‘The Destroying Angel of Tempest’: the Sea inVillette

Abstract

In Charlotte Brontë's Villette, the sea represents the repressed intellectual power, romantic fantasies, resentment and fury of Lucy Snowe. Ocean images in Villette are entrenched within the ideological and iconographical heritage of Homer and the Bible. In the Odyssey and the Bible the sea is associated with dichotomous extremes of beauty and hideousness, gentleness and violence, and salvation and punishment. Charlotte's seas of feminine desire and intellect reflect these dichotomous extremes. With Homeric echoes, Charlotte uses ocean imagery to depict the excesses of passion, insanity and hopelessness that result from the complete liberty of female emotion and intellect. Yet, with biblical echoes, she also uses ocean imagery to create the Christian framework she establishes in order to control these excesses. Ultimately, Charlotte makes the sea in this novel the cognate for human suffering, which she presents as simultaneously ugly, intolerable and exquisite.keywords Bible, Charlotte Brontë, Homer, sea, Villette The interior oceanAs Ellen Nussey recollects, when Charlotte Brontë took her first view of the sea in 1839, it 'quite overpowered her' and she 'could not speak till she had shed some tears'. 1 Charlotte was twenty-three years old by the time she stood on a Bridlington cliff with her friend to face the sea, but she had already interiorized 'how dark the waves flow'. 2 Charlotte uses the sea to signify the subjugated desires, intellectual power, violent fantasies and repressed fury of Lucy Snowe in Villette. She also uses sea imagery as an analogue for unbearable, hideous, and yet also heartbreakingly gorgeous suffering. As metaphors for buried female passions and the potential liberation of the self, the sea scenes in Charlotte's writing disturb mid nineteenth-century social conceptions of acceptable and ideal femininity. This is because her sea images reveal emotional extremes and longings for passion, mental respect and understanding in her plain and impoverished heroines, and because in imagining sea extremes these heroines reveal their intellectual desires and abilities, as well as their imagination freed from 'duty'. 3