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

Withholding Speech

One of Jane Eyre's most famous turning points occurs when Jane returns to Rochester at the novel's conclusion. After he tells Jane how he called her name three times and heard her voice in return, Jane explains to the reader why she allowed this amazing revelation to go unanswered:

Reader, it was on Monday night-near midnight-that I too had received the mysterious summons: those were the very words ("I am coming: wait for me!"] by which had I replied to it. I listened to Mr. Rochester's narrative; but made no disclosure in return. The coincidence struck me as too awful and inexplicable to be communicated or discussed.... I kept these things, then, and pondered them in my heart. (471-72)

Critics have offered numerous explanations of this withholding of speech, narrative, and autobiography at just the moment when Jane would seem best positioned at last to unify her story and her self in verbal exchange with the man she loves. One critic, arguing that even in this withholding Jane achieves fulfilling speech to a reader, writes that Jane "is enabled to tell her life, to say to us, in effeet, listen to my words, Reader."6 When one addresses a "Reader," however, one does not speak but writes, and this simple fact may explain why Jane makes "no disclosure," "kept these things, then, and pondered them in my heart." Jane does not tell Rochester the story of her life, but instead writes it to a readership.7 She shifts from a vocal to a scriptive mode of communication. She chooses the silent address to an unknown mass readership over the intimate, confessional "disclosure" to a loved one. She withholds, fails to disclose all, and thus opens up a new space of interiority-"in the depth of my heart" (74), "in my heart" (472)-created by writing. Paradoxically, Bronte suggests, address to a mass readership is best achieved not through vocal amplification but through restraint, withholding, and the construction of an authorial identity through writing.

Bronte's decision to make Jane withhold spoken narration of her tale, and provide instead the written narrative of the novel we read, offers a clear message that writing cannot be understood as merely the transcription of a preceding voice where meaning and affect reside. Instead, Bronte suggests that writing gains value for the very reason that it remains unspoken. Novel-writing in the 1840s attained cultural power, in part, by creating a sense of having been spoken, by allowing what Kittler describes as the Mother's Mouth to seem to speak between the lines. Writing passes itself off as speech, or as an effect of speech. But Bronte, recognizing the ways female authors are ultimately undermined by the assumption that contemporary writing derives from an originary but historically past woman's speech, defies the convention and suggests in Jane Eyre that her heroine comes into her own only as she turns from speech to writing. Only writing can define the new kind of powerful interiority and appeal to a mass audience from which Bronte's prose draws authority.