Must I Render an Account

Must I Render an Account?":Genre and Self-Narration in Charlotte Brontë's Villette Emily W. Heady (bio) Charlotte Brontë's Villette (1853) is often described as an uneasy fusion of two dominant novelistic modes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Gothic and realism. However, as I will argue, instead of foregrounding the contrasts between these two apparently antithetical modes of storytelling, Brontë instead reveals the similarities between them, for both, in her mind, tend to undo the authority of the inner life by making interior matter, such as emotion, desire, or identity, publicly visible. If realism tends to rewrite identity in material terms—as economic progress, for instance—so too does the Gothic tend to project the internal matter of identity outward, manifesting deeply personal fears and desires as external phenomena. Brontë uses Villette to show that the errors inherent in Gothic and realist modes of narration also characterize Victorian ways of seeing the world—the Victorian willingness, for instance, to think of progress in entirely economic terms, or the common, post-Carlyle tendency to subjugate the vagaries of the inner life to concrete, material realities such as useful, improving labor. For Brontë, Victorian England's literary tastes reflect and reproduce its damaging blindness to abstract, non-material modes of meaning, such as emotion or spirituality, and she uses the whole of Villette to propose a narrative alternative to this perspectival error. The narrative mode that Brontë ultimately chooses is typology. Doreen Roberts suggests that the most obvious signal of Brontë's generic ambivalence [End Page 341] is her use of typological figures (40)—and it is typology, I argue, that ultimately forms the basis of Brontë's revision of novelistic form. Typology, as Landow describes it, is a system of progressive revelation that sees the material real world as a figure for a deeper spiritual reality that will come to pass later on.1 This definition well describes large portions of Villette, for Lucy spends the whole of her narrative searching for a mode of self-narration that will bestow personal and spiritual significance on the material realities of her everyday life. Yet for Brontë, the narrative and interpretive maneuvers integral to typology matter at least as much as the Christian doctrines with which they are usually associated. While Brontë uses and accepts biblical tropes and patterns, she is just as concerned with the modes of reading that these tropes invite as with the specific spiritual lessons that they might be used to teach. At its center, in fact, Villette uses typology to teach its readers a new way to interpret the world around them. Villette is ultimately a typological story—a parable whose meaning points to the future—about the manifold meanings of money and material success. And as typology, Villette both acknowledges the extraordinary power of the material world as it exists in mid-century England and exposes this world as a type or figure for the spiritual world that coexists with it. At the same time that typology allows the material and spiritual facets of Lucy's life to bestow significance on each other, it also allows Lucy to escape the culture-wide materialism that, in Brontë's mind, plagued Victorian England. Brontë uses two of the most common narrative modes of the nineteenth century—realism and the Gothic—to demonstrate this point. For Brontë, both of these modes are materialist at the core, and using them requires Lucy to make visible parts of life that are and ought to stay out of sight. The failure of realism and the Gothic as narrative modes for Lucy's autobiography thus signals the need to move into different generic territory—into a place that will allow her to keep her inner life secret. Thus in Villette, typology intervenes in a society that overvalues economic success to clear a space for those things that modes such as realism and the Gothic tend either to overlook or to forcibly publicize—namely, the spiritual life of the material world and the hidden self of the feeling subject. The conversion of the novel form that Brontë undertakes in Villette ultimately has two effects. Leaving behind the Gothic and realism for

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