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

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

Their mistaken investment in the idea of novel-writing as storytelling is what allows critics to overlook how sharply Bronte rejected the storyteller paradigm established by male authors. This mistake was encouraged early on, when Elizabeth Gaskell described Charlotte Bronte's relationship with her schoolmates as that of

an invaluable storyteller, frightening them almost out of their wits as they lay in bed. On one occasion the effect was such that she was led to scream out loud, and Miss Wooler, coming upstairs, found that one of the listeners had been seized with violent palpitations, in consequence of the excitement produced by Charlotte's story. (133)

Such an account implies that the roots of Bronte's novels lie in a storytelling practice associated with audible screams and palpitations. Bronte criticism has taken its cue from Gaskell by consistently linking her authorship with storytelling and speech. But it is too hasty, I would respond, to presume that Bronte's purported childhood model of telling stories to an "audience" of friends continued to provide the adult novelist with her method.4

Indeed, I would suggest, such criticism participates in the very logic that Bronte's writing powerfully questions. Even Carla Kaplan's recent critique of this critical tendency ultimately returns to a similar, if updated, conflation of Bronte's writing with her speech. Kaplan's attention to the significance of voice in Jane Eyre ingeniously rescues us from a taken-for-granted understanding of Bronte as producing novelistic "inwardness" and privacy. Kaplan problematizes Jane's yearning for conversation with an equal partner by pointing out that contemporary critics imagine themselves to be the conversational partners Jane desires. "With the childhood declaration, `Speak I must' Jane resolves to narrate her own story, to explain and vindicate her life, to exercise her voice and participate in the 'joyous conversational murmur"' (5), Kaplan begins her essay. Her analysis of Jane Eyre as a developing romance of conversation convincingly links the novel's beginning and conclusion into a coherent telos. There is no denying that Jane, having declared her desire to "speak" in a context where her speech seems to be either ignored or forcibly repressed, continues to seek the opportunity to exercise her voice throughout the novel. When she explains, "we talk, I believe, all day long" (475) at the novel's end, she provides an utterly satisfying conclusion for readers who have learned to long, with Jane, for fulfilling conversation and speech: a satisfying conclusion, at least, for readers who have deeply internalized the equation between unfettered, expressive speech and self-fulfillment.

But Kaplan errs, I believe, in then declaring that this "story of ... [Jane's] own longing to talk" is also-and is equivalent to- `the story of the growth of a writer, someone who can extend the gesture-or invitation, if you will-of her own, assured voice to an unknown and unpredictable other (the reader)" (9). Bronte, as I will argue, indicates that a woman must abandon the conceit that authorship is equivalent to speaking if she wants to exercise the social power of an author. Indeed, Bronte suggests that "the story of the growth of a writer" entails the abandonment of a fantasy of speech as self-expression and a rejection of the identification of the author with an embodied voice.