‘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 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 and classical reception 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 incomplete text of the Aeneid. Silence thus becomes a locus in which Le Guin can transform Vergil’s silencing of Lavinia into a generative vision of the open space of interpretation available in classical literature and its reception.