Jean Rivard - University of British Columbia

Heroines
specifically on the need to include all voices, to suppress none. Beynon uses
her central character to urge those who would be silenced to speak against
their oppression, stressing in Aleta Dey (1919) that any woman who dares
speak against the dominant culture's wartime ideologies must be fearless. In
documenting the difficulties a woman faces in finding her public voice,
Beynon's Aleta reflects a woman's quandary in any era, but the wartime climate
is more intimidating and exacerbates her character's dilemma. At the
outset, Beynon illustrates the conditions which force women into passive
submission to authority, and then establishes the types of barriers a woman
encounters should she wish to speak her peace in wartime.
Aleta's induction into cowardice begins in early childhood. In each institution
she encounters—the family, the church, the school—she identifies
inconsistencies or ambiguities in its teachers, but when she asks for clarification,
she finds her questions ridiculed. Like bell hooks, who writes of her
own silence and oppression as a woman in Talking Back, Aleta is "always
saying the wrong thing, asking the wrong questions" (hooks 6), and, like
hooks, her childhood is characterized by "intense confusion and deep anxiety"
(hooks 7). [H]ooks claims that those who get on well in patriarchal
society acquiesce; they speak, but "talk a talk that [i]s in itself a silence" (7).
In Aleta Dey, Beynon makes a similar charge. Aleta's friend and sister are
what Belenky et al. term "silent women," girls who see authority figures as
all-powerful, all-knowing, and submit blindly to their instruction (27-28). 13
Unlike Aleta, they keep out of trouble by adhering unquestioningly to the
directives of the masters.
The authority figures in Beynon's text (teachers, preachers, fathers) think
exclusively in black/white, right/wrong terms; unable to rationalize their
positions intellectually, they demand utter obedience from their charges,
and either verbally humiliate or physically beat transgressors like Aleta into
silence. As a result of the severe punishment she suffers at the hands of
patriarchal figures, especially her violent father, Aleta's confidence in her
ability to think and speak is shaken; even as a mature journalist who knows
how to use words, she stills her own voice, and allows others' to hold sway.
Uncomfortable in her silence, often seething inwardly at others' irrationality,
especially during the war, she remains deaf and dumb, a "coward" who
adopts a "wait and see" attitude towards life.
To date, articles on Beynon have centered primarily on the anti-war views
which she expressed while a journalist for the Grain Growers' Guide, but