SOURCE: “Resistant Silence, Resistant Subject: (Re)Reading Gayl Jones's Eva's Man,” in Bodies of Writing, Bodies in Performance, edited by Thomas Foster, Carol Siegal, and Ellen E. Berry, New York University Press, 1996, pp. 72-96.

In the following essay, Wilcox, a professor at Washington State University, applies Michel Foucault’s theories on discourse to analyze Jones's use of silence in Eva's Man.

In an interview conducted in the spring of 1975, just after the publication of Gayl Jones's first novel, Corregidora, Michael S. Harper asks Jones if any of her work was autobiographical. Jones responds with an acknowledgment that despite her use of first-person narration, none of her writing was “strictly autobiographical.” She names one story as a slight exception: “‘The Welfare Check’ is only in terms of the Woman's being like me.”¹ Jones elaborates further on the function of the narrator of the story and the purpose the story...