SILENCE AS RESISTANCE IN THE GALO FOLK STORY OF TERI ANE: A GOTHIC PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

The Gothic genre became most popular in the late 18th century with the publication of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto in 1764. Since then, it has been a well-established literary genre. The presence of supernaturalism, ghosts and the uncanny was always a part of literary tradition but Walpole’s novel brought new popularity to the Gothic and made it a separate literary genre. As a genre, it includes horror, terror, supernaturalism, the mysterious and the uncanny, termed a male Gothic. With time female Gothic writers also contributed to its expansion and the genre got enhanced by the addition of women's expressions of fear as well as experiences of domesticities, anxieties about the self and critique of capitalism about gender, these were later collectively termed as female Gothic, Gothic as a genre refers to a representation of silent space, a space that remains with its strength and capacity to be heard through the unuttered means of parapraxes and ellipses in discourse. The paper discusses Gothic in respect of its nature of silences as a tool of resistance through the Galo Female Gothic narrative tradition, which brings forward a magnificent tale of Teri Ane, from the Galo narrative tradition, a tale that epitomizes silence as a tool of resistance.