Abstract
This chapter examines two novels which consolidated Tremain’s reputation as a historical novelist: Music and Silence set in seventeenth-century Denmark and The Colour set in nineteenth-century New Zealand. The two novels distinguish themselves from Restoration through their use of polyphony and magic realism. Music and Silence allows Tremain to make the silenced voices of women heard. She dramatizes the historical marginalization of women through figures of servants, widows and divorcées. She also resorts to fairy tale motifs and types to question gender and socialization. The Colour is a Neo-Victorian tale of female emancipation set against the backdrop of New Zealand colonization. It uses Victorian landscape depiction and magic realist parallel worlds to display the characters’ conflicting world views about land, home and self.
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Walezak, E. (2017). Historical ‘Terrains’: Music and Silence and The Colour . In: Rose Tremain. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57129-4_7
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