Download or read book Silence and Rage in Miriam Toews’s Mennonite Novels written by Rita Dirks and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2024-04-17 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on six of Miriam Toews’s Mennonite novels—Swing Low: A Life (2000), A Complicated Kindness (2004), Irma Voth (2011), All My Puny Sorrows (2014), Women Talking (2018), and Fight Night (2021)—, so called because they portray fictional and autobiographical events, set in Mennonite communities in Canada, Mexico, and Bolivia. Rita Dirks argues that through the exploration of difficult subjects such as the physical and emotional abuse of teenaged girls, women, and children , Toews gives a voice to victims and survivors who are otherwise silenced in that sequestered culture. In addition, Dirks shows that in the Mennonite novels, Toews’s rage at the injustices experienced by her protagonists becomes a transformative art that gives a voice to all stories, especially those of women within authoritative patriarchal communities that openly proclaim pacifism.