Muted Voices and Oppressed Bodies: An Intersectional Feminist Reading of Gendered Violence in Harold Pinter’s Mountain Language

Abstract

This study investigates Harold Pinter’s play Mountain Language in a feminist and intersectional context to discover how the text demonstrates gendered violence, silencing, and organizing violence. This study's main argument is that language and suppression of language are a means of control, along with the fact that gender plays a significant role in identifying how the various individuals are victimized. Utilizing Judith Butler, bell hooks, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak as my frameworks, I interrogate Pinter’s performance text as an intersectional consideration in which class, ethnicity, language, and sex all intersect and layer different forms of violence and oppression. Pinter's performance investigates an engagement with how bodies are gendered and racialized by state power while also showing how silence can be used for oppression, yet can also be understood as a means of resistance, paradoxically. Methodologically, the study employs close reading and textual analysis in order to examine the gender dynamics at play within Pinter’s dramatic style. It discusses the play’s spare language and disconnected dialogue in order to demonstrate how linguistic disempowerment operates on stage, highlighting the invisibility of women's suffering within a patriarchal, militarized context. In the end, this study ultimately argues that Mountain Language is not simply a representation of authoritarianism: it is a performance of it. By silencing its characters, especially the women, the play places the audience in a position of complicity in this act of erasure, compelling them to acknowledge their role in systems that line themselves up with the silencing of others.