El silencio femenino

Abstract

This paper is concerned with those "circumstances, inner or outer, which opose women's needs of creation", as Tillie Olsen put it. Focusing on poems by Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop and Adrienne Rich, it analyses three factors which may account for female silence in literature: the burden of literary criticism, women writers' identification with dominant sexist values, and the need to alter a man-made language.