“Women should be silent”

The expression “Women should be silent” names a rule imposed on women in both religious life and musical work. In Marie-Josèphe’s history, it is not merely an injunction to keep quiet: it helps justify the denial of education and creative authority. Her continuing questions, compositions, and efforts to speak faithfully for the sea woman show how the novel places that rule under pressure.

Religious Discipline and Denied Learning

During five years in a convent, Marie-Josèphe was denied books and music. The sisters taught that knowledge would corrupt her, invoking Eve, and presented women’s silence in the house of God as a demand of the Pope. These restrictions did not extinguish her intellectual life. She continued to think and question, though she felt unable to voice those questions; her interest in mathematics was treated as suspect, and a letter from Newton was burned unopened before her. The injunction thus operates through everyday control of learning as well as through an explicit religious rule.

The Rule Repeated in Musical Life

Later, a music master turns the same gendered restriction against Marie-Josèphe’s work. He disparages her compositions and playing, then declares that women should not compose. His attack makes professional judgment inseparable from a wider refusal to recognize women as authors. Marie-Josèphe clutches her papers and asks to pass; the young musicians remain silent, uncomfortable and afraid of their master. The scene links her individual vulnerability to a room in which others also withhold their voices.

Speaking, Listening, and Mediation

The expression gains force from the contrast between enforced silence and Marie-Josèphe’s actual role as a listener and interpreter. When the sea monster cries during Yves’s presentation, she quietly tells Lucien de Barenton, Count de Chrétien that she has fed it and that this is not its hungry cry; she considers whether it dislikes the music. Her observation is tentative, but it challenges the assumption that the creature’s sound is meaningless noise. Elsewhere, when the sea woman waits before the King, Marie-Josèphe wonders whether to make her sound more diplomatic and decides against distorting her words, believing the sea woman would correct her herself. She acts not as a ventriloquist but as a mediator accountable to another speaker.

A Countervoice to Silence

Before Pope Innocent, Marie-Josèphe sings the sea woman’s account of life: people live, create new life, and die, but do not return. When the Pope condemns the account as heretical, she insists that she did not invent it and that the sea woman told it. The episode places women’s speech within a dispute over who may transmit knowledge and whose account is allowed to count. Against the injunction’s repeated effort to confine women to silence, Marie-Josèphe’s conduct makes listening, composing, questioning, and truthful retelling forms of intellectual agency.