Villette (Charlotte Brontë, 1853)

Brontë, Charlotte. Villette. Pub. 1853. Ed. Helen Cooper. New York: Penguin, 2004.

• Pub 3 vol Smith, Elder
• Good for: affectively, the depiction of Lucy's depression; 54 Representation of Paternoster Row (as in Pendennis (Thackeray, 1850)); 96 serial character studies structure: Paulina, Marchmont, Beck, Ginevra (counterbalancing triple-decker format); early use of "network" metaphor (in this sense, 4a, earliest from 1839) (connection to Bleak House (1853)); 185-6 swoon at volume break and narrated through dissociation from material objects; 222ff gallery scene (Black 2000); 487 imperialism undergirding realist novel

General notes

Vol I

• 15 Lucy's "overheated and discursive imagination" vs Paulina
• Paulina's monomania - Nelly says heathcliff is a monomaniac in Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë, 1847)
• 17 "cup did not foam up" when Paulina and father reunited --CB dampening melodramatic expectations as in first chapter of Shirley (Charlotte Brontë, 1849)
• 20 Graham to Paulina: "I reckon on being able to get out of you a little of that precious commodity called amusement"
  • a pre Marxian sense, as Freedgood 2006 would say
• 23 graham threatening to cut up the engraving Paulina likes to light candles
• 34 race and missionary English identity in Paulina's book
• 38 "We should be friendly to all, and worship none."
• 39 "the nightmare"; metaphorizing her depression (?) as falling overboard
  • 41 mourning dress - gradual revelation
• 42 second time she's mentioned "character study," first Paulina and now Mrs Marchmont
• 43 disease heralded by atmospheric change?
• 49 vision instigated by Aurora borealis
• 62 vision of Europe followed by school copybook disavowal
• 71 "fate and providence" leading her to Madame Beck's pensionnat
• 82-3 compare description of school and pedagogy to Lowood in Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë, 1847)
• 96 serial character studies structure: Paulina, Marchmont, Beck, Ginevra
• 106 fate again with reconnecting to Dr John
• 107 "he laid himself open to my observation" -- narration as espionage, which is explicitly thematized or represented through Mdme Beck
• 117 ghost story about nun - gothic tale irruption -- connect to description of Beck as ghostly on her first night
• 118 another natural reverie
• 121 again her nervous sensitivity to weather
• 132 "complicated, disquieting thoughts" as a threat to her identity
• 173 her despair in the vacation, faced with open time and abandoned space
• weather sensitivity again
• 177 ghostly white beds
• 178-80 LS's confession and rejection of Catholicism after
• 181 lost in villette "I got immeshed in a net-work of turns unknown" - early (?) use of this metaphor?

Vol II

• 185 direct continuation of reflecting on swoon she just narrated -- dissociation from her soul
• tangling image clusters together: hearing returns like thunder, "I should have understood what we call a ghost, as well as I did the commonest object"
• 186 really interesting that her dissociation is first externalized through object relations
• i 'fell on sleep' - derivation? And the untraced allusion on 167?
• 196 "I had preferred to keep the matter to myself" - unreliable narrator
  • but why doesn't Mrs Bretton recognize her? Or does she and LS misrepresents it?*205 add SSRIs and you've got modern psychiatric treatment
• 220 john's original conversation preferred to "stealing from books"
• 222 ekphrastic reminder of nature contemplation from vol 1 in gallery
• 238 in describing the king hypochondria/melancholi/depression and its "ghostly" appearance connects that image cluster to that theme
• 255-6 moving description of the affective experience of anxiety (what she calls Reason Freud would've call the superego)
• 273 LS Sees the ghost of the nun after reading John's letter
• 277 "material terrors"
• 278 "no mockery in this world ever sounds to me so hollow as that of being told to 'cultivate' happiness."
• 281 "a new creed became mine - a belief in happiness" - don't both Caroline H and Jane E also will a change? No - I'm thinking of Maggie in Mill
• 282 writing 2 letters, feeling and reason
• 295 "whose lives have fallen amid the seclusion of schools Or of other walled-in or guarded dwellings"
  • puts in mind of enclosures - must be a way to connect space affect and text
• 304 grown up Paulina Bassompierre described as "winter spirit"
  • and again ff. associated imagistically with material furniture
• 310 description of women's imaginations "waiting at lonely gates and stiles" for men to come
• 328-9 LS's ceremonial burial of her letters from John (b/c of Madame's, and or someone else's, spying) -- and then seeing the nun again
• 330 her nature as "overcast"
• 341 LS describes herself as "perhaps a personage in disguise"

Vol III

• 401 her entombed but undead(?) feelings for John
• 403-5 Paul's surveillance of the alleyway
• 406-7 Paul asking about the ghost
  • she then appears on 408
• 414 now Paulina's letter from John to parallel Lucy's
• 429 again her fear of storms, "that exertion if strength and use of action I always yield with pain"
• 436 the "handful of loose beads" of her day, looking for the clasp - metafictive
• 454 "Life is so constructed, that the event does not, cannot, will not, match the expectation."
  • again dampening expectations but also that tension with the gothicism of Mrs Walraven's house
• 469 "Graham had a wealth of mirth by nature; Paulina possessed no such inherent flow of animal spirits"
  • connection to Shirley Seriality Project
• 482 "Is there, indeed, such happiness on earth?" and following - lovely
• 487n. specifies that the plantations Paul goes to manage in Guadeloupe are slave plantations - as in WH (cf. Sneidern 1995 and JE (cf. Freedgood 2006), slavery undergirds the economy of the realist novel
• 497 another vision, this time a dream one opiate induced, of Villette at night
• 500 voyeurism/surveilling the Bassompierres on her midnight walk
• 513 Justine Marie
• 519 seeing the nun on her bed
• 545-6 again the weather as portent, and the ending left open

Theme Tracking

Shakespeare allusions

• 78 "the head and front of her [Mrs Sweeny] offending" Othello
• 116 "that hag disappointment...all hail" Macbeth greeted by witches
• 137 "pearl of great price" othello again
• 199 Graham/John "I am sure thereby hangs a tale" Taming of the Shrew
• 208 John says Mrs B reminds him of Titania when napping, she him of Bottom - Midsummer Night's Dream
• 260 Ginevra calls LS Timon, again 264, 271, 523 ("Tim")
• 311 Count de Bassompierre described as "grave and reverend signior" Othello
• 318 "too too solid flesh" - Paulina - Hamlet
  • also horn-book is in Loves Labours Lost
• 366 M Paul reading unnamed French translation of Shakespeare play
• 460 M Paul talking to LS again "the vow 'more honored in the breach than in the observance" Hamlet
• 539 Justine's name - "what isnin a name?" Romeo and Juliet