This article attempts to interrogate the ways in which silence, as demonstrated in the works of Witold Gombrowicz and J.M. Coetzee, is staged to undo the instrumentalising narrative tactics that are oppressive to female characters. The first part of the article discusses the fictional representations of female silence in the fictional works of both authors in general, while the second part offers a close comparative reading of the play Princess Ivona (1958) by Witold Gombrowicz and the novel Disgrace (1999) by J.M. Coetzee with an eye to tracing the extent to which the ethics of feminine silence serves to offset the oppressive effects of male-dominated narratives. The paper ends with a reading of the works under discussion via the lens of the philosophical and ethical concepts of the Dutch philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard.