"Till You Hear Me!": Sonic Suffering in Ellen Wood's East Lynne

By centering its analysis on such textual elements as point-of-view, focalization, and semantics, narratology often trains readers to approach narrative with their eyes. I suggest that this visual approach to narrative has obscured the aurality of the Victorian novel. Using Ellen Wood's East Lynne (1861) as a model text, this article demonstrates how a sonic narrative approach enables the reader to hear what cannot be seen in the Victorian novel. I argue that Wood uses sound to represent the graphic experiences of Victorian women's lives that often remain unseen in nineteenth-century fiction, including sex, pregnancy, postpartum depression, and childbirth. Through Isabel Carlyle's sonic suffering, East Lynne teaches us to read with our ears rather than our eyes.