Negotiating voice and power: Silence and Speech in female–female interactions in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre

Abstract

This paper investigates the proportion to which silence and speech is an interdependent power negotiation strategy in female-to-female interaction in Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. Although comprehensive study on feminist scholarship on the verbal agency of Jane against the agents of patriarchal society has been carried out, there is still relatively little focus on the linguistic relationship that arise between females. This study focuses on the critical aspect of the relationships between Jane and female characters like Mrs. Reed, Helen Burns, Blanche Ingram, and the rivers sisters Diana and Mary with the help of textual analysis. This study uses feminist narrative and discourse-pragmatic approaches as framework. The analysis highlights that Bronte creates an economy of women speech, voices, and silence, whereby morality, affection, resistance, and the bargaining of social order are manifested with the use of speech and silence as tools. Silence serves as a communicative act of purpose for enforcing repression, emotional restraint, moral superiority or subversive defiance. Speech acts, on the other hand, are contention, sympathetic, and power areas. This discussion helps in widening the critical perception of the gendered power relations within the novel. It paved the way for larger discussions about the topic of women use of language for constructing gendered norms in the Victorian novel by emphasizing the role of a female-to-female communication narrative as opposed to the traditional male-female dynamic.