Why Lucy Doesn't Care and Psychoanalytic Orphans

An article and a thesis:

Why Lucy Doesn't Care: Migration and Emotional Labor in Villette Talia Schaffer
Novel (2019) 52 (1): 84-106

In this essay I argue that Lucy's traumatic condition comes from her experience navigating an emerging economic phenomenon. She is an early participant in global migrant caregiving. Initially involved in an intensive, all-engrossing care dyad, she then moves into what Arlie Russell Hochschild calls “emotional labor,” the act of performing an inauthentic feeling publicly for money. Like modern caregivers, Lucy Snowe expresses a sense of invisibility and stress over her cultural alterity. When Madame Beck's surveillance forces Lucy to enact her teacherly persona constantly, Lucy fetishizes her inner truth and develops a disastrous split between these two versions of herself—a split that the novel represents both by her two love interests and by the costume of the nun. In Villette, moreover, Brontë invents specific narrative tropes that would be picked up by later writers on migration including Jamaica Kincaid. Although Lucy Snowe is the first protagonist to suffer from emotional labor, analyzing Lucy's condition helps us notice that throughout Victorian fiction, a host of minor characters—companions, governesses, nurses—share some of these characteristic traits. Villette therefore gives us an alternative way of understanding Victorian working women in fiction, and the effort to depict the inner life of a person whose work profoundly alienates her from her inner self accounts for the extraordinary literary innovations of Brontë's last novel.

A Psychoanalytic Analysis of the Figure of The Orphan in Frankenstein, Villette, Wuthering Heights and David CopperfieldErdélyi Hajnalka (2018)
Szegedi Tudományegyetem

The figure of the orphan was always present in national literatures. The oldest examples can be found in the ancient times. These parentless protagonists became very popular among the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English novelists, as well. They were central figures, however, their roles and characteristics were changing in the course of time. Their stories usually started with the loss of their parents, and this way they had to discover the world all alone. The various adventures and hardships formed their personalities till they finally found their happiness at the end of the story. As they grew up, they became “normal” adults with certain values accepted by the society. From the end of the eighteenth-century a new literary genre emerged which depicted another kind of orphan who was not able to process his childhood traumas. Consequently, Gothic fictions were full of orphan characters who suffered from mental disturbances and anxieties. Their extreme behaviour came to the front which provided an abundant source of investigation for another newly found theory, namely psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud, the father of this new conception, was also devoted to literature. He was the first who tried to “scientifically” investigate the relationship between the author’s unconscious mind and his creative writing. According to his theory, the repressed feelings and thoughts reappear in the process of creation. Unfortunately, many of the prominent nineteenth-century writers were personally attached concerning parentless situations. Their experiences are reflected in their novels, as well. The aim of my thesis is to investigate the way how Mary Shelley, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë and Charles Dickens depicted their own “orphanhood” trough their most famous orphan characters. To analyze Frankenstein, Villette, Wuthering Heights and David Copperfield, I apply the Freudian psychobiographycal approach. By this, I make an attempt to discover the relationship between the authors’ unconscious mind and the figure of the orphan in the novel.