‘Reading Men More Truly’: Charlotte Brontë’s Villette

Abstract

When Caroline Helstone, in Charlotte Brontë’s novel Shirley, states that ‘authors’ heroines are almost as good as authoress’s heroes’, her spirited friend Shirley disagrees, and declares: ‘women read men more truly than men read women. I’ll prove that in a magazine paper some day when I’ve time.’1 In Villette (1853), Charlotte Brontë’s characterizations of Paul Emanuel and Graham Bretton offer a shrewd critique of both men and aspects of Victorian masculinity. Paul Emanuel, for example, is an assertive and strong-minded man who displays ‘tenderness& affection & and & sincere pious enthusiasm’,2 and for whom ‘the self-denying and self-sacrificing part of the Catholic religion commanded the homage of his soul’.3 This configuration of the manly with the spiritual — where spiritual might be defined as ‘an age-old human quest to seek fulfilment, liberation and pointers towards transcendence’ (Ursula King)4 — was not a distinctive feature of the Victorian ‘bourgeois masculinity,’5 which Herbert Sussman opines had become, in a society ‘transformed by industrialization’,6 the dominant model for middle-class male behaviour by the 1850s. Characterized rather by ‘emotional control and clear-eyed scientific objectivity’,7 this influential ‘bourgeois masculinity’ is portrayed as at least one aspect of the ‘true young English gentleman’,8 Graham Bretton, a handsome doctor of great charm, whose interests appear to lie more in science than religion. It is in the relationship that both men have with Lucy Snowe, the novel’s central heroine — described aptly by Kate Millett as a woman ‘who has watched men and can tell you what they are as seen by the women they fail to notice’9 — that we see aspects of Brontë’s critique of masculinity most clearly expressed.KeywordsSexual PoliticsRomantic ExperienceCatholic ReligionMagazine PaperFirm ResolutionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.