Aesthetics of Wounding:Strategies of Self Repression in Charlotte Brontë's Villette Meera Jagannathan (bio) Critics have noted how Lucy Snowe, the unreliable, unlikeable protagonist of Charlotte Brontë's most mature novel, Villette (1853), resorts to strategies of self-repression so as to counter the "acoustic stress" encountered by the main character (Lewis 85). The strategies deployed have the following aims: (1) alerting the reader to a new kind of narrator who seems to challenge prevalent notions of the self as unchanging (Gibson 203–26); (2) providing narrative tools for an invisible shadow whose writing mimics her circumscribed life (Gilbert and Gubar 399–440); (3) giving greater agency to the writer while imagining the reader as an abstraction (Kreilkamp 122–54); and (4) aiding in the representation of a subversive and uncanny feminism (Jacobus 42–60). Readers have also noted the psychological parallels between the protagonist and her creator. For example, the chapter "The Long Vacation," a surreal revelation of the unconscious, is an exploration of Lucy's need for a confessional testimony offered by the Catholic church. As many critics have discussed, Brontë herself was drawn to the ritual of Catholic confession (Edgren-Bindas 253–59). Both as a source of frustration for the readers and as a powerful narrative tool of self-limitation by the writer, the persistent yet perplexing role of silence in the novel has also captured scholarly attention. Contrary to Freud's abreactive psychoanalytic model, which presumes that it is necessary to give expression to repressed emotional content, those who study trauma narratives recognize how silence can work as a powerful strategy [End Page 213] by allowing for the reformulation and reconstitution of the victim-protagonist.1 Lucy Snowe walls herself in a cryptic silence that poses an obstacle to those who wish to surveil her, like Mme Beck, the inquisitive proprietor of the school where Lucy works, and even M. Paul, Lucy's lover-tormentor. The rhetoric of silence employed by Lucy disrupts the abreactive model set out by Freud in histheory of trauma management (Breuer and Freud 8). In Villette, Lucy's muteness is not the sign of her speechless terror, but rather a crafty tool to keep both Mme Beck and the readers out. In this model, the reformulation of the self, promised by the therapeutic work of narrative, assumes a specific identity which is contingent on a particular social order. The adaptive tactics of silence and self-limitation are practiced carefully by Lucy, who, as critics of the novel have long noted, often stands in for Brontë herself when she famously walled herself within the remote moors after attaining unwanted publicity for her writing. Previous readings of Villette illuminate the challenges Brontë faced as a Victorian woman writer. Yet scholars have not acknowledged the particular trauma suffered by a writer like Brontë who felt that her life was passing away. Reading Brontë's letters and journals closely alongside her fiction is a way to comprehend more fully how her personal pain is textualized, especially as her trauma developed after her sibling-collaborators died. At the heart of this novel is a protagonist whose traumas reflect Brontë's own, and who, like her creator, does not suffer fools easily, making her tenuous position as a dependent particularly galling. In this essay, I draw parallels between the writer and her narrator while highlighting how this palimpsestlike text seeks a particularly empathic reader who must navigate the many disruptions and elisions that frustrate easy reading. Far from imagining the reader as an abstraction, Brontë's autofiction calls out to an emotionally intuitive reader who may be imagined but is very human. In this intimate novel, where Brontë blends her own real-life sufferings with the imaginary ones of her protagonist, she is crafting an aesthetic of wounding. This aesthetic not only draws on the reader's sympathies but conscripts the reader into becoming a witness to her suffering (G. Stewart 31). Aesthetic of Wounding Brontë had a very specific vision of how her novels should convey her understanding of human passions to the world, a view which conflicted with [End Page 214] prevailing ideas about Victorian fiction and gender roles set forth by leading...
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Jan 4, 2023
Nadine Sika 
Open Access