Unuttered: Withheld speech and female authorship in Jane Eyre and Villette

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Summer 1999 by Kreilkamp, Ivan

An Invaluable Storyteller

The metaphor of the author as a speaker, as one who must seek to find his or her "own voice" in writing, is a truism of the creative writing workshop, so thoroughly naturalized by now as to seem timeless. The origins of this metaphor, however-at least as applied to the novel,-that thoroughly un-lyrical genre-can be found in the emergence in the early Victorian period of new practices of authorship. In performing authorship on stage in the 1840s and 50s, such novelists as Thackeray and Dickens associated their writing with presence and speech and forged a metaphorical connection between words on the page and an author's speaking body. This essay argues that Charlotte Bronte's work evaded the new imperative to make fiction speak. Indeed, her writing implicitly argues that the gendered construction of this imperative would force women writers to embody and vocalize their writing just where disembodiment might best serve their interests.1 Through a reading of Bronte's Jane Eyre and Villette, I will argue that Bronte resists the equation of novel-writing with speech in order to develop a more effective means by which women writers might participate in the public print sphere and attain the "full reward" of professional success in its terms. I also want to suggest that it is an irony of literary-critical history that the very link between writing and speech that Bronte resisted as an unwanted imposition of masculine authorship has become a tenet of modem liberal feminism. Bronte herself worked to disassociate her work from a Victorian mythology of vocal writing, yet a certain tradition of feminist criticism has adapted that myth for its own purposes and turned Bronte into the model of a female author who triumphantly finds her own "voice" in writing.

I argue, against such readings, that Bronte rejects a model of authorship based on voice and embodied personality in favor of one based on the material possibilities of print.2 But I do not wish to be misunderstood as locating Bronte, all too familiarly, on the side of a privacy that contrasts her work with that of her brasher male counterparts, Thackeray and Dickens. To suggest that Bronte rejects a public voice for a more withdrawn style of writing immediately generates familiar images of the female author confined to the recesses of heart and home. The kind of authorship I have in mind is not only withdrawn but also anonymous, or at least impersonal, with nothing spontaneous about it. What is more, this authorship self-consciously addresses a mass readership, a readership imaginable only as a necessarily abstract collection of readers dispersed throughout an expansive public sphere. In Bronte's work, the interiority of writing therefore provides the means of a new form of publicity-a publicity obtained without showing one's face or raising one's voice.

Although we are not accustomed to think of Bronte as the successor to Walter Scott, Ian Duncan's observations about Scott's fiction apply usefully to her work as well. Duncan observes "a lack of 'voice"' in Scott's writing, which "displays its character as composition rather than inspired invention" (93). Rather than being "the powerful sign of a personality," such writing should be understood as "a professional, institutional language, administrative and legal and academic" (94). "If Scott's mother was his personal source of romance, of a nourishing domestic culture of memory and voice," Duncan continues, "the father whose name he bore was the Writer" (94). To apply such characterizations to Bronte's fiction runs against the grain of a critical tradition that has consistently thought of her fiction as just such a "powerful sign of a personality" and as "voice." I want to insist that to define Bronte as the creator of "professional ... language" is not, as Duncan's dichotomy might suggest, to remove her from female authorship and reassign her to a masculine Writing; it is instead to recognize that Bronte works powerfully toward developing a paradigm of professional writing in the service of women.

Bronte's fiction registers the formation of a newly abstract readership or national print sphere. It does so, I am suggesting, by means of writing that is disembodied and impersonal and yet able to address a mass audience. Thackeray and Dickens performed their work on stage as if to say that fiction published for a mass audience was really not that different from the vocal utterances of storytellers, men present to an audience gathered in one place. Bronte emphatically rejects such a model for novel-writing. Instead, she offers fiction that denies the connection between the words on a page and an embodied voice. She suggests that writing that renounces the fiction of the storyteller will reach a mass readership more effectively. Bronte published her first novels under a pseudonym, and her career as Currer Bell is generally regarded as a phase she passed through on the way to full authorship, an unfortunate moment of self-concealment required by the sexism of the Victorian literary marketplace. Only one critic, Sharon Marcus, contends that Bronte and her protagonist Jane Eyre gain the power of authorship by "abstracting" themselves into signs (such as the initials "J.E." and the pseudonym) bearing social power within a modern print culture (213-217).3 In the place of the warmth, simultaneous experience and personal charisma associated with the figure of the storyteller, Bronte offers her readership the gifts of a professional writer: the exercise of good taste, strong interpretation, and physical disembodiment.