Charlotte Brontë’s Villette and the Book of Esther: A Pioneering Hermeneutic on Sexism and Xenophobia

Abstract

Throughout her literary career, Charlotte Brontë sustained a prolonged intertextual relationship with the Book of Esther, which reached its peak in Villette (1853). While most scholarship on the topic has focused on Brontë’s Vashti, a renowned actress, a close reading of the novel belies an adaptation of the whole Book of Esther that is focused on the compounded forms of oppression Lucy must face simultaneously as a woman, an English national and a Protestant. Considered in light of contemporary readings of the Book of Esther as an intersectional narrative on sexism (Esther 1, Vashti’s rebellion and the edict against women) and antisemitism (Esther 3–4, Mordecai’s rebellion and the edict against Jews) overlapping most acutely in its heroine, a Jewish woman, I argue that Brontë uses the biblical story to address sexism and xenophobia with a triply disadvantaged Esther figure in Lucy Snowe. Villette thus offers one of the first proto-feminist, intersectional readings of Vashti and Esther, setting the stage for more emphatic female-authored exegesis to champion Vashti and Esther as paragons of action against oppression. In this sense, Brontë’s approach to the Book of Esther as a source text for her unique brand of fictionalised proto-feminism and social criticism is an as yet unrecognised pioneer of such hermeneutics.