Villette Flashcards
sally on sanity
Lucy is a ‘figure whose psychological stability is permanently in question. In probing the inner processes of mind of a subject who defines herself as ‘constitutionallly nervous’, Bronte has chosen to focus not on the flamboyant extreme of ‘mania’, but on the more subtle area of neurosis’
‘By focusing interpretative attention in the novel on Lucy’s ‘sightings’ of the nun, Bronte is deliberately raising the issue of Lucy’s psychological stability. Hallucinations, as bronte was clearly aware, were classically regarded as signs of madness’
conflict science and personal
‘your nervous system bore a good share of suffering” / “I am not quite sure what my nervous system is, but I was dreadfully low-spirited”
Dr John medical PofV
i look on you now from a professional point of view, and i read, perhaps, all you would conceal - in your eye, which is curiously vivid and restless… in your hand, which you cannot steady. Come, Lucy, speak and tell me.
what lucy saw
“i will never tell exactly what i saw”, i said, “unless someone else sees it to.’
contemporary critic on insanity
Jean-Etienne Esquirol,
‘some of them know so well how to disguise their situation…it becomes extremely difficult even for judges to pronounce whether they are insane or not’
John Barlow 1843 says difference between sanity and insanity ‘in the degree of self-control exercised’
fine pleasant summer quote
• the hours woke fresh as nymphs… they stepped out dismantled of vapour: shadowless, azure, and glorious, they led the sun’s steeds on a bringin and unclouded course. / in short, it was as fine a day as the finest summer’
opium identity and dr john
“my identity would have been grasped between his, never tyrannous, but always powerful hands”
picture me boat
‘I will permit the reader to picture me, for the next 8 years, as a bark slumbering through hacyon weather… i must some how have fallen over board
. ‘rush of salty briny waves in my throat, and their icy pressure on my lungs’…‘in fine, the ship was lost, the crew perished’.
two lives
• “I seem to hold two lives – the life of thought, and that of reality.’ The ‘former was nourished with a sufficiency of the strange necromantic joys of fancy’.
D. A. Miller police
how the novel participates in a policing power. now a novel exercises panopticism; ‘the workings of an implied master-voice whose accents have already unified the world in a single interpretative centre
the creepy spy hole
‘you need watching’
‘there i sit and read… my book is this garden; its contents are human nature- female human nature’.
foucault panop
he who is subject to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself.’. 1975
charlotte cant get imagination out of her mind
- Charlotte Bronte in ‘Farewell to Angria’: ‘it is no easy theme to dismiss from my imagination the images which have filled it so long…”
a cold name
- Bronte letter to W.S. Williams, 6 nov 1852: “a cold name she must have… for she has about her an external coldness’
jane eyre
- ‘conscience, turned tyrant, held passion by the throad… and swore that with that arm of iron, he would thrust her down to unsounded depths of agony’ – Jane Eyre. Almost sadistic struggle
lucy perverse
“there is a perverse mood of the mind which is rather soothed than irritated by misconstruction”
cloak of invisibility (quote and then critic karen)
“I had a staid manner of my own which ere now had been good to me as a cloak and hood of hodden grey, since under its favour I had been enabled to achieve with impunity, and even approbation, deeds that… would in some minds have stamped me as a dreamer and zealot”.
“deliberately obscures her intelligibility, her body, and her signature”, as Karen Lawrence argues.
critic about disguised writing
Eugene Forcade depicts how Bronte’s narrative is full of “abrupt transitions…arranged with a disguised skill
Forcade argues, “[Charlotte Bronte] is able to lend a strange and romantic colour to the most common occurrences of everyday life”.
reason!
“’Never!’ declared Reason. […] Reason might be right; yet no wonder we are glad at times to defy her, to rush from under her rod and give a truant hour to Imagination”.
prosopopeia
: “conscience, turned tyrant, held passion by the throat… and swore that with that arm of iron, he would thrust her down to unsounded depths of agony
no longer currer bell
Bronte uneasily writes to her publishes prior to Villette, “I… fear that I no longer walk invisible” (1849)
Lucy is forgotten by Mrs Leigh
Me she had forgotten… I made no attempt to recall myself to her memory: why should I?”.
anxious grammatical distortion
flowers
the eyes of the flowers had gained vision”.
sally on brontes dads medical book
Patrick Bronte, religiously read and annotated Thomas John Graham’s Domestic Medicine, on medical and social psychological debate.
“in naming Dr John Graham Bretton after her father’s treasured medical tome, Bronte was giving embodiment to the system of medical surveillance which had governed her own life
jane and phrenology
: “’does my forehead not please you?’” He lifted up the sable waves of hair which lay horizontally over his brow, and showed a solid enough mass of intellectual organ
the end
here pause: pause at once… Let it be theirs to conceive the delight of joy… let them picture union and a happy succeeding life
physiognomy
Madame beck to M. Paul ‘i want your opinion. We know your skills in physiognomy; use it now. Read that countenance.”
(…) he meant to see through me, and that a veil would be no veil for him.
its dr john! Witholding narrator
for, reader, this tall young man - this darling son - this host of mine… was Dr John…this discovery was not of today’
, a pseudo- scientific methodology promoted by Johann Caspar Lavater in the late eighteenth century. promoted and quoted later by John Graham
villette publication and date that charlotte was a governess
governess in 1839. book published 1853
‘the life of charlotte bronte’
Elizabeth Gaskwell: ‘Mr bronte wanted them to ‘marry, and live very happily ever after’… all she could do in compliance with her fathers wishes was so to veil the fate in oracular words as to leave it to the character and discernment of her readers to interpret her meaning.
lucy acting
Retaining my woman’s garb without the slightest retrenchment,
A keen relish for dramatic expression had revealed itself as part of my nature..
… such passion ‘would not do for a mere looker-on at life’
addressing the reader
religious reader, you will preach to me…you, stoic, will frown; you, cynic, sneer;
bronte doubts readers
she doubts ‘whether the regular reader will consider… the colours dashed upon the canvas with a proper amount of daring’.
jane lamb like submission
i could see that he was excellently entertained and that a lamb-like submission… would have suited his tastes less
