Can the Women Speak?: A Symptomatic Reading of the Women’s Silence in the Markan Ending

Abstract

Two prevalent interpretations of the women’s silence in the Markan ending—the silence as failure and as a religious response—share the assumption that the silence is the subjective action of the women. However, such interpretations fail to see the way in which the Markan women characters are constructed in the narrative, which is already colored by an androcentric and patriarchal lens. In this paper, I propose a symptomatic reading of the silence with a question “Can the women in Mark speak?” which is inspired by Spivak’s article “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1999). An analysis of women’s speech in Mark shows how their voices are silenced in/by narrative. The women’s silence symptomatically appears from the Markan contradiction. On the one hand, Mark portrays the women positively on the surface; but soon after, Mark unconsciously dismisses the women from the narrative because of internalized androcentrism on the other.