American Research Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

In the Love of the Nightingale, Timberlake Wertenbaker frequently presents a phenomenon of silence, including both a physical silence represented by Tereus’ cutting down Philomele’s tongue, and a psychological silence shown in the incommunicability between Niobe and Philomele, as well as that between Female Chorus and Procne. This latter psychological silence, when given the author’s complicated cultural identity and through the frame of postcolonial theory, will offer a deeper reading of Wertenbaker’s concept of “silence”, not female’s silence based on gender perspective only, but the act of silencing in general, including the enforced silence of the colonized by colonizer and that of a “barbarian” culture by a civilized and logical culture.