comes by fairy knowledge – help or riches or simply good luck – they must never tell where these good things came from or they will vanish. Sometimes the fairy folk coerce silence by terrible vows or threats. Sometimes they even seal characters’ mouths and make them dumb so that they
cannot
speak. This sort of silence trickled out of the stories and into ‘real life’. In several witch trials in Scotland in the early seventeenth century this silencing comes up in evidence: Elspeth Reoch’s fairy lover made her

Scottish witches had much more exotic and florid experiences of the devil’s works than English witches. This probably has less to do with Celtic versus Anglo-Saxon imaginations and more to do with the fact that Scottish law allowed witches to be tortured in more extreme ways than English law did. Isobel Gowdie told her court a spell for flying and assured them that it was easy; Elspeth Reoch was given Knowledge and bound to silence. We now know that ‘evidence’ given under torture is extremely unreliable and these trials offer older proof of that. In such witch trials I think we see women under intense and painful pressure drawing on stories from their communities in order to have something to say.

A great many fairy stories are about someone’s true identity. You may look like a goose girl; you may be so filthy and ill-kempt, through poverty or neglect, that they call you Cinderella, but truly you are the princess – and the evil servant or stepsister who has usurped your rightful place will be exposed. Related to this there is also a very specific silence about a person’s true name. In the
Earthsea Trilogy
Ursula le Guin picks up on this particular silence: to know people’s or things’ true names gives you power over them. The art of magic is the art of learning true names and how to use them. Le Guin did not invent this – it is embedded in a great many cultural myths and stories: if you know a person’s real name, you know their true identity, for good or bad, and you have power over him or her. ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ is a very well-known European version of this sort of silence. The imp or minor devil who bails out the heroine by spinning her straw into gold – a task laid on her, incidentally, only because of her own lies – does so in exchange for her first child when she has one. The straw is spun, she marries the prince and she has a baby. The imp returns to extract his wages, but she strikes a bargain with him: if she can discover his real name the pact will be voided. Through an odd mixture of chance and endeavour she does indeed succeed – she tells him his name and he vanishes in a puff of smoke. Identity, these stories suggest, must be guarded and cherished.

The idea of trial by silence is very ancient: it emerges in folklore and religious ritual from almost every culture. The aboriginal boy must undergo an initiation of silence-in-the-wild to become a man, while on the other side of the world the squire and the novice must pass through a night of silent vigil, the tall columns and vaulted roof rising above them like trees, to achieve their high status as knight or monk.

Trials are the stuff of fairy stories. Quests, both outward into the unknown world and inward into the protagonist’s moral being, are basically trials. Only the worthy can prove they are worthy. Only the
real
princess can feel the pea through all those mattresses. Unlike myths, fairy stories are never about transcending nature, but
about uncovering – discovering – an already existing identity. The function of trials is to uncover the truth: this is why trial by combat between two men was deemed capable of determining a woman’s sexual fidelity; why trial by water could prove whether someone was a witch; or indeed trial by jury can infallibly expose a criminal. Etymologically ‘trial’ derives from ‘try’, not in the sense of ‘attempt’, but in the sense of ‘test’ – to try out a new car, or try on a new frock.

Perhaps the best-known European fairy story dealing with ‘trial by silence’ is ‘The Six Swan Brothers’.
¹⁴
Here the nameless heroine’s six brothers, betrayed by their stepmother, are turned into swans and she voluntarily undertakes a trial by silence to release them: she will be silent for seven years. She is bound neither by a forced oath nor by being struck dumb – she chooses to be silent freely and with love as her only motive. She also has to make them each a shirt out of starwort. This is deeply mysterious because starwort is a leggy wild flower with tiny petals and not particularly fibrous stalks; it does not seem possible to make thread out of starwort. The only clue I can find to the meaning of this strange task is that starwort, in some parts of the country, is called stitchwort – probably because, as an infusion, it was believed to heal ‘stitches’, the kind that stab you in the side if you run too far or fast. The pain, the endurance of pain and the difficulty of the task all come together here – although I don’t know if the twinning works in German whence the story originally comes.

She sits in a tree, like a bird, completely silent and sewing the shirts. A king finds her there, woos her, takes her to his palace and marries her, but still she does not speak. Her wicked mother-in-law steals her newborn babies, smears her mouth with goats’ blood and eventually persuades the husband that his silent wife is a witch and has eaten their children. She does not defend herself. She must be burned. She is led to the stake, the almost finished shirts carried neatly over her arm – and at the last moment the air is filled with swans, they swoop down, put on the shirts and are restored to human form. She is free to speak, she tells her story and all is well,
save that one shirt was unfinished and the youngest brother must go through life lopsided, with a swan’s wing instead of his own left arm.

This is a very strange story. Surely a woman is not
meant
to love her brothers more than her husband or her children? In ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ the ‘heroine’ is let off her Faustian bargain simply because mother love is allowed to override justice; she is freed from a promise because she is a mother. This is a much more normal approach to mothers and their commitments. If fire tests courage and water tests purity, what does silence test? Not love certainly. The boundaries of the self, perhaps.

Integrity. Together with vigils and trials by silence go fasting and trials by hunger. The silent hermits are fiercely ascetic. Taboos about food and taboos about words are often closely related. Persephone must not eat while in hell; she must keep her mouth shut, or she will be claimed by death for ever. None of this is surprising: our mouths are one orifice over which we might seem to have control. To speak is to give not just secrets, but our selves, away. Not to speak, then, is to be self-contained, autonomous, adult and, by implication, chaste. Trial by silence tests integrity.

Going to the forest did not cure me of being scared of it, but it taught me that the terror of silence was complex and the struggle to engage with it and understand it was beautiful as well as dark. I came home from Inverness somewhat enchanted myself, and more aware than ever that the long shadow of the wild wood plays an essential role in our contemporary negative attitudes to silence.

Looking back at those three years in Weardale, I see them as a kind of novitiate. When a would-be nun (or monk of course) enters a religious order she is first a ‘postulant’, a person ‘postulating’ or proposing that she might want to join. A postulant takes no vows and makes no commitments. If this works out well on both sides, she then becomes a novice. A novice is a new nun in formal training; as well as participating in the life and practice of the order she is taught – about prayer, about the theories behind it, and about the history of monasticism and her own chosen version of it; in a sense
a novice is an apprentice – she is learning the skill of her life work in both theory and practice. In Weardale I was a silence novice, studying the practice and history and theory of silence.