Villette (Charlotte Brontë, 1853)

General notes

Vol I

• 15 Lucy's "overheated and discursive imagination" vs Paulina
• Paulina's monomania - Nelly says heathcliff is a monomaniac in Wuthering
• 17 "cup did not foam up" when Paulina and father reunited --CB dampening melodramatic expectations as in first chapter of shirley
• 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
• 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 externalizef thrrough 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)

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