In this sentence, the proper name ‘Amish’ is signified by the clothes they wear, and the lack of questioning of their lifestyle by outsiders. “The Amish act and the clothes served her well and no one seemed to question that I might be an abused.” (42). Early on in the book, our cognitive dissonance about the Amish is summarized in a section about the general public’s failure to stop Griffin’s mother’s abuse. A proper name that is signified around in Tears of Silenced is, of course, Amish. Silver defines the semic code as functioning “by grouping a number of signifiers”, or words, “around either a proper name, or another signifier which functions temporarily as if it were a proper name,” (251). In the chapter “Re-Writing the Classic Text” in The Subject of Semiotics, Kaja Silverman defines five codes, which “manifest themselves through connotation” and “represent a sort of bridge between texts” (239). We don’t want to believe the structure of Amish society could be perpetuating these awful things, so we have to believe that Griffin is a liar or a discriminator. What we already know about the Amish in our culture clashes with the horrible misogyny and abuse we are witness to in the book, and we cannot reconcile the two. I think this might be due, at least in part, to a cognitive dissonance which we experience when reading this book. Because she blames the society in which “Amish rules outweigh any form of crime” for the abuse she endured and the hands of a few individuals, some members of our group felt that she was being discriminatory and reductive (13). In our group’s conversations about Misty Griffin and her book Tears of the Silenced, there was always an undercurrent of distrust of her story.
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