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

Lucy's professional success derives from her recognition that knowledge and effective language are to be found not "in the head," but outside the self, in books; not in spontaneous speech, but in "laboriously constructed" writing.

One of Villette's central interpretive problems concerns the question of Lucy's reliability as a narrator, and specifically the problem of how to interpret her various lapses in full disclosure. The most striking of such reticences is Lucy's eventual revelation that she recognized "Dr. John" as her childhood acquaintance Graham Bretton long before the novel's readers are made privy to this identification. The passage in which she explains her failure to speak up to Graham himself-and, implicitly, to the novel's readers as well-offers a striking demonstration of Lucy's identification with the principle of writing, writing as a withholding of speech and self-nomination:

To say anything on the subject, to hint at my discovery, had not suited my habits of thought, or assimilated with my system of feeling. On the contrary, I had preferred to keep the matter to myself....

Well I knew that to him it could make little difference were I to come forward and announce, "This is Lucy Snowe!" So I kept back in my teacher's place; and as he never asked my name, so I never gave it. (219-220)

Explaining to her reader, "I had preferred to keep the matter to myself," Lucy sounds very much like Jane Eyre, who comments, "I listened to Mr. Rochester's narrative; but made no disclosure in return.... I kept these things, then, and pondered them in my heart." One does not achieve authority through verbal exchange, Bronte suggests, but by "keep[ing]" language in that peculiarly private/public domain of print. Bronte here establishes a protocol of narrative that refuses "to say anything," to "come forward" to identify oneself as a personality linked to voice. Bronte's text demands to be read as writing rather than conversation or confession. It knows that the audience it may reach will never be knowable as a speech partner, but can only be anticipated as the eventual reward for valuable texts: prestige, financial payment, the positive balance of authorship as a material practice of writing.

Lucy's failure to identify herself to Dr. John gets interpreted by most critics as some version of self-doubt, so that the declaration that "it could make little difference were I to come forward and announce, 'This is Lucy Snowe!"' seems selfabnegation, insufficient self-regard, erotic passivity. When open and free conversation with an equal partner is regarded as the text's utopia, then to fail to introduce oneself by name must represent a painful suppression of speech's pleasure principle. One might alternately, however, read Villette as offering Bronte's analysis of the situation of writing and print in mid-century England. In this culture, she suggests, prestige, power and reward-professional advancement-follow most effectively not from assertions of personal identity and erotic or vocal charisma but from mastery of the flow of print and information.10 It is this mastery of texts that both Lucy-and arguably, Bronte herself-attain through Villette.11