Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-94d59 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-29T11:25:02.459Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Conclusion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 November 2009

Sally Shuttleworth
Affiliation:
University of Sheffield
Get access

Summary

Villette marks the culmination of Brontë's struggle against the authority of the ‘real.’ As in the 1834 story, ‘The Spell’, the reader is tempted into offering diagnoses of the protagonist, whilst simultaneously being shown how arbitrary, and inadequate any such readings would be. We form, as readers, one more layer of social surveillance which Lucy, our narrator, is determined to frustrate. Her autobiography operates not as a form of confession, which would then transfer power to the reader, but rather as a form of creative evasion which leads finally to a new vision of embodied selfhood. No longer do the real and the imagination, the outer world and inner feeling, stand in painful conflict; Brontë's text opens up a space where the metaphoric world of desire is actively embodied. In place of the reductive materialism of medical science, with its claims to authoritative interpretation of the symptoms of selfhood, we are offered a materialism which embraces the realm of imagination.

In foregrounding the interpretative conflict between the man of medical science, Dr John, and Lucy, Brontë makes explicit the concerns which had underpinned the narrative methodology of all her writing. Medical science, Rothfield has suggested, offers a paradigm for the realist novel in its ‘immanent power to penetrate and know the embodied self it treats’. Brontë's distrust of such claims to authority is encoded in the narrative form of all her writings, from the teasing, unreliable narrators of her earliest stories, to the conflictual, autobiographical forms of her major novels.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1996

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Conclusion
  • Sally Shuttleworth, University of Sheffield
  • Book: Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology
  • Online publication: 06 November 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511582226.012
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Conclusion
  • Sally Shuttleworth, University of Sheffield
  • Book: Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology
  • Online publication: 06 November 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511582226.012
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Conclusion
  • Sally Shuttleworth, University of Sheffield
  • Book: Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology
  • Online publication: 06 November 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511582226.012
Available formats
×