Must I Render an Account ?

A recent paper that we missed in our periodical scholar updates:

Heady, Emily W.
"Must I Render an Account?": Genre and Self-Narration in Charlotte Brontë's Villette
Journal of Narrative Theory - Volume 36, Number 3, Fall 2006, pp. 341-364
Special Issue: Volume I: Realism in Retrospect
Eastern Michigan University

Charlotte Brontë's Villette (1853) is often described as an uneasy fusion of two dominant novelistic modes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Gothic and realism. However, as I will argue, instead of foregrounding the contrasts between these two apparently antithetical modes of storytelling, Brontë instead reveals the similarities between them, for both, in her mind, tend to undo the authority of the inner life by making interior matter, such as emotion, desire, or identity, publicly visible. If realism tends to rewrite identity in material terms (as economic progress, for instance) so too does the Gothic tend to project the internal matter of identity outward, manifesting deeply personal fears and desires as external phenomena. Brontë uses Villette to show that the errors inherent in Gothic and realist modes of narration also characterize Victorian ways of seeing the world: the Victorian willingness, for instance, to think of progress in entirely economic terms, or the common, post-Carlyle tendency to subjugate the vagaries of the inner life to concrete, material realities such as useful, improving labor.

Categories: Journals, Scholar