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During the late-Victorian age the aggressive enactment of heteronormative laws forced the systematic silencing of many homosexuals. In the cultural and historical context of the late nineteenth century, the discourses about homosexuality were formulated by both the medico-scientific establishment of the period and the homosexual apologists opposing it. Fin-de-siècle Gothic narratives such as Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray could be read as offering the alternative and silent speech of homosexuality. Through the representation of silence, these literary texts in fact almost reveal a queer rhetorical strategy apparently countering the contemporary medical discourses legitimated by (and legitimating) a male- and hetero-dominated legislation. The characters fear being exposed both for the secret vices they indulge and for their decision to avoid any public scandal by conducting a double life hidden from the inquisitiveness of the contemporary public and the condemnation of the law. Thus Dr. Jekyll and Dorian Gray indirectly represent the lives that many late-Victorian homosexuals were forced to conduct, and particularly their anguish and indecision between liberally experiencing their natural urges and suffocating them because of the dictates and legal restrictions imposed by the surrounding society. Most recent psychoanalytical perspectives on trauma and silence (taking form through the withdrawal of information from public knowledge), demonstrate the mechanisms of unconscious suppression and deliberate denial enacted in these texts.