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

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

Jane Eyre begins with Jane's exclusion from the very sort of domestic speech community that Dickens offered as the imaginary scene of his own narration: "Eliza, John, and Georgiana were now clustered round their mama in the drawing-room: she lay reclined on a sofa by the fire-side, and with her darlings about her" (7). With children "clustered round their mama" like satellites around a planet, the Reeds embody an inviting possibility of domestic unity. Appearing in the first page of a Victorian novel, the scene clearly represents an idealized tableau of narrative's reception. In order to understand that what Jane is being excluded from is the use of language as the vehicle of familial affect, one must bring to this scene the insistent Victorian connection between domesticity and narrative. "Be seated somewhere," Mrs. Reed commands her, "and until you can speak pleasantly, remain silent" (8). Those who associate speech with personal fulfillment would have to take this injunction as a wholly negative blockage of all that someone like Jane might desire: self-expression and fellowship. But in fact Jane seems to find considerable pleasure in her silent solitude, "shrined in double retirement."

A small breakfast-room adjoined the dining-room: I slipped in there. It contained a book-case: I soon possessed myself of a volume.... Folds of scarlet drapery shut in my view to the right hand; to the left were the clear panes of glass, protecting, but not separating me from the drear November day. (8)

Jane describes herself in terms similar to those with which she describes the book itself. "Contained" in a series of enclosures, protected by a pane of glass, Jane as she reads very much resembles a prized volume. It is in this space of textuality and reading; where the self is understood as a text, I will argue, that Jane finds her greatest satisfaction. Where Kaplan interprets Jane Eyre as a novel charting Jane's progress away from such immersion in books towards the warm presence of speech, what we actually encounter, I believe, is Jane's gradual recognition that happiness was always as close at hand as Bewick's History of British Birds. Through Jane, Bronte demonstrates that female agency derives from the withholding or denial of speech and the silent mastery of language.

As Jane reads, Bronte offers a comparison between book and experience that might support the claim that Bronte sees books as transcriptions of voice, secondary substitutes for the more primary pleasures of speech and storytelling:

Each picture told a story; mysterious often to my undeveloped understanding and imperfect feelings, yet ever profoundly interesting: as interesting as the tales Bessie sometimes narrated on winter evenings, when she chanced to be in good humour; and when, having brought her ironing-table to the nursery hearth, she allowed us to sit about it, and while she got up Mrs. Reed's lace frills, and crimped her nightcap borders, fed our eager attention with passages of love and adventure taken from old fairy tales and older ballads.... (9)