Ambivalence of Villette

An alert from Sydney, Australia for tomorrow, July 13:

“The Orb Of My Life Is Not To Be So Rounded”: The Ambivalence Of The Bildungsroman In Charlotte Brontë’s Villette

Sophie Frazier

Sat Jul 13th 10:30am - 11:30am

Castlereagh Boutique Hotel, 169 Castlereagh St, Sydney NSW 2000, Australia

Charlotte Brontë’s final, desolate novel Villette (1853) is a narrative of exile and displacement: one woman’s flight from her home in England to an indeterminate future in a foreign city. A distinctly phenomenological novelist, in Villette Brontë maps the affective crisis of displacement onto the transmogrifications of sensory 1 life. Avowedly ambivalent about her progress in the world, protagonist Lucy Snowe disavows material success and even, at times, acts with nonchalance about her very survival. In this way Brontë emphasises both the temptations and perils of conforming to the conventional plot of female development, eschewing marriage for her heroine in preference for an enigmatic and suitably indeterminate conclusion. In this paper I will read the phenomenal character of Brontë’s narrative of oscillation between worldly success and the banality of insignificance, tracking the emotional expressiveness of the sensing body to bring out the loss inherent in Lucy’s escape from the confines of a conventional female bildung.