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

Lucy writes that M. Paul's ship, returning home to her from the West Indies after three years, was caught in a terrible storm; she describes her longing for him in terms of a desire- which must be denied-to hear his voice again.

Peace, be still! Oh! a thousand weepers, praying in agony on waiting shores, listened for that voice, but it was not uttered-not uttered till, when the hush came, some could not feel it: till, when the sun returned, his light was night to some. (617)

Suggesting a mass audience waiting eagerly for speech, those "thousand weepers" invoke Bronte's own readership, all too prone to sentimentalize print as a kind of voice.16 She pointedly disappoints any reader who hopes to locate a voice within or between the lines. "Here pause: pause at once," Lucy continues. "There is enough said" (617). Like Jane "keep[ing] these things" in her "heart," Lucy withholds speech and information, refusing to reveal whether M. Paul survived. Of all the suppressions of the physical body in Villette, the final disappearance of M. Paul is the most radical. Denied the privilege of a return and burial, he simply vanishes from the text.

What do we make of Bronte's deliberate disfiguration of the traditional conclusion of a domestic novel? In withholding gratification, I want to suggest, she generates prestige; in a culture given to confession and vocal expression, one attains a particular value by refusing to divulge. It is noteworthy that, while Jane Eyre ends with its protagonist finally ruling a household as a mother, Villette concludes with Lucy presiding over a "house" devoted to professional duties: "My school flourishes, my house is ready" (616). If Jane Eyre triumphantly reveals the potential for language to create value, a new kind of interiority, and even love out of writing read by a mass audience, Villette offers a more sober lesson. This later novel suggests that emotional "reward" and cultural value can only be created out of professional work and speech withheld. Bronte dismisses the possibility of romance and vocal expression in order to offer, as compensation, the satisfactions of writing and intellectual labor.17

1 In a discussion of the Victorian author's ascent to the platforms of public lectures and readings, Collins includes Bronte among those Victorian women writers whose "sex would have kept them off such platforms, even had they no other disadvantages in terms of physique, temperament, and social position" (9). Collins is absolutely correct to note that a career of reading on stage was unavailable to a woman writer, although he too casually presents this prohibition as an incidental detail, rather than as a constitutive factor in the Victorian literary marketplace. In the Victorian era, vocalization of novel-writing was never gender-neutral.

2 For an example of a similar attempt to shift the terms of debate regarding an author who has been central to feminist criticism away from a "paradigm of voice," see Carby on Zora Neale Hurston: "[B]oth sides of this debate about the speaking or silent subject exist within the same