SOURCE: “‘Checkmate’ Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Silent Partner,” in Legacy, Vol. 3, No. 2, Fall 1986, pp. 17-29.

In the following essay, Fetterley explores the phenomenon of inarticulateness of women in The Silent Partner.

I

Even before I was consciously feminist, I found Ben Jonson's Epicoene offensive for its assumption that a “silent woman” is an oxymoron. Our culture exudes commentary on the talkativeness, the irrepressible noise of women—“tell it to a woman, tell it to the world”; “a woman's tongue is never still.” Yet, as many linguists have documented, the truth is precisely opposite. Though the tall, dark, handsome and silent male may be a common figure in the popular imagination, in fact it is men who talk and women who are silent. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Silent Partner (1871) starts with this truth and seeks to articulate the phenomenon of inarticulateness and to give voice to the fact of...