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

When Bronte turned to Villette following her visit to London, she continued her experiment with a fictional form that would implicitly argue against the metaphor of authorship as storytelling. She did this by creating a famously closemouthed heroine. Twenty years ago, in The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar called Villette "perhaps the most moving and terrifying account of female deprivation ever written" (400). To those critics, who invented a feminist polemic on Lucy's behalf, what seems most deprived about Lucy is her voice, or lack of it: there is a "progressive deterioration in spirit and exuberance," Gilbert and Gubar argue, from Jane Eyre to Lucy's "submission and silence." In her silence, Lucy is utterly "dispossessed ... of her own identity and power." What seems so commonsensical as to go unremarked in this argument is an equation between silence and powerlessness that translates into a second equation between speech and power. But is silence always powerlessness and speech always power? Is it possible that Lucy Snowe might choose not to speak, for reasons of her own? The rest of this essay will demonstrate that we should take Lucy at her word when she rejects any simple equation between silence and powerlessness: "Silence is of different kinds, and breathes different meanings; no words could inspire a pleasanter content than did M. Paul's wordless presence" (436). Lucy and Villette emphatically disappoint any reader who wishes to be a listener, and ask of us this question: "Surely there cannot be error in making written language the medium of better utterance than faltering lips can achieve?" (287).

Observing the joyful reunion of a father and daughter and their exchange of fond words, Lucy Snowe exclaims, "on all occasions of vehement, unrestrained expansion, a sense of disdain or ridicule comes to the weary spectator's relief" (16). This biting comment sounds a challenge Villette meets throughout. Observing the verbal and physical contact between the father and daughter, Lucy figures herself as a disdainful "spectator," a reader and interpreter rather than a participant in the presence and emotional unity of voice. Thus, we can say, Lucy does not want to be a participant in an exchange of language that produces physical intimacy. Instead, as the "voice" of the novel, she addresses a mass readership who consume novels in anonymity, far away from their authors. Bronte suggests counter-intuitively that narrative best flourishes in that acid moment of distaste for the voicing of emotions out loud, for the excitement and heat of private or public vocal reading-the excitement she herself, according to Elizabeth Gaskell, had once mastered as a student, in telling stories to her friends (133). Villette advocates silence, writing, solitude, and defines its own narrative as writing disconnected from storytelling.