Unravelling the Body/Mind Reverberations of Secrets Woven into Charlotte Brontë’s Villette

Abstract

Abstract The pervasive psychological realism of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) challenges scholarly assumptions based on her biography or her indoctrination to Victorian medical discourses, as it explores dysfunctional body/mind interrelations, particularly those evidencing patriarchal pressures and prejudices against women. Under the guise of her heroine Lucy, the author becomes both the physician and the patient suffering from a female malady of unnamed origin. This article intends to prove that, instead of narratively unravelling her creature’s past trauma with healing purposes, the author conceals its nature to protect her intimacy and she focuses on the periphery of her crisis aftermath to demonstrate its severity by means of the psychosomatic disorders that persistently haunt her life: depression, anorexia nervosa and suicidal behavior. Brontë’s literary guerrilla of secrecy aims, simultaneously, to veil and unveil the core of Lucy’s clinical case with an unequivocal diagnosis: a harmful, mysterious event from her childhood/adolescence, whose reverberations repeatedly erupt during her adulthood and endanger her survival. Unreliable but “lucid”, this heroine becomes the daguerreotype of her creator to portray life as a sad, exhausting journey, where professional self-realisation - not love or marriage - turns into the ultimate recovery therapy from past ordeals, never successfully confirmed in the case of Lucy, who epitomises a paradigm of femininity in Victorian England: the impoverished, solitary, middle-class woman