Charlotte Bronte's Villette Essay

Charlotte Bronte’s Villette is described by Steven Millhauser as a “story of two unconsummated loves” however “beneath this plot runs a darker story” this is expressed through Bronte’s descriptive writing and is clearly evident in this passage. Villette was Charlotte Bronte’s final novel written at a time of great loneliness for Bronte which is directly paralleled within the novel. Bronte particularly highlights the effects of language and imagery in this passage; using symbolism to form an image in the readers mind, which can be seen in this passage. The role of women remains a great focal point in Charlotte Bronte’s novel, exploring the struggle of women in realising self-independence. With a subjective, first person narrator, it's structure
and the literary devices used are very different from the third-person, all-knowing omniscient narrator. Villette is, like Brontë's more popularly known Jane Eyre, a fictional biography or memoir that tells the story of its how it's protagonist narrator, Lucy Snowe, comes to terms with difficult circumstances and personal trauma to make a life for herself. She does that in a world where single women are disadvantaged in almost every aspect of their lives. Gothic Romanticism also plays a pivotal role in Villette and which is of a great emphasis in this passage with several referneces to hell and the after life.
Imagery is of great importance in the Bronte’s use of stylistic devices and is seen in this passage.
It begins with the sense on an enclosed atmosphere with the idea of the “theatre [being] full – crammed to its roof” giving the sense of being enclosed with little chance of escaping. Bronte continually presents stark contrasts between images such as the idea that those in the theatre to be “royal and noble” but then disregards this by referring to them as being “inmates” suggesting a sense of realisation that although they are perceived to be that of nobility they are criminals. The use of term “inmates” Bronte is reaffirming the sense of imprisonment and little chance for
escape. Mirroring was another aspect used in Bronte’s Villette , “The relationship of emulation enables things to imitate one another from one end of the universe to the other…by duplicating itself in a mirror the world abolishes the distance proper to it; in this way it overcomes the place allotted to each thing. But which of these images coursing through space are the original images? Which is the reality and which is the projection?”
Critics have persistently faulted the novel for its "unreliable narrator" (Knies) and its "odd structure" (Martin); It has become conventional to describe the central conflict in the novel as one between "Reason" and "Imagination" in the personality of Lucy Snowe, the narrator.
But a materialist interpretation of the work finds a much larger issue at stake. We see constant reminders of the gothic aspect of the novel, particularly in this passage, her “regal face” is then soon after contrasted to a “demoniac mask” as we progress through this passage, and the theme seems to be becoming increasingly gothic in its language using such vocabulary as “Hate and Murder and Madness” and “seven devils” as a reference to the Bible and the seven deadly sins. Brontë's use of Gothic and Romantic aspects of Villette not only represents a re-emergence of Romantic ideas about personal liberty and the freedom of the imagination to foreground the conservative, reactionary aspect of Victorian society but she also anticipates Freud's later nineteenth and early twentieth century psychoanalytical work on the uncanny - the uncanny being something familiar and meaningful from the past that re-emerges in strange ways. That, I suggest, is what happens with Romanticism in Villette - it resurfaces in the form of a radical Victorian gothic that ignites the potential of the imagination. Uncanniness runs thorough Villette, with characters reappearing
unexpectedly.
Women float in and out of view in Brontë's novel, and some of them appear to be living (and are not) and some of them appear to be dead (and are not). Some of them, in fact, are not even women. I would assert at the outset that there is a good deal of intense uneasiness about the role and nature of women in this novel. The ghostly nun who appears three times in the text suggests one of the most persistent tropes in the gothic repertoire, the sexually disgraced female victim. Or she is the mother who has been murdered, displaced, or unjustly separated from her children.
Pathetic phallasy is seen in this passage also as well as throughout the novel. References to “that December night” giving the sense of a cold, dark image in the mind of the reader. The references here to wind and rain are both highly recognizable recourses to conventions in gothic, and it is also important to note here that the forest was one of the stock gothic settings developed as a visual extravaganza by Loutherbourg.
Villette did not receive much feminist critical attention until the publication of Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Mad Woman in the Attic in 1979. Gilbert and Gubar regard it as Charlotte Brontë’s “most overtly and despairing feminist novel.”(1) Since the 1980s, feminist criticisms have mainly focused on interpreting female desire, the relationship between power and love, and exchanging gender roles in the work. Actually, Villette is not simply about a solution to the emancipation of a repressed single woman in a patriarchal society, but reflects a social problem about “redundant” women in the Victorian age. Brontë creates a fictional model of a spinster in nineteenth century England and finally comes up with emigration as a transition for the “excess” Charlotte Brontë’s Solution to the Excess Woman in Villette woman to forge independent lives. Apparently, existing interpretations of Villette have neglected to situate the work in this specific historical context. There was an imbalance of male and female in the population in the mid-Victorian period as the result of higher child mortality among boys and the emigration of men to America and the colonies. Statistics show that by 1851, two years before the publication of Villette, there were over a million unmarried women and about 400,000 “excess women” in Britain. The most significant point is that most of them were educated women and belonged to the upper class (Davis 246). Some Victorian commentators considered the disparity in population an urgent problem. The problem of single women in English society caused such public attention that they became the source material of literature and art.