1 Rhetoric and Silence: The Turkish Tales’ Heroines Michela A. Calderaro Michela A. Calderaro, an Associate Editor of Calabash. A Journal of Caribbean Arts and Letters, teaches English and Postcolonial Literature at the University of Trieste (Italy). Ms Calderaro, whose critical works include a book on Ford Madox Ford and numerous articles on British and Caribbean writers, has just finished editing a collection of unpublished poems by Creole writer Eliot Bliss and plans to complete Bliss’s biography by the end of 2012. The Turkish Tales are rightly considered “major poems in [Byron’s] development as an artist”. 1 In them he first gave form to the figure of the Romantic Hero who would later reach perfection with Childe Harold, as well as experimented with new structural techniques. My consideration of the Turkish Tales, though, concentrates on the female figures, who are generally viewed as weak and passive, and I argue are anything but. Naturally, the Tales feature Byronic heroes who pursue great enterprises. But the dramatic climax in each ‘tale’ is achieved, in my view, by matching the male protagonist with a female counterpart of equal weight who, though she may appear at first as a voiceless companion oppressed by the prevailing patriarchal order, is anything but a compliant subject who would accept her fate without a fight. Some would argue that in The Turkish Tales “the passive woman dies easily”. 2 Yet, reading through the Tales we see that these women are not at all passive: They voice their desires; they actively pursue happiness and demand their share of it from the male hero. Indeed, they die just because they are not passive, just because they challenge the patriarchal order. If the Romantic heroines that preceded the Tales are all women who are totally dependent on their brave and self-assured male counterparts, the new female protagonists are given their own independent voices. Though Leila in The Giaour (published in 1813) is portrayed as a passive figure with no clear individual voice, when in disguise – as a Georgian page – she actively pursues her passion and sheds the chains of social restrictions. 3 Structurally, she resembles Francesca, who in The Siege of Corinth, the last tale, talks only as a vision, an illusion, and thus transforms the Tales in a chiasm: Leila and Francesca open and close the series; and Zuleika, Medora and Gulnare are in the middle: Each of them is a new stage in the process of establishing a new female order. In The Bride of Abydos and in The Corsair the heroines claim more and more space in the text and begin to assert their will, which does not necessarily coincide with that of their lovers’. Soon after giving voice to their desires, the two women share a similar fate: both end up dying of broken heart, because without the Byronic hero at their side there can be only death and silence. Speech – or the heroines’ ability to express themselves through words – is dependent on the presence of male counterparts: in their absence they grow silent and die. However, the opposite is also true: the Byronic hero exists only in relation to a female figure. Her voice, speech and songs are as essential to the hero’s own being. Consequently, the heroine’s silence and death lead to death (Selim), exile (Conrad) or death-in-life (the Giaour). In a passionate outburst, though carefully constructed according to rhetorical rules, Zuleika asserts her right to love Selim and to her own language. Medora, whose song stirs Conrad’s heart, prepares for a reversal of roles and triggers Conrad’s crisis. In the same tale, Gulnare, by taking her destiny into her own hands and killing Seyd, establishes herself as a possible substitute for Conrad. In her we find both male and female prerogatives: she is both beautiful and sweet, yet cruel and violent. She succeeds in giving rhetorical justification to her acts through a passionate and shrewd oratory. In so doing she upstages the Byronian corsair, not only in deeds but in words as well. Gulnare/Kaled in the fourth tale, Lara, brings to completion the fusion of male and female roles. In the last tale, The Siege of Corinth, the protagonist becomes herself a work of art, a symbol of beauty and innocence of unearthly quality. Her last speech, as a vision, transforms her into sheer poetry. We can safely argue, then, that although initially the female figure is characterized by absence, silence and immobility, she soon demonstrates her ability to construct what is defined by classical rhetoric as an “ideal speech.” Indeed, an ideal speech is based on certain arguments which possess “an inherently 1: Robert Gleckner, Byron and the Ruins of Paradise, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press 1967 p.138. 2: Malcom Kelsall, “Byron and the Romantic Heroine”, in Byron: Augustan and Romantic, Andrew Rutherford (ed.) London: Macmillan, 1992. 3: Indeed she is associated with silence, immobility and death. She is defined by her absence (“Leila there no longer dwell”), by being not a body you can touch but a pure form of “light and life”.