Homesick: The Domestic Interiors of "Villette"

Abstract

NONPERSONAL SOCIABILITY With romance and marriage relegated to the Polly Home subplot, Villette' s unattractive and acerbic heroine unhappily resigns herself to a solitary life – a life spent out of wedlock, a homeless life: But, afterwards, is there nothing more for me in life – no true home – nothing to be dearer to me than myself and by its paramount preciousness, to draw from me better things than I care to culture for myself only? Nothing at whose feet I can willingly lay down the whole burden of human egotism, and gloriously take up the nobler charge of labouring and living for others? I suppose, Lucy Snowe, the orb of your life is not to be so rounded; for you the crescent phase must suffice. By threatening Lucy Snowe with spinsterhood, Villette displays here a peculiar rhetoric of renunciation. The moment records Lucy's decision to redirect her desires: instead of wishing for a “true home” of her own, she will wish for a school of her own; instead of wanting to establish herself in the institution of marriage, she will construct a surrogate establishment. Despite the passage's subtext of desire, Lucy's paean to home does not represent marriage as a pleasure, or as a means of emotional gratification or even as a personal or private relationship shared with one other person; on the contrary, Lucy presents the institution of marriage as a noble and ennobling space, a “rounded” place populated by anonymous “others” for whom she would have laboured and lived selflessly.