“Almost Stunned at the Sound of my Own Voice”: Internal/External Exploration and Female Penetration in “Winkfield’s” The Female American

The Female American prefigures, serving as a kind of “oracle” or found hermit’s manuscript for the “female gothic” novel within the context of trans-Atlantic, long eighteenth-century literature. One interesting orifice through which to glimpse such continuities between female exploration/penetration tales such as this fictional descendent of nonfictional historic colonial-American seventeenth-century figures, is language using sound to illuminate the multisensory experience of Female American, and female hermit who prefers not to marry but does, Unca Eliza Winkfield. It is not only light and dark tones with which this novel is painted through contrasting elements but also through loud and soft and multidimensional sound. The most glaring examples of sound and Unca Eliza’s sensitivity to it during her hermitage occur in the (textual and underground) passages in which she discovers the idol, through which she converts, Cavendish-Blazing-World like, the indigenous community around her through awe, not force. Unca Eliza, the narrator and supposed (but not) author writes: 

“I still kept silence; not thinking as yet a proper time to interrupt them. When … the high-priest made an address to the sun, in a very low feeble voice, which yet I could hear very plainly … A confused disharmonious noise ensued, for each had a petition to offer up, whilst like the priests of Baal, they cried as loud as they could, as if their God was a great way off, or deaf, and could not hear them” (100). 

The indigenous community’s annual sun-god ceremony is punctuated by silence. Silence and soft-speaking fills the void in which the “Baal”-like worshippers pour their “disharmonious noise.” At first, Unca Eliza is aligned to the priests in her keeping “silence”; her conversion experience not of herself but of the indigenous individuals surrounding her, will consist in knowing when it is the “proper time to interrupt them.” However, once the non-priestly communicants “ensue” and “offer up” their individual (“each”) “petition,” the priests “cried as loud as they could.” It is ridiculous to her, who perceives her God internally rather than externally (preaching, earlier in the novel, protestant theology of salvation by faith not works), that their God required crying “as loud as they could.” It is as if “their God” was (1) far away or (2) deaf and (3) “could not hear them.” Either way, “their God … could not hear them.” 

What follows during this ritual to the sun, to light in darkness both physical and of their unenlightened collective mind, which when brought together for worship could be “understood” by her, the Female American observer, when singularly spoken by the priests but not when the community comes together, when “great lamentations, attended with the most dreadful yells” ensue (100). The indigenous community’s silence, then, contrasts Unca Eliza’s wise waiting for a “proper” (polite? Providential?) time to interrupt. It is not her singular silence but instead “a general and profound silence.” She then prepares to speak but waits again, her opportunity punctuated by the “high-priest” who “raising his voice, seemingly, as loud as he could, he cried … WHO IS GOD BUT THE SUN?” Providence combines with her patience and persistence in waiting for the opportune moment when she speaks through their “idol”: “HE WHO MADE THE SUN.” The all-caps nature of the priests’ questioning is matched by her reply. This is the perfect segue for her to take what the indigenous community “knows” and to build on—correct—their spirituality. God then, dwells in the darkness before the sun and causing the sun; he is before the light, not the light itself. The all-caps of the spiritual question and answer denotes both volume and importance. The “lay-assembly” explodes with “loud shouts” but the priests “with more decency and gravity, profoundly bowed their bodies.” Silence, then, appears to be aligned with spiritual, individual discernment, propriety, and correctness; loud noise and explosive, loud gestures are aligned with the “lay” people; she, aligned with the priests, knows when to be quiet and when to make noise, and how loud to amplify that noise, or not. 

Previous to this first colonialist/imperialist exchange—with a female flair much like Cavendish’s Empress uses awe rather than violence to conquer and enslave (as Robinson Crusoe brags of doing to Friday and the people of “his” island), the hearts and minds of her people in The Blazing World—Unca Eliza is exploring, penetrating due to her need to sufficiently “satisfy her curiosity,” a phrase repeated often throughout this portion of the tale that, in my mind, aligns her with Catherine Morland as she sifts through old chests and manuscripts in Northanger Abbey and Northanger Abbey (88). During this time in which “the remains of the dead give [her] the least terror, … [she] was alarmed with a loud clap of thunder.” Her response was not that of terror because, she professes she “naturally loves to hear it thunder; there is something awful and great in it”—in other words, the loud clap of thunder is sublime (see: the Female Gothic). She does not respond in “terror” but instead it “composes” her “mind, raises it above the things of sense, and fills my mind with noble and exalted ideas of God” to whose presence she “bows with reverence”: “for though sensible that both it and lightning are the effects of natural causes, yet I consider them as under the direction of God; and doubt not that they are sometimes directed to answer some particular ends of providence” (88-89, emphasis added). Previous to the commencement of her conversion of the indigenous spiritual community, she already aligns with the priests by “bowing with reverence,” which they do in response to her voice arising out of their “idol.” Her curiosity manifests both in the physical realm and the intellectual realm; she is “sensible” that both extreme light and loud sound have natural causes but she ascribes the cause of those natural elements, like she does later to the sun, to God “himself.” 

Works Cited 

Winkfield, Unca Eliza. The Female American. Broadview, 2014.