"A Great Break in the Common Course of Confession": Narrating Loss in Charlotte Brontë's Villette

This essay suggests that a complex understanding of trauma can significantly explain both the narrative structure and the subject matter of Charlotte Brontë's Villette. The narrative structures attendant on traumatic experience provide a model for understanding Lucy Snowe's silences, repetitions, and evasions in a way that moves past the longstanding critical dichotomy that casts them as either an indication of oppression or a strategy for empowerment and instead explores how they both represent and enact a model of communication that seeks to render accessible experiences and perspectives generally marginalized in both Brontë's contemporary culture and the traditional realist novel.