Issue 2: Textual Bodies

'I would keep my own dress': Self-Determination and the Roles of Power Dressing in Villette

Nicole Bush

After the 'two hot, close rooms' of life with Miss Marchmont, Lucy Snowe's introduction to the 'vastness and strangeness' of the metropolitan 'wilderness' of London understandably causes her some mental trauma; 'confused with darkness [and] palsied with cold', she handles this manifestation of insecurity by splitting herself in two.1 Referring to 'Common-sense' in the third-person, Lucy's narrative tells that this being 'spasmodically executed her trust': it 'paid the porter [and] asked the waiter for a room'. It is also this disassociated self who 'bore, without being overcome, a highly supercilious style of demeanour' from the chambermaid:

I recollect this same chambermaid was a pattern of town prettiness and smartness. So trim her waist, her cap, her dress – I wondered how they had all been manufactured. Her speech had an accent which in its mincing glibness seemed to rebuke mine as by authority; her spruce attire flaunted an easy scorn at my plain country garb. 'Well, it can't be helped,' I thought, 'and then the scene is new, and the circumstances; I shall gain good'. (p. 106)

This early introduction to Lucy reveals certain things which will become key for her future in Villette. Orphaned, and possessing fifteen pounds, Lucy must engage herself with some course of action; prompted by a housekeeper she decides to set off for London and then on to the Continent, hoping to find work as a governess. As Lucy's experience upon first arriving in the city shows, she quickly develops mechanisms to help her cope with the expanded horizon she has chosen. By erecting 'Common-sense' as a device to help her cope under duress, Lucy can protect herself from the vulnerability of being in a foreign land alone. The above passage also demonstrates that throughout the text Lucy increasingly turns to modes of dress as a further method to help her integrate into life in Villette. Her dealings with the chambermaid are indicative of the way fashion is used in the novel: Lucy, ever the astute observer, (Catherine Spooner has argued this amounts to her 'obsessively recount[ing] the dress of others'2) turns her eye quickly to dress, measuring its ability to endow status and authority, and imbuing dress with the power to 'gain good'.

Our introduction to the physicality of the narrator centres not on facial features or bodily characteristics but on her choice of dress, 'plain country garb' in Lucy's case. Further, as Sara T. Bernstein has recognised, this attention to dress is not purely descriptive, but rather is an 'emotionally-loaded account'.3 The passage quoted above also draws attention to the problematics of surface appearance and reality which will be drawn out by Brontë in her text. The chambermaid's readiness to direct 'easy scorn' at Lucy's dress is countered by her retrospective foreshadowing that 'the scene is new', alerting us to the slippage of theatrical role and reality, the playing of character, and the place which dress occupies as a site on which these discussions can be played out.

It is my intention in this essay to consider some of Lucy's formative moments in her narrative, arguing that her attention to dress and fashion enable her to construct herself in this new and foreign locale in an image which is wholly her own. She negotiates the power structures at play within the pensionnat using dress as a tool for concealment and empowerment. This can only be effected by her close observation of the rules, and roles, of dress – she knows when to adhere to and when to work around these structures, which leads ultimately to her having 'gain[ed] good'.

On the boat sailing to Villette, Lucy is deeply interested in the clothing of her fellow-passengers. The description of the Watsons, with their 'velvet cloaks and silk dresses [which] seemed better suited for park or promenade than damp packet-deck' alerts us to Lucy's preference for a modest style of dress. (p. 113) She fails to be interested in their finery, mocking instead of applauding. Her approval goes to another's 'simple print dress, untrimmed straw bonnet, and large shawl [which] formed a costume plain to Quakerism'. (p. 113) This female traveller is introduced as Ginevra Fanshawe, the frivolous friend Lucy will associate with in the pensionnat, and, as some critics have put forward, her double.4 Use of the word 'costume' here alerts us to the problematics of Lucy's retrospective narrative, and her awareness of the use of dress as costume, for it is only the older Lucy who would recognise Ginevra's plain clothes as a costume, garments donned only for the rough sea voyage, and utterly at odds with the 'flourishing and fluttering' silk dresses and 'jewels' which are her normal fashion. (p. 153)

For her own part, it is Lucy's 'homely mourning-habit' which we are introduced to, and which will form her wardrobe for the start of her time in Villette. (p. 114) Her modest, unadorned style of dress is indicative of her desire to pass unnoticed. The 'gown of shadow' she prefers to wear allows her to feel 'at home and at ease' in her unsettling surroundings. (p. 200) In a new country, and faced with teaching in an unknown language, Lucy must engage in the same 'surveillance and espionage' practices as Mme. Beck in order to learn and progress. (p. 135) The 'soundless slippers' of Mme. Beck mirror the drab garments Lucy chooses to wear: both enable the women to sneak and snoop and observe without drawing attention. (p. 133) Passing wordlessly on the stair, Mme. Beck nods approval at Lucy's dress, both garments being 'almost as quiet' as one another. (p. 200) This style of dress, the robe grise, allows her to pass unnoticed, and also to 'avoid […] categorisation' as Bernstein argues. (Bernstein, p. 216)5 By extension, her narrative can be read as an avoidance of such categorisation; for example, in her resistance to surveillance, and by the textual games she plays with the reader. By holding back information, altering chronology, and mirroring her 'gown of shadow' in the text itself by regulating what she makes visible, she ensures that even the reader cannot imprison her within descriptive boundaries.6 Susan Watkins asserts that 'it is particularly through the slippage of language that the feminine subject is questioned and destabilised' in the text. My reading, though, sees the 'slippage' in Lucy's narrative not as a destabilisation of female identity, which implies an element of passivity, but as a wilful attempt to determine her own version of feminine subjectivity.7

I have argued that Lucy uses a plain style of dress to enable her to successfully engage in practises of surveillance. Additionally, the choice of a 'quiet' dress is indicative of Lucy's lack of confidence in the image of herself. Describing the other girls' neat attire for the fête ('a clean white muslin dress [and] blue sash' – hardly ostentatious) as a 'diaphanous and snowy mass', Lucy demonstrates what extreme modes of being can be evoked for her by different styles of dress. It is almost a dysmorphia to compare these fête dresses to the idea of a heaped, fibrous, chaotic knot of threads. Lucy does not have the 'courage' to put such a thing on, preferring to search tirelessly through 'a dozen shops till [she] lit upon a crepe-like material of purple-grey - the colour, in short, of dun mist, lying on a moor in bloom'. Is Lucy afraid that the 'snowy mass' will engulf her fragile sense of self? It is not until much later into her narrative that she feels able to wear such a fashionable and colourful dress, when her place within Villette is secured, and she is cultivating and shaping her emergent self. For now, Lucy uses plain dress to conceal herself to her own advantage, ensuring she is as unnoticed as 'a mere shadowy spot on a field of light'. (p. 200)

The pertinent question put forward by Ginevra: 'Who are you, Lucy Snowe?' gets the reply: 'Who am I indeed? Perhaps a personage in disguise. Pity I don't look the character'. (p. 393) The laughter Lucy initially responds with shows her glee at being able to baffle her peers, and at successfully avoiding categorisation and operating between the lines of a demarcated and fixed identity. Note Brontë's modification of the stock phrase here: 'pity I don't look the part' becomes the awkward 'pity I don't look the character'. Lucy's sense of self revolves around not one 'part' but multiple 'characters', or roles. The teasing, almost coy tone employed in her answer to Ginevra hints at her enjoyment of playing a character 'in disguise', the same enjoyment which will later be given expression in the pensionnat play, and will 'gift [her] with a world of delight'. (p. 211)

Joseph Litvak's thorough study of the modes of theatricality in Villette puts forward that her desire for a 'sheltering shadow' posits 'not an antitheatrical position but an intensely theatrical penchant for disguise and dissimulation'.8 Her evasion of categorisation, highlighted by Ginevra's question, is for Litvak 'aggressively […]strategic'. (Litvak, p. 476) Lucy's understanding of using dress to create the 'look' of a 'character' is also in play here. As we will see later, by using the grey robes, or the pink dress, Lucy can navigate between extremes of character, never settling decisively on one role, but shifting between multiples for her own advantage.

Perhaps the most decisive event of Lucy's autobiographical narrative comes when she is requested by M. Paul to take on a role in the vaudeville de pensionnat. At first aghast, then strangely tempted by 'an appeal behind [his] menace', her 'lips dropped the word 'oui'' and she is led away by M. Paul to rehearse alone in the attic. (p. 203) Quickly adapting to the idea of acting, it is when she realises she must be dressed for her part that Lucy shrinks away in discomfort and agitation. In response to Zélie St Pierre's mocking exclamation of '[d]ressed – dressed like a man!' she plans her stubborn argument:

To be dressed like a man did not please, and would not suit me. I had consented to take a man's name and part; as to his dress – halte là! No. I would keep my own dress; come what might. M. Paul might storm, might rage: I would keep my own dress. I said so, with a voice as resolute in intent, as it was low, and perhaps unsteady, in utterance. (p. 208)

It is her female dress which Lucy cannot countenance parting with for the vaudeville. Willing to act, perhaps even willing to dress the part of a woman, but to 'consent' to wear the whole costume of a man is beyond her agreement. Compromising, she tells M. Paul that whatever costume she is to wear 'must be arranged in my own way: nobody must meddle; the things must not be forced upon me. Just let me dress myself'. Here she asserts her own artistic eye for costume, and argues successfully against being dressed by another. To do so would be an act of oppression, and, 'under theatre's emboldening stimulus' she stands up to the joint might of Zélie and M. Paul, thus empowering herself and foreshadowing the 'delight' she will get from 'taking courage' and 'act[ing] to please [her]self'. (p. 211)9

Her chosen costume ('retaining my woman's garb […] I merely assumed in addition a little vest, a collar, and a cravat') plays with the definitions and boundaries of gender, enacting upon her body a site on which gender can war – she is very literally half woman, half man. The breakdown of a full sense of womanhood is so complete that before she has started to act she has assumed the characteristics of her other, masculine, half: to Zélie's sneer, Lucy responds: 'I was irritable, because excited, and I could not help turning upon her and saying, that if she were not a lady and I a gentleman, I should feel disposed to call her out'. (my emp., p. 209)

This episode has interested many critics, and garnered diverse responses. Luann McCracken Fletcher founds her argument in the 'essential femininity' of Lucy, and reads her refusal to don a complete male costume as a 'need to remain Lucy Snowe, as though to cross-dress involves a loss of her feminine identity'. The male costume then is 'merely an adopted disguise'. However, she problematises her argument with reference to the scene, quoted above, of Lucy's temptation to 'call [Zélie] out', which destroys the 'distinction between assumed role and understood identity'.10 Lynn Voskuil asserts a similar argument, stating that Lucy's desire to dress herself marks the boundary between 'essential identity' and costume – the fop's clothes are put on over her female dress, and can be taken off, not affecting the 'authentic core' of the self beneath the costume. For Voskuil: '[i]f Lucy's resistance to a full male costume can be read as a threat to unyielding gender roles, it can also be interpreted as a reaffirmation of Brontë's reliance on essential interiority'.11

I would argue, however, that based on multiple events in the text, described above and later with reference to Lucy's pink dress, Brontë uses this text to assert an even more evasive and changeable structure of gender identity and role-playing than critics have allowed for. The transvestism of this episode, displayed by the costume cut in half at the torso at the exact mid-point of the body (and at the space associated with the reproductive organs), pushes gender into a completely liminal space. It does not display preference for one gender, as although the masculine costume could easily be taken off, revealing Lucy as wholly woman, the female dress could equally be removed, leaving only the masculine. Referring to Lucy's choice of grey and shadowy garments, but equally relevant here, Bernstein advances that 'Lucy Snowe's sphere is thus composed of liminality: neither light nor dark, but the shade in between'. (Bernstein, p. 163) The sphere of Lucy's gender is likewise constituted of the overlap between two opposites, becoming the slippery 'shade in between'.

The lack of a fixed identity can be read through Judith Butler's theories of gender and performativity. If 'the effect of gender is produced through the stylisation of the body', then as such it is these 'bodily gestures, movements and styles of various kinds' which work to 'constitute an illusion of an abiding gendered self'.12 Butler's language here – illusion, effect, movement, gesture – speaks of the performativity of gender roles, of the playing, acting, and 'stylisation' of gender (all of which Lucy utilises in the text). The dialectic movement between male and female, illustrated by Lucy's costume, mirrors the construction, for Butler, of 'woman', which she figures as 'a process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or to end'. (Butler, p. 33) Lucy's narrative of self-determination reflects this construction of gender through dress and costume, and through the continually changing (changing in both senses of the word: changing vogues, and literally the taking on and off of clothing) fashions of dress which Lucy employs to play with and construct a definition of the self.

Although Lucy deigns 'never to be drawn into a similar affair' again after acting in the vaudeville, that it gave her a 'keen relish for dramatic expression' is undeniable. She, the 'mere looker-on at life' must 'retire into [her]self and [her] ordinary life'. This retreat is pictured in terms of costume and its attendant associations: 'My dun-coloured dress did well enough under a palêtot on stage, but would not suit a waltz or a quadrille'. (p. 211). However, she soon acquires a prop, the pink dress, which enables her to rescue her acting pleasures from 'retire[ment]' and brings the empowerment she gained through theatrical expression into her daily life, infusing the 'colourless shadow' with vibrant colour, and experimenting with new roles and costumes. (p. 226)

It is Mrs Bretton who initiates the buying of this dress for Lucy, who, although initially steadfast in her disapproval, wears the garment often during her narrative from then on. Mrs Bretton insists Lucy 'must have a new one' and returns with 'a pink dress!'. 'That is not me', Lucy insists, worrying about the ostentatious colour and feeling she would 'as soon clothe [her]self in the costume of a Chinese lady of rank'. The root of her concern is here explained: 'I knew it not. It knew not me. I had not proved it'. (p. 283) What Lucy must prove is that she is worthy of such a vivid display of colour and show (the affirmation of which we see later from that most confusing of admirers, M. Paul). Additionally, she needs to believe her sense of self will not be swallowed by such flamboyance, to prove her own worth to don such an expressive garment.

Echoing her quick relent when tasked with a request to perform on stage, Lucy appears unconsciously 'led and influenced by another's will, unconsulted, unpersuaded, quietly over-ruled' into wearing the dress. (p. 283) It is only the approval of Dr John, the man closest to a brother-figure for Lucy, that 'calmed at once [her] sense of shame and fear of ridicule'. (p. 284). However, she is unsettled enough that the outfit feels like a costume. Walking into the concert, she describes walking towards a group of three figures, and the uncanny situation of not recognising her own reflection:

For the fraction of a moment, [I] believed them all strangers […] before the consciousness that I faced a great mirror […]. Thus for the first, and perhaps only time in my life, I enjoyed the 'giftie' of seeing myself as others see me. No need to dwell on the result. It bought a jar of discord, a pang of regret; it was not flattering, yet, after all, I ought to be thankful: it might have been worse. (p. 286)

Her level of self-awareness was so insubstantial that her physical body was not recognised when its external garments were changed, bringing a 'jar of discord'. Realising though that 'it could have been worse' brings her to an awareness of the role of dress, and its potential for changing the physical self, so as to enable the playing of characters, of disguise, and of creating multifarious ideas of self. It is at this moment that she 'proves' the dress.

During the period of time when her affection for Dr John is waning, she confesses: 'His “quiet Lucy Snowe”, his “inoffensive shadow”, I gave him back; not with scorn, but with extreme weariness: theirs was the coldness and pressure of lead; let him overwhelm me with no such weight'. (p. 403) The dress as prop empowers Lucy: no longer needing the sanctuary of shadow she delights in the lightness and freedom of expression costume has revealed to her. It is no longer Dr John's approval she seeks.

That he 'took no further notice of [her] dress' than a 'satisfied nod' (p. 284) alerts her to an incompatibility between them both. The ability of dress to enact changes to the physical body is something which Lucy enjoys engaging with – for Dr John, dress must only satisfy his expectation. He does not participate creatively in the practise of costuming like Lucy does, and as her future suitor, M. Paul, will also do. This is confirmed by John's later comments on the actress, Vashti: '[i]n a few terse phrases he told me his opinion of, and feeling towards, the actress: he judged her as a woman, not an artist: it was a branding judgement'. (p. 342) As I have demonstrated above, Lucy's discovery of the power of dress leads to her acceptance of a fluid, not fixed, sense of self, one that can be moulded, the creation of which becomes akin to an artistic practise. For Dr John to judge the actress (the very distillation of role-playing and costume) as a 'woman' is indeed 'branding' as it constrains her within a category, the very thing which Lucy, throughout her narrative, moves away from steadily. Dr John could never allow her to operate outside such definitions as 'woman', nor would he ever judge her as an 'artist', but it is this which she needs, and actively enacts upon her body. The distinction between Lucy as child and Lucy as woman is shown through her empowered use of dress and is emphasised by the reaction to such creative costuming of the character which bridges both these spheres, Dr John.

It is another who takes her attention from now on; no longer playing to Dr John, she directs her costume towards M. Paul, he who tutored and first engaged her in dress and performance at the vaudeville. Inevitably then, the pink dress attracts the attention of M. Paul's 'dart-dealing spectacles': 'He was looking at me gravely and intently: at me, or rather, at my pink dress'. Lucy has not previously suffered from his 'strictures on the dress' at the pensionnat until now, largely because '[her] sombre daily attire [was not] calculated to attract notice'. (pp. 409; 299) Once satisfied with the 'gravity, the austere simplicity' of Lucy's shadowy dress, the change to 'flaunting, giddy colours' now makes him 'sigh over [her] degeneracy'. For M. Paul, the observance of drab dress equated to 'highest hopes' of moral and intellectual worth; what he insists on calling her 'scarlet' dress is tarnished with connotations of corruption and degradation. (p. 419) The contradiction of M. Paul, and, if we take him to be representative, of Victorian male desire, manifests itself here, in that 'he would not be understood to speak in entire condemnation of the scarlet dress [yet] he had no intention to deny it the merit of looking well'. (p. 420) He advises Lucy to wear the colourful dress, yet to imagine she were wearing her previous grey robes, requesting that she simultaneously play two roles. Brontë uses the dress to illustrate the conflict inherent in male desire, also seen in the Cleopatra episode, of the wish to have both a serious, demure figure of woman, alongside (even within the same body) a more colourful, daring and wicked example. The problematics of this issue are explicated by Bernstein: '[w]omen were expected to be the visual embodiment of tradition, religious purity, and material wealth, all while staying within the limits of good taste'(Bernstein, p. 156), and it is this inherent contradiction which Brontë engages with in her text through the problematic figure of Lucy Snowe; problematic in that she works both within and outside of this discourse, supporting and destabilising it through dress. Lucy wants to be serious, educated, and focused on teaching, and sets herself up in contrast to the fripperies of Ginevra and Paulina, yet also fraternises often with these 'ornament[ed]' girls, and, as I have shown, enjoys the pleasure of costume, playing at character, and arousing desire through dress. (p. 155)

Lisa Surridge argues that, as seen earlier in the text, 'Lucy's refusal to don tights or trousers [for the vaudeville] may thus be understood as her refusal to perform as a sex object'.13I think Lucy is much more complicated a character than this allows, in that her refusal is matched by acquiescence, and even enjoyment, at certain points in her narrative. Just as M. Paul does and does not like the pink dress for the decadent associations it brings to Lucy, so Lucy does and does not comply with this male desire, choosing when to act, or perform, as sex object and when to refuse. This can be seen in Lucy's description of an excursion out to have breakfast in the country, headed by M. Paul. This day out occasions a change of dress for the pupils: 'a clean fresh print dress, and the light straw bonnet […] was the rule of costume'. (p. 469) Lucy prefers to walk hidden from the sight of M. Paul 'for a reason I had'. This reason is revealed as: 'the circumstance of the new print dress I wore, being pink in colour – a fact which, under our present convoy, made me feel something as I had felt, when, clad in a shawl with a red border, necessitated to traverse a meadow where pastured a bull'. (p. 470) Lucy plays the role of temptress here: knowing that M. Paul had previously admired first pink dress, she purposely wears another of the same colour, aware that she will be a thing of attraction to him. The animalistic language employed by Brontë imbues the scene with an overt feeling of sexual danger and bestial passion. It works to alert the reader to how much more developed Lucy's sense, and empowerment, of self is. She knowingly constructs herself in a role, donning costume to ensure the scene plays out as she wants it to. She treads the same line of empowerment and submission as the matador figure she evokes in her language does.

Reflecting the conflicted compound of male desire seen in M. Paul earlier, Lucy continues playing two roles: in displaying her dress so confidently and provocatively: 'I shook out the long fringe, and spread forth the long end of my scarf', she incites desire from M. Paul: 'A-h-h! c'est la robe rose!', then counters repeatedly with coy assertions of her naiveté: 'It is only cotton [and is] cheaper, and washes better than any other colour' and 'ma robe n'est pas belle, monsieur – elle n'est que propre'. ('my dress isn't pretty, Monsieur, it's only neat', p. 471)14 Her performed coquetry gives lie to her own assertion that she would not act again. With M. Paul she re-enacts her fascinated reaction to watching Vashti: 'instead of merely irritating imagination with the thought of what might be done, at the same time fevering the nerves because it was not done, [the actress] disclosed power like a deep, swollen, winter river' and it is this power and tension which she is able to bring about using dress and performance in her temptation of M. Paul. (p. 341)

Lucy notes, while acting at the vaudeville, that '[t]he spectacle seemed somehow suggestive'. She has seen her fellow actress Ginevra directing her performance towards Dr John, and, entering into a triangulation of gazes and characters, Lucy extends her own performance, to the end that her portrayal of a male fop 'out-rivalled' Dr John for Ginevra's attention. As the muddying of the role/reality boundary stretches from life, onto the stage, and back to the audience, Lucy becomes 'animated': 'I drew out of it a history; I put my idea into the part I performed […]. Retaining the letter, I recklessly altered the spirit of the role'. (p. 210) Along with the obvious sexual connotations of the 'suggestive' spectacle, what else is 'suggestive' to Lucy is the opportunity of re-writing, and re-righting, a role, thus providing a parallel narrative that comes closer to the story that she desires to tell. Using the tools and props of theatricality – character, disguise, costume – Lucy learns she can enact this in her own reality. Dress empowers her to experiment with different roles, to her advantage: grey and pink, shadow and light participate in a switching interplay, with Lucy both cloaked and disguised, and 'teas[ing] […] with an obtrusive ray'. (p. 421) Her unreliable narrative is a product of this empowerment; by dramatically altering, concealing and exaggerating what she allows the reader to know she can act out both the role of author/director and protagonist/actress. Lucy's 'heretic narrative' undercuts assumptions about gender and power, displaying that 'there is no singular truth, no certain identity, no answer to the enigma waiting to be unveiled', as Christina Crosby summarises, and that such fixities can be dressed up or dressed down, their fundaments dramatically altered to suit.15 The 'real truth' which Lucy desires to penetrate is ultimately ambiguous: 'I liked seeing the goddess in her temple, and handling the veil' – is truth behind this veil, or does Lucy allude to truth physically being the veil, the cloth, itself? (p. 564) I would suggest the latter. Note the language Lucy uses on discovering that the apparition of the nun, far from being a ghostly spectre, is revealed to be a costume, an 'artifice' empty of a fixed identity: 'all the movement was mine, so was all the life, the reality, the substance, the force; as my instinct felt. I tore her up. […] And down she fell - down all around me - down in shreds and fragments - and I trode upon her'. (p. 569) Under the costume lies nothing, the garment is just that.

Lucy enables Brontë to explore ideas about the ambiguous definition underneath the 'covered […] aspect' of truth, and to question whether the 'awful sincerity' it reveals is a physical presence or, echoing the nun, an absence:

...the covered outline of thine aspect sickens often through its uncertainty, but define to us one trait, show us one lineament, clear in awful sincerity; we may gasp in untold terror, but with that gasp we drink in a breath of thy divinity; our heart shakes, and its currents sway like rivers lifted by earthquake, but we have swallowed strength. To see and know the worst is to take from Fear her main advantage. (p. 564)

What this unveiling reveals may bring a 'gasp [of] terror' but it is necessary: it gives 'strength' and destroys 'fear'; unveiled, Lucy can begin again, in a cyclical movement (mirroring the changes of fashion), veiling the body in dress, taking off, putting on again, creating a myriad of selves, breaking rigid definitions and constantly creating anew.

References

1 Charlotte Brontë, Villette (1853; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985) pp. 97; 106. All further references to the novel will be placed in parentheses within the body of text.

2 Catherine Spooner, Fashioning Gothic Bodies (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 2004), p. 56.

3Sara T. Bernstein, '“In This Same Gown of Shadow”: Functions of Fashion in Villette', in The Brontës in the World of the Arts, eds. Sandra Hagan and Juliette Wells (Ashgate: Hampshire, 2008), pp. 149-168 (p. 150).

 4 See Robyn R. Warhol, 'Double Gender, Double Genre in Jane Eyre and Villette', Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 36:4 (Autumn 1996), 857-875, for a reading of Lucy and Ginevra as doubles.

 5Bernstein reads Villette as working within and without discourses of fashion, and has very interesting things to say about anti-fashion and the modernity of Brontë's text, linking dress in the novel to contemporary medical concerns and the romanticisation of illness. My argument works alongside hers, but her reading differs from mine in that she sees Lucy as unwilling to put herself on display, whereas I argue that as her narrative progresses, Lucy becomes more involved with the empowering nature of display, by playing at roles and costume.

6 See Joseph A. Boone, 'Depolicing Villette: Surveillance, Invisibility, and the Female Erotics of “Heretic Narrative”', NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 26:1 (Autumn, 1992), 20-42, for a deeper reading of this issue.

7Susan Watkins, 'Versions of the Feminine Subject in Charlotte Bronte's Villette', in Ethics and the Subject, ed. Karl Simms, (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1997), pp. 217-225 (p. 225).

8Joseph Litvak, 'Charlotte Brontë and the Scene of Instruction: Authority and Subversion in Villette', Nineteenth-Century Literature, 42:4 (March, 1988), 467-489 (p. 475).

9Anne W. Jackson, '“It 'Might Gift Me with a World of Delight”: Charlotte Brontë and the Pleasures of Acting', in The Brontës in the World of the Arts, eds. Hagan and Wells, pp. 125-148 (p. 139). My argument is closely aligned with Jackson's, in that this experience of acting empowers Lucy throughout the rest of her narrative.

10Luann McCracken Fletcher, 'Manufactured Marvels, Heretic Narratives, and the Process of Interpretation in Villette', Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 32:4 (Autumn 1992), 723-746 (p. 728).

11Lynn M. Voskuil, 'Acting Naturally: Brontë, Lewes, and the Problem of Gender Performance', ELH, 62:2 (Summer 1995), 409-442 (pp. 429-30). See also John Maynard, Charlotte Brontë and Sexuality, for a reading of Villette as attempting to 'uncover an essential human sexual nature', p. 214.

12Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 179.

13 Lisa Surridge, 'Representing the 'Latent Vashti': Theatricality in Charlotte Brontë's Villette', Victorian Newsletter, 87 (1995), 4-14 (p. 6) quoted in Anne W. Jackson, “It 'Might Gift Me with a World of Delight': Charlotte Brontë and the Pleasures of Acting”, p. 135.

14Translation by Mark Lilly, in Charlotte Brontë, Villette, p. 617.

15 Christina Crosby, 'Charlotte Brontë's Haunted Text', Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 24:4 (Autumn 1984), 701-715 (p. 715).