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

8 See Litvak 75-107 on Villette and theatricality. On the representation of Rachel Felix in Villette and other Victorian novels, see Stokes.

9 Also see Lawrence, who focuses on Lucy's reticence and her self-representation as a "cipher;' and Dames, who observes the numerous failures of traditional desire in Villette and concludes that "antagonism and frustration in the novel are signs of desire" (386).

10 On the development of a Victorian information culture, see Richards.

11 My arguments here and throughout are informed by Gallagher's analysis of the links between female authorship, anonymity, and the rise of the novel. Gallagher calls for a criticism that will "concentrate on the elusiveness of .., authors, instead of bemoaning it and searching for their positive identities"(xviii).

12 It is worth noting that in the passage I cite from Derrida, he is specifically criticizing this definition of writing as a dispersal of presence, a definition he sees as typical of Western metaphysics. I see Bronte as to some degree implicated in what Derrida sees as a mystified understanding of writing as governed by principles of veiling, hiding, dispersal of presence. Yet where, in Derrida's argument, such writers as Rousseau and Levi-Strauss define writing as damagingly breaking presence, introducing discord into scenes of otherwise harmonious presence in speech, Bronte embraces the potential of writing to dispel any illusion of collective presence.

13 Villette contains another scene depicting a wholly positive depiction of reading aloud-very different from the scene I analyze above-as M. Paul reads to Lucy and the girls in the countryside: "Well could he narrate: in such a diction as children love, and learned men

emulate; a diction simple in its strength, and strong in its simplicity" (477). Following his performance, M. Paul alludes to the future possibility-"some day"-of Lucy performing a similar role for him as that Jane performs for Rochester at the end of Jane Eyre: "I could dictate ... with pleasure to an amanuensis who suited me" (478). I would argue that this momentary idyll of social, communal vocal reading is significantly anomalous and utopian in the novel, a passing imagination of some social possibility not to be implemented in the novel's historical present tense. It is crucial, for example, that while Jane Eyre concludes with a scene of vocal romance, a couple reading aloud, Villette raises the possibility of such a relationship as a deferred and, as we find, impossible one: in response to Lucy's prediction that M. Paul would be angry and frustrated at her performance as amanuensis, he suggests, "Try some day.... But just now, there is no question of dictation" (478). The book's conclusion, of course, allows no such "some day,' but instead only listeners waiting for a voice that is "not uttered" (617).

14 My argument in this article, noting a pattern of Villette's rejection of spontaneous personal speech, de-emphasizes what some critics read as the "romanticism" of the novel. Yet Lucy's comparison of herself to a "stone" recalls Wordsworth's Lucy poems, and draws on a strain of romanticism that focuses not on lyric self-expression but on the silencing of speech and sensation. See Wordsworth, "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal": "No motion has she now, no force;/ She neither hears nor sees;/ Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,/ With rocks, and stones, and trees" (115).