AustLit

'In Philip Roth’s American Pastoral (1997) and Gail Jones’s Sorry (2007), the portrayals of stuttering in the female characters Merry Levov and Perdita Keene share a common conception of the stutterer as prone to violent, destructive behavior. Although the manifestations of their stutters are reversed—Merry develops hers gradually whereas Perdita’s stutter is triggered by the trauma of her father’s murder—both narratives share this same tendency to link blocked speech to sudden outbursts of violence. In this article, I show how the link in both novels between violence and stuttering is further tied to a discussion of political agency (understood in terms of voice). In Merry’s case, this comes with her stuttering protests against the Vietnam War, and in Perdita’s case, with her inability to testify on behalf of the Aboriginal people. Thus, I argue that Roth and Jones deploy the stutter not only in gendered terms, as a symbol for the suppression of the female voice, but also as a broader symbol for the struggle to achieve political voice in the face of injustice.' (Publication abstract)