Haunted Childhood in Charlotte Brontë's 'Villette'

Abstract

Ghosts are a phenomenon necessarily borne out of uncertainty: Do they exist? Whence do they come? In contrast, children are relatively easy to understand. We certainly know where they come from and their noise, coupled with the fact that they are often under one's feet, testifies to their empirical existence. Despite the fact, however, that we have all been children, what they have in common with ghosts is that we insist on treating them as 'other': foreign, different, to some extent unknowable. James R. Kincaid, in his controversial but influential study, Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture, addresses the problematic issue of setting fully defined limits for childhood. For him, it is the relationship between subjectivity and conscious or unconscious projections of childhood that applies: 'My ''child'' [.. .] is not defined or controlled by age limits, since it seems to me that anyone between the ages of one day and 25 years or even beyond might, in different contexts, play that role.' 1 Two of the more complex issues explored in Charlotte Brontë's Villette (1853) are what it is, precisely, that constitutes childhood and what makes children uncanny. As the central protagonist, Lucy Snowe, finds on facing little Polly in Chapter 2, 'When I say child I use an inappropriate and undescriptive term-a term suggesting any picture rather than that of the demure little person in a mourning frock and white chemisette, that might just have fitted a good-sized doll.' 2 This sense of the projection of uncanniness on to Polly, however, also works as an early piece of mirror identification, for though Lucy is several years older than Polly and, by the end of the book, Lucy is in her mid-twenties where Polly is in her late teens, Polly's main narrative function is to cast reflected light upon Lucy's past. In actuality, Lucy's frequently voiced criticism of Polly for her determination to hold on to childish ways, reminds us that Lucy's own partially erased family history leaves her, too, stranded in the role of abandoned child. Hence, in a second face-to-face encounter, this time with an 'adult' apparition, she considers, '[Was] that strange thing [.. .] of this world, or of a realm beyond the grave; or [was it. . .] only the child of malady, and I of that malady the prey[?]' (p. 333). As the phrase 'child of malady' implies, Lucy's own relationship to

Empty Letters and the Ghost of Desire in Charlotte Brontë'sVillette

“…Lucie Armitt states: 'In categorically refusing to state the fate of M. Paul, Brontë ensures that his fate recedes beyond the limit of the horizon'. 10 Although I would shift this narrative distancing onto the character of Lucy, Armitt's identifying of a haunting and unknowable space within the pages of Villette suggests the same liberating, yet troubling, lawlessness, which I argue underwrites the work in its entirety. Jon Hodge similarly notes the emancipating potential of what he describes as Lucy's melancholic and sadistic narrative compulsion, which accounts for the difficult ending: 'By allowing herself to work through the contradictions that arise from the ambivalence constitutive of her melancholia, she is able to craft her autobiography in terms of a rather perverse pleasure'.…”