Spectral Narration and the Houses of Desire in Charlotte Brontë's Villette

The narrative complexities of Villette derive from the positing of Lucy as a ghost that hovers between absence and presence, interiority and exteriority, private and public. The claim that Lucy is a ghost projects a somewhat different light on the novel which may then be viewed as the spectral narration of a spectral quest for a spectral identity, and this insistent aspect of spectrality, which is frequently encountered in the novel's resourceful use of gothic elements, must be thought to problematize any notion of narration, quest, or identity that grounds itself on presence. Being uprooted from her native environment, in which she seems hardly ever to have taken root, Lucy often seems to stick vehemently to her Protestantism, defending it against the incursions of the Catholic environment in which she lives and works. But this is ultimately a surface opposition which has more to do with the public performance of identity and which is largely at odds with the much more fluid field of identity determined by processes of varying and unstable identifications and speculations, in which Lucy enters as a speculating and spying ghost. What underlies the surface opposition between Catholicism and Protestantism are the various desires and fears that Lucy experiences in the project of finding a home for her own ghostly self. Therefore, the question of Lucy's national or religious identity in Villette must be understood as her ghostly quest to find an adequate home or haunt.