Mood, silence and ghostly words: female trauma in Isabel Coixet’s The Secret life of Words

Abstract

Isabel Coixet uses silence and sound, the remarks of a ghost and heterotopic locations in her film The Secret life of Words (2005) in order to convey the devastating effects of trauma on the main character’s life. Trauma scholars have been debating the inadequacy of attempting to represent trauma (impossibility of adequately representing trauma, the necessity of respecting the mourning of those involved, the need to avoid making some else’s suffering a spectacle, and the desensitization due to a surfeit of traumatic images). On the other hand, many authors have claimed the moral obligation of talking about trauma (to make the public ‘know’, to mobilize viewers/readers responses and to give an opportunity for critical reflection). This last stance is more pressing in the case of female trauma, as it has been largely obliterated from public discourse. From a feminist point of view, though, representing women’s misfortunes – rape and abuses – posits added problems such as further objectification. By refusing to offer a visual representation of what has befallen the main character and a conventional narrative explanation of the events, Coixet provides a viable feminine way to represent the unrepresentable: the experience of traumatic events in women’s lives.