Villette

Question 1

sally on sanity

Answer 1

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’

Question 2

conflict science and personal

Answer 2

‘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”

Question 3

Dr John medical PofV

Answer 3

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.

Question 4

what lucy saw

Answer 4

“i will never tell exactly what i saw”, i said, “unless someone else sees it to.’

Question 5

contemporary critic on insanity

Answer 5

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’

Question 6

fine pleasant summer quote

Answer 6

• 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’

Question 7

opium identity and dr john

Answer 7

“my identity would have been grasped between his, never tyrannous, but always powerful hands”

Question 8

picture me boat

Answer 8

‘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’.

Question 9

two lives

Answer 9

• “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’.

Question 10

D. A. Miller police

Answer 10

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

Question 11

the creepy spy hole

Answer 11

‘you need watching’

‘there i sit and read… my book is this garden; its contents are human nature- female human nature’.

Question 12

foucault panop

Answer 12

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

Question 13

charlotte cant get imagination out of her mind

Answer 13

• Charlotte Bronte in ‘Farewell to Angria’: ‘it is no easy theme to dismiss from my imagination the images which have filled it so long…”

Question 14

a cold name

Answer 14

• Bronte letter to W.S. Williams, 6 nov 1852: “a cold name she must have… for she has about her an external coldness’

Question 15

jane eyre

Answer 15

• ‘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

Question 16

lucy perverse

Answer 16

“there is a perverse mood of the mind which is rather soothed than irritated by misconstruction”

Question 17

cloak of invisibility (quote and then critic karen)

Answer 17

“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.

Question 18

critic about disguised writing

Answer 18

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”.

Question 19

reason!

Answer 19

“’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

Question 20

no longer currer bell

Answer 20

Bronte uneasily writes to her publishes prior to Villette, “I… fear that I no longer walk invisible” (1849)

Question 21

Lucy is forgotten by Mrs Leigh

Answer 21

Me she had forgotten… I made no attempt to recall myself to her memory: why should I?”.
anxious grammatical distortion

Question 22

flowers

Answer 22

the eyes of the flowers had gained vision”.

Question 23

sally on brontes dads medical book

Answer 23

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

Question 24

jane and phrenology

Answer 24

: “’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

Question 25

the end

Answer 25

here pause: pause at once… Let it be theirs to conceive the delight of joy… let them picture union and a happy succeeding life

Question 26

physiognomy

Answer 26

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.

Question 27

its dr john! Witholding narrator

Answer 27

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

Question 28

villette publication and date that charlotte was a governess

Answer 28

governess in 1839. book published 1853

Question 29

‘the life of charlotte bronte’

Answer 29

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.

Question 30

lucy acting

Answer 30

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’

Question 31

addressing the reader

Answer 31

religious reader, you will preach to me…you, stoic, will frown; you, cynic, sneer;

Question 32

bronte doubts readers

Answer 32

she doubts ‘whether the regular reader will consider… the colours dashed upon the canvas with a proper amount of daring’.

Question 33

jane lamb like submission

Answer 33

i could see that he was excellently entertained and that a lamb-like submission… would have suited his tastes less