Shipwreck, Slavery, Revolution: History as the Open Secret in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette

Celeste, Mark

Shipwreck, Slavery, Revolution: History as the Open Secret in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette

dc.contributor.author	Celeste, Mark
dc.date.accessioned	2016-06-10T17:18:51Z
dc.date.available	2016-06-10T17:18:51Z
dc.date.issued	2016
dc.description	Winner of the Friends of Fondren Library Graduate Research Awards, 2016.	en_US
dc.description	This paper was originally prepared for Rice Course ENGL541, Victorian Studies: Genres of Privacy given by Professor Helena Michie, Department of English in Spring 2015.	en_US
dc.description.abstract	Is trauma a private or public experience? How do larger moments of historical, national, and imperial upheaval reverberate on the level of the individual? How readily do we forget a violent past, despite the traces that wash up on the textual margins? In this project I move against the critical current that posits Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) as an autobiographical work. Although the parallels between the lives of Brontë and Lucy Snowe are perhaps tempting—much like her protagonist, Brontë leaves England for the continent, teaches English at a boarding school, and falls in love with a spirited, temperamental instructor—such an autobiographical reading imposes limits upon the possible interpretations of two traumatic scenes in the novel, Lucy’s journey to the continent and the (supposed) death of Monsieur Paul Emmanuel. Against an autobiographical backdrop, these two scenes read as simple textual symptoms of Brontë’s homesickness and unrequited love. By contrast, I place Brontë’s work in a longer, wider historical context, considering the uses and limits of framing Villette as a shipwreck novel. I contend that the flotsam and jetsam of a traumatic past—specifically, the violence of the British slave trade in the West Indies and the upheaval of the 1848 European revolutions—surface in Lucy’s pain and M. Paul’s apparent death. At stake in my project is the status of history: in Villette, I believe that history functions as an “open secret” (à la D. A. Miller), an absent-yet-present, repressed-yet-pervasive knowledge of the past that haunts the present.	en_US
dc.identifier.citation	Celeste, Mark. "Shipwreck, Slavery, Revolution: History as the Open Secret in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette." (2016) Rice University: <a href="https://hdl.handle.net/1911/90478">https://hdl.handle.net/1911/90478</a>.	*
dc.identifier.uri	https://hdl.handle.net/1911/90478
dc.language.iso	eng	en_US
dc.publisher	Rice University
dc.rights	This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.
dc.rights.uri	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
dc.subject	English	en_US
dc.title	Shipwreck, Slavery, Revolution: History as the Open Secret in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette	en_US
dc.type.dcmi	Text	en_US
dc.type.genre	Research paper	en_US