Analysis of Bronte's Villette

A Deconstructive Analysis of Bronte's Villette

In Villette, Charlotte Bronte (2001) exploits the confusion between appearance and reality, and the difficulty that its characters, especially Lucy, have in recognizing both the self and others, in order to encode a strategy for denouncing what Cocci (2003) characterizes as the terrible falsity of the social code and the difficulties a woman meets when she tries to see not only others but herself as she really is. Deconstructive analysis, as proposed first by Jacques Derrida, asks that an analyst literally strip away the multiple layers of meaning contained in a text to identify alternative explanations and meanings, some of which may have been planned by the creator or authorial voice, and others of which emerge from the perspective of each successive generation of readers (Boone, 1992).

As Boone (1992) commented vis-a-vis this novel, there are several levels on which the text and its characters can be analyzed. Among those are the issues of seeing and invisibility, or surveillance and disappearance from view. Given the brevity of the report, reference to several of the many approaches to the novel and its meaning will be made to illustrate the range of deconstructed analyses that have been undertaken.

Boone (1992) believes that Lucy, as a narrator-heroine, is the observer who spies on others and is imprisoned in societal, emotional chains. Bronte (2001) therefore may have written Lucy as an archetype of the middle-c

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sed on a phrenological model of seeing, which compels readers to revise their privileging of depth over surface. The goal of the novel is therefore to train the reader to "see" with Lucy's clinical gaze. Sight is intertwined with desire, which leads to a combination of visibility and opacity (Dames, 1996). The result is that Lucy's attraction for the Catholic Church becomes one of the mechanisms of her psychological liberation. Lucy's experiences with the Church show Lucy the destructiveness of both excessive reason and unchained imagination as forces external to the self (Schiefelbein, 1996). The various ways of "seeing" that are used by Bronte (2001) both reveal Lucy's self and attempt to obscure that self from the gaze of the reader. In an analysis of the novel, Warhol (1996) says that the trope of "doubleness" is figured as both feminine and feminist, as a strategy for negotiating differences between and within male and female, center and margin, private and public, realism and romance. Essentially, to be "double" is to resist categorization as one thing or the other and to invoke "doubleness" is to address binary oppositions without resting comfortably in either of the two terms being opposed. Forsyth (19

Category: Literature - A