Charlotte Brontë's Villette and the textuality of selfhood

Abstract

This paper attempts to explore some of the reasons for and manifestations of subjectivity in women's fiction, with particular reference to Charlotte Brontë's Villette. Villette, it argues, plays out the tension in Lucy Snowe between the external imperative of self-repression and her own creative drive towards self-reconstitution. In face of society's injunction that as a poor, plain, and friendless woman she devote her life to selfless service to others, Lucy acquires the art of self-construction, an activity that takes the form, in her presentation of it, of character creation in the literary process. If her life is a “blank page,” it nonetheless offers the opportunity for self-inscription. Through her adherence to the personified ‘daughter of Heaven,” the Imagination, she combats the annihilating effects of Reason, that “hag” that would deny her self-expression. The paper concludes with some suggestions as to why novels like Villette, like many other women's novels, have been the subject of “close reading,” in a literal sense, by women as readers. It may be that women readers, like Lucy Snowe, use her text as the site of their own self-reparation.