'Grave and Quiet at the Mouth of Hell': Speech and Imperialist Subtext in "Jane Eyre" Aline Dolinh College

“We talk, I believe, all day long: to talk to each other is but more animated and an audible thinking,” Jane Eyre reports fondly in the conclusion of her eponymous novel, describing the marital bliss she has finally achieved with Mr. Rochester (Brontë 519). Indeed, Charlotte Brontë positions Jane’s ultimate triumph as a function of her sophisticated ability to speak – that is, her mastery of language, which manifests both within her stirringly eloquent proto-feminist addresses and her romantic interactions with Mr. Rochester. Yet Brontë also places the highly articulate Jane in stark contrast to the seemingly feral and incoherent figure of Mr. Rochester’s first wife Bertha Mason, who is characterized as verbally unintelligible as well as physically repellent. Thus, Jane’s narrative vindication and displacement of Bertha can also be read as an affirmation of imperialism’s binaristic foundations – Jane Eyre’s victory is one of “refined” speech over “crude” action, and more implicitly that of the “civilized” English mind over the “savage” colonized body.

Even before Jane commences her formal education, Brontë establishes her canny expressiveness as a fundamental extension of her will. As an abject ten-year-old orphan at Gateshead,...