Women should remain silent

“Women should remain silent” is the edict Pope Innocent invokes to rebuke Marie-Josèphe’s music and to claim that female silence belongs not only in church but everywhere. Its force in the story lies in the conflict between that universal prohibition and Marie-Josèphe’s increasingly consequential acts of musical creation, interpretation, and speech.

The edict and its scope

Pope Innocent makes the rule explicit when he condemns Marie-Josèphe’s composition as indecent. He argues that music should glorify God and asks whether she knows the Church’s edict: “Women should remain silent.” Marie-Josèphe answers that the rule applies in church. Her reply distinguishes a restriction on women’s voices during worship from a ban on women making music at all; the Pope rejects that boundary, insisting that they must be silent “At all times” and declaring music injurious to her modesty.

The dispute reaches beyond the propriety of one composition. The Pope treats female musical expression as a violation of religious and gendered order, while Marie-Josèphe understands the injunction through her experience of convent life, where it had produced what she remembers as miserable silence. The exchange places her artistic work under competing authorities: the Church’s command to restrain women’s voices and the King’s court, where her composition has just been performed.

Marie-Josèphe under the rule

The condemnation unsettles Marie-Josèphe rather than leaving her immediately defiant. Her joy drains away; she blushes and wonders whether the Pope may be right. She recalls the convent’s punishments: when she asked a question, she received a switch and tears instead of an answer. The remembered pain helps explain why the edict carries such weight for her. It is not an abstract doctrine but a rule joined to an earlier experience of being silenced and punished for seeking understanding.

She revises her judgment of the sisters who enforced that silence. Marie-Josèphe had believed they were misguided and that God could not wish women to live in silence and heartache; faced with the Pope’s condemnation, she thinks she may have been wrong and that the sisters were closer to the Church’s truth. The episode shows the injunction operating inwardly as well as publicly: authority makes her question not only her composition but her confidence in the beliefs that once allowed her to resist the convent’s discipline.

The pressure to silence a voice also recurs outside the church dispute. During the noisy examination of a male sea monster, Lucien de Barenton, Count de Chrétien, tells Marie-Josèphe that the creature must be silenced for the King’s sake. She answers in a whisper that she has fed it and that its cry was not the sound it made when hungry; she wonders whether it dislikes the music. The scene does not repeat the edict, but it places her in the role of a listener and interpreter whose quiet judgment challenges an order to suppress an inconvenient sound.

Speech, music, and testimony

Later, Marie-Josèphe considers whether she could make the Sea Woman sound more diplomatic, then decides that doing so would entangle her in lies and that the Sea Woman would correct her herself. The moment marks a limit she places on her own authority as translator: rather than make another’s voice conform to courtly expectations, she allows for the Sea Woman’s ability to speak and correct the record.

That distinction matters when Pope Innocent questions whether the Sea Woman believes in immortality and the Resurrection. Marie-Josèphe sings the Sea Woman’s account: life continues through living beings creating new life, but those who die do not return. When the Pope calls the exchange heretical, Marie-Josèphe protests that she did not invent the story; the Sea Woman told it and does not understand heresy. She is speaking on another being’s behalf, but she also insists on the source of the testimony and refuses to let it be treated as her own fabrication.

Meaning in the story

The edict’s absolute wording contrasts with the range of expression Marie-Josèphe exercises: she composes music, interprets a creature’s cries, and sings the Sea Woman’s account before religious and royal authority. Her actions do not erase the power of the prohibition. After the Pope’s rebuke, she is visibly shaken and briefly turns the Church’s judgment against her own convictions. But the later exchange shows her speaking again, even when her words bring an accusation of heresy.

The expression therefore names both a rule and a recurring struggle over who may speak, make music, and be believed. In Marie-Josèphe’s case, silence would prevent not only her own artistic work but also the transmission of the Sea Woman’s testimony. The conflict is not simply between a woman and a command: it is between an authority that prescribes silence and the acts of listening, composing, and truthful interpretation through which Marie-Josèphe gives otherwise disregarded voices a hearing.