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Unuttered: Withheld speech and female authorship in Jane Eyre and Villette
Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Summer 1999 by Kreilkamp, Ivan
I have described two tropes as central to Villette's anti-vocal narrative: the disinclination to "speak up,' and the removal of bodies to create a space for pure textuality. Both tropes recur in the scene where M. Paul reads aloud to his students. Elizabeth Gaskell claimed this scene was based directly on Bronte's own experience, at a Thackeray lecture, of finding unwanted public attention directed at her ("Shakespeare" 242). Bronte describes M. Paul as, in effect, reversing the logic of Lucy's triumph in the classroom, as he intrudes "a l'improviste" on a scene of silent study and reads aloud. "It was his occasional custom ... to arrive of an evening, always a l'improviste, unannounced, burst in on the silent hour of study, [and] ... cause books to be put away" (412). Bronte depicts M. Paul's intrusion as the displacement of silent reading with "some tragedy made grand by grand reading, ardent by fiery action.... [H]e would ... show us a glimpse of the current literature of the day, read us passages from some enchanting tale, or the last witty feuilleton which had awakened laughter in the saloons of Paris" (412413). His reading is a vocalization of previous vocalizations, a performance of texts that have been given value by previous public utterance. His entrance to the classroom produces a community around speech: "We heard the sharp bell-peal which we all knew; then the rapid step familiar to each ear: the words 'Voila Monsieur!' had scarcely broken simultaneously from every lip, when ... he stood in the midst of us" (413). A series of shared aural perceptions signal the experience of an impossible, simultaneous communal utterance, as a phrase breaks "from every lip," heralding the presence of a utopian speech community truly speaking and listening together, as in one voice. M. Paul may here be understood to embody the Thackerayian author, a storyteller whose heterogeneous texts become, in speaking out loud, a single, unified voice capable of transforming a mass of individuals into a single audience, a "community of speech where all the members are within earshot" (Derrida 136): "we all," "us."
Thus it is Lucy who becomes the discordant element in this community, when her non-participation gives the lie to the illusion of a voice that speaks to and from everyone. As M. Paul sits down beside her, she "swept away my working materials, to clear space for his book, and withdrew myself, to make room for his person" (414). Insulted by Lucy's disinclination to sit close to him as he reads, M. Paul vengefully gathers all the girls to sit at a different table and sits himself, in mockery, at the opposite end of the long bench from her. "As for me," she comments, "I took it with entire coolness. There I sat, isolated and cut off from human intercourse; I sat and minded my work, and was quiet, and not at all unhappy" (415). This scene brings to mind Thackeray's daughter's description of what one guest described as "one of the dullest evenings she had ever spent in her life," a party thrown for Bronte in London by Thackeray: "It was a gloomy and silent evening. Every one waited for the brilliant conversation which never began at all. Miss Bronte retired to the sofa in the study and murmured a low word now and then to our kind governess.... [F]finally, overwhelmed by the situation, my father had quietly left the room, left the house, and gone on to his club" ("Shakespeare" 49-50). Apparently like Bronte herself, Lucy takes pleasure in "retiring," and frustrating a male authority figure's expectations for speech.13
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