Weird Weather: Nonhuman Narration and Unmoored Feelings in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette

Abstract

78 Victorians Journal Weird Weather: Nonhuraan Narration and Clnmoored feelings in Charlotte ©ront£’s Villpttp by Czra ©an Feldman Over the last forty years or so, criticism of Charlotte Bronte’s Villette (1853) addressed numerous problems in the novel, including its narrative omissions and unreliabilities, its lack of closure, its multiple constructions of the reading audience, its attention to different kinds of plot, and its participation in both realist and Gothic traditions.1 Much of this criticism arrays the novel’s complexities in defense of the literary and social-critical worth of Bronte’s oeuvre, with the laudable aim of establishing that oeuvre in the canon of British literature and ensuring that it is read and studied. With Villette squarely in critics’ sights, it is now possible to return to the novel from quite different perspectives. Elisha Cohn, for example, recently drew attention to the aesthetic practices represented in Villette and Lucy Snowe’s habits of agitation and repose. Cohn notes her frequent retreats from analysis into slumber and reads them as intervening in a nineteenth-century discussion about how aesthetic contemplation ought to register in the body and mind. My own focus on her withdrawals emphasizes their meta-diegetic qualities: as Cohn also notes, the character withdraws from plot and narration as well as from wakefulness. This withdrawal has echoes in the later narration of “weird” stories, a genre characterized by its combination of supernatural actors (ghosts, strange gods, and the like) with an emphasis on the unsayable, the indescribable, and even the unimaginable. Kate Marshall’s discussion of new weird and old weird narrative techniques in “The Old Weird” is particularly helpful in making sense of Villette's narrative irregularities. Marshall’s work tunes in to the links between contemporary weird texts, like Cormac 1 See Gilbert and Gubar’s “The Buried Life ofLucy Snowe”; Jacobus’s “The Buried Letter”; and Silver’s “The Reflecting Reader in Villette.” Each differently addresses Lucy Snowe’s erratic narrative habits. Victorians Journal 79 McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985), Mat Johnson’s Pym (2011), and China Mieville’s Railsea (2012), and what she calls “the gothic residues of nineteenth-century American literature” (631). In whatever era, “the weird” balances realism and experimentalism, exemplified by the writing of H.P. Lovecraft, whose narrators so often strive to maintain a banality of realist (even technical) description against the bizarreness and horror of the tales they are constrained to relate. Villette also has something like a gothic residue, seen in its famous ghostly nun (or “NUN”). This figure turns out to be explained, intradiegetically, in terms of human actions and ordinary clothes. However, that explanation does not prevent a formal cross­ contamination between the nun and the narrator. In moments ofnarrative (rather than personal) crisis, Lucy Snowe can be broken down, just as she dismantles the nun. The proximity and the similarity in structure between the narrator and the ghostly nun— two features of Villette that might have been more definitively distinguished from one another—allow the novel to query the ontological and ethical statuses of nonhuman beings. Narrative theory that engages with speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, and new materialisms—as Marshall’s does—promises to help rearticulate and reevaluate Vidette's narrative peculiarities so that they count towards, rather than against, the novel’s success as an aesthetic project. Rather than treating Villette's narrative difficulties as a set ofproblems that must be smoothed over, I return to them with the goal of elucidating their ontological implications for Lucy Snowe and examining the ethical demands that they issue from a nonhuman perspective. According to Marshall’s analysis, “[T]he indifferent and the cosmic [are] two of the key perspectival forms central to the arguments linking the new weird to the Weird Tales writers and their nineteenth century proclivities” (642). These forms recur in Villette, most explicitly when Lucy Snowe avows her own indifference to a scene that she recounts. This indifference is even confirmed at times by other characters, as when Ginevra Fanshawe (herself the possessor of a “halfhonest , half-insolent unreserve”) remarks on Snowe’s “strange composure” (Bronte 340, 341). The name “Lucy Snowe” also encourages the image of unruffled equanimity. And...