Surveillance and Musical Passion in Villette

Abstract

Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, Elizabeth Sara Sheppard’s Charles Auchester, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth and Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, all published in 1853, engage with a burning topic of the day: rationalist surveillance. Each novel emphasizes different attributes of surveillance, suggesting that novelists struggled with the idea of the ubiquitous gaze and what it meant in English life. Ruth depicts the negative effect of observation and discipline in the Bradshaw home, for instance, and is similar to Dickens’s novel in its sympathy toward unwed pregnancy. Both narratives accentuate moral questions, especially as unrelenting scrutiny required so-called fallen women either to conceal their deed or submit themselves to harsh social judgment. However, while Bleak House contains mysteries within its pages, Villette’s narrator and protagonist Lucy Snowe, as Sally Shuttleworth astutely observes, does not have real secrets,1 neither do the characters in Charles Auchester. Rather, these last two novels demonstrate pressures exerted on characters in crowded aesthetic spaces; the concert hall and theater are public venues that help to define and shape bourgeois identity in complex and sometimes contradictory ways. Ultimately, as this chapter explores, music serves to undermine an essentially rationalist approach to the construction of society, positing the importance of the aesthetic to individual and community.