They consider silence as a non-verbal means of communication, suitable to convey diverse messages, advertise virtues, hide secrets and faults. Slightly differing attitudes towards silence voiced in different texts indicate a possible tendency towards a greater acceptance of female speech as the century progresses.
The need to negotiate changing ideals of femininity such as the question of female silence may have contributed to the increasing popularity of the genre. The focus will be on the voluntary renunciation of speech in everyday social interaction. I shall argue that silence is considered a non-verbal means of communication in its own right, that it is an elaborate communicative practice subject to controversy and to historical change.
Its most important characteristic is that it gives advice on both character formation and the conduct of life Newton, Learning. It comes in different forms such as sermons, series of letters, tracts or fables and its typical target audience are middle class adolescents and young adults. It is sometimes e. During the eighteenth century, a growing number of conduct books targeted young women Poovey Different authors give strikingly similar advice to their young female readers.
They all prescribe a model biography Schrick : coming out, choice of marriage partner, being a wife, a mother and the mistress of a great house with servants. Conduct books of course do not give us a faithful picture of real life 3 but of the ideal to which young ladies were supposed to aspire. The increasing demand for advice literature on questions of proper female conduct has therefore been attributed to historical changes in female education and the prevailing ideal of femininity e.
That the preference for domesticity and avoidance of conspicuous self-display recommended in conduct books would be accompanied by taciturnity rather than loquaciousness has, to my knowledge, been acknowledged in research on eighteenth-century English-language conduct books for women, but it has not received much attention.
