With no outlets for self-expression, Messina’s protagonists necessarily lead intense inner lives. Dreams of marriage and motherhood, the only socially sanctioned avenues open for self-realization, are fueled by repressed or unfulfilled emotional and physical desires. When such hopes fail to materialize or when they are thwarted by the actions of others, these women face the terrifying prospect of spinsterhood, with its endless succession of days and excruciating routine. Time, which “changes the color of things,” transforms them, cruelly leaving their “virgin hearts intact.”

The degree to which Messina’s protagonists internalize behavioral expectations also manifests itself in their unfailing, at times baffling, silences and is stylistically rendered in narratives that are riddled with ellipses, unfinished sentences, and internal monologues. Clearly, Messina had learned her lessons well from the exacting Verga, an author who insisted that all writers create for themselves a language perfectly suitable to the world of their characters. Drawing on her experience as well as on her careful observations of daily life as it unfolded within her own class, Messina settles on the language of silence, as the absence of any meaningful voice was the most accurate measure of Sicilian female existence (Barbarulli and Brandi 1996).

This persistent social aphasia afflicts all Messina’s protagonists and finds its highest expression in the character Ciancianedda, a young girl who has literally lost her voice. Struck by a mysterious fever that has left her unable to speak or hear, Ciancianedda inhabits a world bound by fearful silences. The freedom she enjoyed as a child, epitomized in her unfettered singing, stands juxtaposed to the “leaden silence that weighs heavily on her heart and ears” once she has entered the world of female adulthood. Unable to articulate the feelings she longs to express (“the words were suffocating her”) and equally shut out from any reciprocity (“nothing linked two creatures together like the spoken word”), the betrayed Ciancianedda is reduced to observing life from behind the grate of her closed door, left to wonder, like Vanna, “if there is a place in the world” for her.