Ocularity and irony: pictorialism inVillette

Abstract

The extended description of character or locale is a commonplace of the nineteenth-century novel, a convention so pervasive that we are inclined to take it for gran ted and overlook the visual and pictorial orientation it implies. Lucy Snowe, the first-person narrator of Villette, is an exemplary “painter” of verbal pictures, an expert at rendering visual experience in terms ofthe conventions of pictorial language. Her descriptions of interior architectu re are meticulous and obsessively thorough, indicative of her profound visual intimacy with the fixed and confining spaces she inhabits. Her “cool observation” also produces a variety of brief character sketches, portraits designed to initiate and sustain the illusion of identity. But descriptions of characters in Villette — and in the Victorian novel in general — tend to resemble, perhaps more than we generally are willing to admit, the crude physiognomical methods that Paul Emanuel employs in his first encounter with Lucy to arrive at a “judgement” of h...