Villette and the Poetics of the Haunted Self

Abstract

Abstract This article examines the way in which the narrative of Villette, more so than Charlotte's earlier novels, is permeated with the subliminary presence of the absent figure 'par excellence': the Mother. Her inverted image can be read through all the negative mother-figures) including Madame Beck and Malevola, but separation is made yet more significant in the novel through the recurring metaphor of the seastorm and the shipwreck, informing the whole of Lucy's experience as doomed to the invitability of loss. These two representations, the debased image and the repetition of loss, can be interpreted in Freudian terms as two symmetrical attempts to master the trauma of the essential loss, but in fact they fail to do so) because the object of the loss is never articulated) but remains buried in Lucy's closed off psyche, as all the fantasies related to the diffuse Gothic forcibly suggest, before they are actually denied by the authoritative speaker. Thus Villette is a cryptic text enacting melancholy, as well as a cathartic attempt, through autobiographic form, to cure it; the long confession carried out by Lucy conceals as much as it reveals) but it also aims at healing, and restoring, through the attempted ab/-re/jection of the haunting, paralysing image of the un mourned Mother: that the outcome should remain highly problematic testifies to the permanence of a poetics of alienation in Charlotte's writing.