Identity and Agency in Villette

A newly published Brontë-related paper:

Representations of Identity and Agency in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette
by Kellie Miller, University of California San Diego

Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies

Issue 18.1 (Spring 2022)

Published female writers in the Victorian era have been long regarded as successful for their ability to push their work forward amidst a patriarchal society. What is often overlooked, however, is the style of writing that women were expected to adhere to. The style and subjects that women were limited to consisted of excessive flowery language that focused around concerns of domesticity and romance. Such gendered expectations were pushed as women’s “literary production had met with considerable resistance” by competitive male writers who dominated the writing sphere during this era. Novels about these topics filled a genre that George Eliot describes as being of a “mind-and-millinery species,” a term that she uses to denote low-brow novels that deal with materialistic issues pertaining to female readership. For women to be considered “serious” writers, their crafted narratives needed to be centered around issues outside of the domestic sphere such as social class and mobility to work towards a higher social station. Female writers who focused on these multi-layered topics, including esteemed novelists such as George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Charlotte Brontë, performed successfully in the literary market as a result and remain in current high regard