The Last Runaway

Silence works with and against Honor throughout the novel, as it is closely connected to her role as a woman and wife in 19th-century America. Though she doesn’t particularly care for Jack, for example, she marries him and perpetuates the illusion that she is happily taken, both because it is expected and because she desires the benefits of a marriage. She states, “What made [Jack] most attractive was that he was attracted to her” (137). She lives a secretive existence simply due to her lack of honesty and acknowledgement of her true feelings as a woman fulfilling a gendered expectation.

Though privately opinionated (as communicated via her letters), Honor is a quiet woman who rarely speaks up, even on matters that are important to her. This quietness is a form of both solace and frustration for Honor; though she enjoys how her quietness helps her remain relatively unnoticed in the insular Faithwell community (after her initial interest as a newcomer and later as Jack Haymaker’s new wife fade), she also laments how she feels excluded from those around her and wishes that she could connect with them more fully. When Honor aids those escaping slavery, her quietness serves her. She finds that people do not expect quiet women to participate in political subversion. In one incident, as she and an escaping woman hide in the darkness from Donovan, Honor feels that her capacity for being quiet is so well honed that it transcends sound; she feels like she can erase herself almost entirely.

After she fails to save the injured escapee, however, Honor lapses into complete silence. She ceases speaking for months—something that enormously frustrates her family and community. To the Haymakers, Judith especially, Honor’s silence feels like condemnation for failing to aid the man before he succumbed to his gangrenous injury. To the Faithwell community at large, Honor’s silence marks her as odd and other; they threaten to expel her from the community if she does not resume speaking, indicating the intolerance that remains among a community known for its liberalism. Quakers, this episode suggests, do not tolerate those who do not follow the unspoken rules of the community. Only one relationship improves during Honor’s period of silence: that with her sister-in-law, Dorcas. The novel frames this as ultimately saying more about Dorcas than about Honor’s silence; Dorcas finally feels as though she is not in competition with her brother’s wife when she takes over communicating for both of them. Internally, Honor finds the silence clarifying; without trying to speak, she finally has the freedom to fully experience her feelings in all their complexity. This peace reminds her of the objective of Quaker meetings, when the group falls silent to seek “Inner Light.”

Though the novel thus presents silence as affecting, it does not ultimately alter anything. Honor’s silence does nothing to convince her community that she has, per their wishes, given up her abolitionist work; when Virginie is found in the haybale, Honor’s complicity is assumed. When she resumes speaking, her position in her community remains precarious; she is threatened with expulsion for a new reason. Ultimately, the inner peace she finds through her silence is not as significant to Honor’s trajectory as is the shift she experiences when her daughter, Comfort, is born. Once she becomes a mother, Honor feels more fixed in her life in America and finds the fortitude to decide about her future. The novel is therefore ambivalent about the power of silence, as it is about many of its political viewpoints. Silence, it suggests, can be useful temporarily, even while it may lack political power. Still, Honor’s happiness in being able to completely think for herself and understand her emotions suggests that pressure to conform or declare an opinion on political matters sometimes lead one to miss opportunities for deeper rumination and empathy.