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

paradigm of voice. I wish to suggest an alternate paradigm that suggests ways in which Their Eyes Were Watching God is a text concerned with the tensions arising from Hurston's position as writer in relation to the folk as community that she produces in her writing" (176, emphasis

3 I am indebted to Marcus's analysis of advertising, "abstraction," and writing in Jane Eyre.

4 Indeed, we should not be too quick to follow Gaskell's lead and link even Bronte's juvenile mode of textual production to oral storytelling, but should remember that the Angrian sagas were utterly written. in forms as divorced from speech as mock-newspapers.

5 Cohen notes that what interests English linguists of the late eighteenth century, as opposed to their predecessors earlier in the century, "is the ability to communicate through speech.... These men share a conception of language in terms of speakers and listeners and a commitment to the priority of the oral over the visual" (118-119), the spoken over the written. The "optic form of the letter"-the visually-perceived shape of writing-is repressed or defined as a secondary imitation of speech; the Mother's Mouth is defined instead as the source of language. The newly standardized national languages marked a sharp break from earlier methods of language acquisition, imposing instead new state-sponsored systems of education: fundamentally, bureaucratic writing systems. Yet these systems produced an imaginary conception of language as orality. A "new scientific study of the language" first emerging in England in the late eighteenth century, Cohen writes, "begins with sounds and uses comprehensive phonological descriptions as the secure basis for a thorough-going linguistics" (111).

6 Freeman argues that only at this moment does Jane fully attain control over her own language: "as she comes to understand the power of human utterance to represent human reality, so she is enabled to tell her life, to say to us, in effect, listen to my words, Reader-for the truth is in them" (699). Bodenheimer offers a reading similar to Freeman's. Joan Peters nuances Freeman's and Bodenheimer's readings in asserting that Jane's progress and the novel's are not the same but are parallel: "Just as Jane, the character, struggles psychologically and rhetorically to establish her own best voice as an individual ... so the narrative itself acts out textually the separate struggle ... of both the character s and narrative's to be in Bronte's view a 'womans voice"' (219). Kaplan criticizes all of these interpretations and suggests instead that "Insofar as ... [Jane's] refusal to tell Rochester her story tempers the bliss of their reconciliation, Bronte is able to suggest that patriarchal, Victorian, British culture cannot provide complete fulfillment or satisfaction for a woman such as Jane" (20). Kaplan leaves intact, that is, the assumption that complete speech with a receptive listener would, ideally, represent an absolute fulfillment.

7 Griffiths makes a similar point about Tennyson in his analysis of the poet's use of the trope of "apophasis," defined in Renaissance rhetoric as "a kind of irony, a denial or refusal to speak ... when in fact we speak and tell all" (100). "Out of the death of the voice," Griffiths argues regarding Tennyson, "a new body of significance can be made to arise" (102). Griffiths argues elsewhere in his book that "in literature shaped by the printing-press, writer and reader do not 'properly' face each other. But this sense of a lost community, felt as a form of death by some writers, is the germ of a new community and a new life" (61). Griffiths's argument in this sense closely resembles the one I am making about Bronte, although it seems to me that Griffiths nonetheless falls prey to an idealization of voice in his presumption that-in poetry, at least"the reader must inform writing with a sense of the writer it calls up-an ideal body, a plausible voice" (60).