Fairy Tales of Silence, Speech, and Return
Copyright © 2026 by Lois E. Wilkins, PhD, APRN
All rights reserved.
There are mornings when the body announces something before the mind has had time to consider it. Recently, I awakened and discovered that my voice was almost entirely gone. I had been ill, so there was an obvious explanation, yet as I moved through the strange quiet of the morning, another possibility began to interest me. Perhaps the body sometimes enters an image before we understand that we are living inside one.
I had been using my voice a great deal, although not always through speaking. Words had been moving outward through teaching and conversation, through essays and journals, through stories and novels, and through the peculiar act of standing before other people and giving breath to something that had previously existed only upon the page. There are seasons when language seems determined to enter the world, and I had been living through one of them. Perhaps that is why the sudden absence of my literal voice felt less like an interruption and more like an image asking to be noticed.
Fairy tales know a great deal about voices that disappear, although they do not always imagine silence as emptiness. In The Six Swans, a young woman must remain silent for years while undertaking the nearly impossible work of freeing her brothers from enchantment. During those years, she gathers nettles, spins them into thread, and makes the shirts that will restore her brothers to human form. Her silence does not mean that nothing is happening. Quite the opposite, because while her voice remains quiet, her hands are engaged in the most consequential work of her life.
There is something important here because we tend to imagine expression as something audible. We speak, announce, explain, teach, answer, and make ourselves understood, yet the psyche has never confined voice to the throat. Hands have voices, just as images and dreams have voices, and a sentence written alone at a desk may travel farther than anything we have ever spoken aloud.
The sister in The Six Swans continues weaving, and I find myself returning to that image because weaving has always belonged to the old stories. Threads are gathered, crossed, knotted, loosened, and joined until something that did not previously exist begins to take form. Writing is not so different. A word joins another word, an image calls forth another image, and slowly something capable of traveling beyond us comes into being. The mouth may be silent while the weaving continues.
The Little Mermaid offers a more painful image because she surrenders her voice in order to cross from one world into another. Her beautiful voice has been part of her identity, and its loss accompanies transformation. I have never been able to read that bargain simply as romantic sacrifice. Something more complicated happens whenever we cross a threshold and discover that the language belonging to one world cannot accompany us unchanged into another.
Yet there is an important difference between a voice that has been taken away and a voice that has been deeply used. One suggests deprivation, while the other may sometimes suggest expenditure. A singer finishes a performance and rests the instrument. A teacher leaves a room after hours of speaking and seeks quiet. A writer sends words outward and then sits before the blank page again. Breath itself knows this rhythm because every movement outward eventually requires a movement inward. No exhalation can continue indefinitely because the lungs must fill again.
The Goose Girl carries the image somewhere else. The young woman knows the truth of what has happened to her, but she cannot tell it where ordinary human beings might hear. Eventually she is instructed to speak her sorrow into an iron stove, and I love the strangeness of this image because the stove does not advise her. It does not interrupt, interpret, reassure, or correct. It simply receives what she cannot say elsewhere, allowing the truth to find a vessel.
Perhaps this is what human beings have always done when ordinary speech becomes impossible. We find another container. We write in journals, make poems, paint, carve, dream, and tell stories in which a princess, a swan, a horse, a stove, or a mouse carries something we cannot yet say directly. The voice has not disappeared so much as changed vessels.
I suspect Kevin has known this all along because mice live close to walls and thresholds, and Kevin has never required a podium. He carries stories through hidden passages, moving between rooms without belonging entirely to either one. He knows that a story can remain alive for generations without anyone standing before an audience to announce it. Sometimes a barn remembers what people have forgotten, sometimes a mouse carries the memory, and sometimes the story waits quietly until someone is ready to hear it.
A novel knows something about this kind of silence as well. For months or years it may grow without making a sound. Characters begin speaking inside the writer long before anyone else can hear them. Images arrive without explanation. Pages accumulate. Sentences are written, discarded, recovered, and rewritten until one day the manuscript leaves the room in which it was created and begins traveling toward other rooms and other minds. Nothing audible has happened, yet a voice has entered the world.
This returns me to the silent sister and her nettles because she does not spend those years waiting for her voice to return. She works. Her silence and her work belong to the same task. She gathers what initially wounds the hand and transforms it into something capable of restoring what has been lost. The nettle does not cease being a nettle, but through attention, endurance, and craft, its nature is changed.
There may be times when our own silence asks something similar of us. After words have been spoken, written, taught, offered, published, and sent outward, perhaps there comes an interval when language needs to stop at the threshold. Not because there is nothing more to say, but because something is gathering again, and the body may understand this rhythm before consciousness does.
I think here of Sleeping Beauty and the sleeping kingdom. Her hundred years cannot be shortened simply because someone has grown impatient with the silence. The castle remains enclosed until the appointed time, and then the briars that once prevented entry open into flowers. What appeared to be an ending reveals itself as an interval, suggesting that voice, too, may have its own seasons of enclosure.
There are times for speaking and times for listening, times for sending words into the world and times for allowing them to gather somewhere beneath language. Silence need not always mean absence, suppression, or retreat. Sometimes it may be the inward movement that makes another outward movement possible.
Kevin would probably be comfortable there because he has always known that the most important things do not necessarily announce themselves. I imagine him disappearing into the wall while the silent sister continues her weaving, passing through some narrow hidden corridor where stories wait between one telling and the next. He would not be worried by the quiet because mice know how much life occurs inside walls.
Perhaps that is what fairy tales are reminding us. The voice has more than one home. It can live in the throat, but it can also live in the hand, the dream, the image, the page, the story, and the attentive silence from which the next words eventually emerge. For now, there may be nothing to do but listen, because somewhere inside the walls, the next words may already be forming.