Voice and the Victorian Storyteller reviewed

Months after its publication we come across a review of Voice and the Victorian Storyteller by Ivan Kreilkamp.

Kreilkamp is in general either ignorant of, or indifferent to, Victorian religious “discourse”. There is a striking example in his discussion of the famous episode of extrasensory perception in Jane Eyre, in which Rochester tells Jane that he cried out to her and heard her reply, and Jane realizes that the words he “heard” were those she had actually spoken (“I am coming: wait for me!”):
“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. If I told anything, my tale would be such as must necessarily make a profound impression on the mind of my hearer; and that mind, yet from its sufferings too prone to gloom, needed not the deeper shade of the supernatural. I kept these things, then, and pondered them in my heart.”
In citing this passage Kreilkamp omits the third sentence (“If I told anything . . .”) which rationally accounts for Jane’s silence, since he wants this “withholding of speech” to fit into a pattern by which Jane (and Charlotte Brontë herself) “shifts from a vocal to a scriptive mode of communication”. But it is even more significant that he makes no mention of the biblical text which Jane quotes:
“And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger. And when they had seen it, they made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child. And all they that heard it wondered at those things which were told them by the shepherds. But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart. And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, as it was told unto them.”
In one sense, this passage (Luke 2: 16–20) fits Kreilkamp’s argument nicely, since Mary’s silent and solitary “pondering” is set against a rich framework of oral narrative, proclamation and communal “wonder”; but Mary cannot be deemed to be resorting to a “scriptive mode of communication”, especially given the Magnificat, which she speaks in the preceding chapter (Luke, of all the Gospel writers, gives Mary the most empowered and affirmative “voice”). What Jane Eyre means (or what Charlotte Brontë means her to mean) by invoking this analogy with the Virgin is a matter of dispute. That it bears on Kreilkamp’s argument is not. [...]
On Villette: “It is at times impossible to say why Lucy chooses to suppress rather than express herself; the implication that she likes to suppress herself is what strikes many readers as the perversity of this particular novel. Her descriptions of vocal repression are often so eloquent as to define a poetics of withheld speech: ‘I held in the cry, I devoured the ejaculation, I forbade the start, I spoke and stirred no more than a stone’.”

We suggest you read the whole article if you are interested in this kind of analysis.

Categories: Scholar, Books, Jane_Eyre, Villette, Victorian_Era