The Affective World of Charlotte Bronte's Villette

Matthew Arnold's comment that Villette was a "disagreeable" novel was, nonetheless, a testimony to the text's extraordinary emotional power, a feature that drew a different kind of evaluation from George Eliot, who wrote with astonishment that "I am only just returned to a sense of the real world about me, for I have been reading Villette, a still more wonderful book than Jane Eyre. There is something almost preternatural in its power." ¹ This article is an attempt to give an account of the distinctive affective world into which the reader is introduced in Villette; it is also prompted, in part, by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's dictum that "[a] great novelist is above all an artist who invents unknown or unrecognized affects and brings them to light as the becoming of his characters." ² Implicit in Deleuze and Guattari's comment is their conception of the novel, particularly the Anglo-American novel, as an experimental means for wholly original contemplations and expressions of feeling and thought. The novelist, in this view, intervenes against established schemes of representation and embarks on raising to the condition of art the sensations and perceptions of a hitherto unarticulated viewpoint on experience. One of the advantages of Deleuze and Guattari's view of literature is that it prompts one to thinking about what a fictional text does, how it conveys to the reader the effects of the unique experience that it elaborates at the level of content. As they write elsewhere, "There is no difference between what a book talks about and how it is made." ³

In what follows, my theme, to put it broadly, will be that Villette is a great novel of affective estrangement, a profound artistic investigation of the unconscious conditions, habits, logic, and tendencies of a radical and intolerable predicament of lovelessness. The chapter "Turning a New Leaf" begins: "My mistress being dead, and I once more alone, I had to look out for a new place. About this time I might be a little--a very little, shaken in nerves. I grant I was not looking well, but on the contrary, thin, haggard, and hollow-eyed; like a sitter-up at night, like an over-wrought servant, or a placeless person in debt." ⁴ This passage announces many of the subsidiary themes of what follows in the novel: the sense of life lived in isolation, transit, and subjection, without adequate social, spiritual, or material resources, the suffering of a nervous derangement that signals to the buried grief of the psyche and divides consciousness from its surroundings, the use of alter egos to express the obsessive misery of alienation on which the text repeatedly insists ("like a sitter-up at night, like an over-wrought servant"), and the spiky and imploring features of language that turn, against narrative progression, inwards into the scenic and the symbolic.

I cite Deleuze and Guattari's work here because their distinctive notion of the unconscious, construed in terms of embodied habits and responses of thought, offers, in the first place, a very different emphasis from that of the Freudian vocabulary that has tended to dominate critical discussion of the novel. ⁵ In the second place, Deleuze and Guattari's work lends itself suggestively to the articulation of a larger literary historical argument, according to which Villette contests the image of the human mind that could be said to underlie nineteenth-century novelistic images of experience. Villette is a novel with disquieting formal features and subject matter that persistently refuse those mid-nineteenth-century norms--of human identity, and of synthesis and development--whose amelioristic values govern syntax, scene, and social world in the work of other novelists of the time. Contrarily, this is a text dedicated, in various ways, to entering the unlinked and unformed intensities of the moment and to exploring the forces of repetition that possess them in the...