Toni Wein - Gothic Desire in Charlotte Bronte's Villette - SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 39:4 SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 39.4 (1999) 733-746 Gothic Desire in Charlotte Brontë's Villette Toni Wein A letter of 16 June 1854 reads as follows: "My dear Ellen, Can you come next Wednesday or Thursday? I am afraid circumstances will compel me to agree to an earlier day than I wished. I sadly wished to defer it till the 2nd week in July, but I fear it must be sooner, the 1st week in July, possibly the last week in June . . . This gives rise to much trouble and many difficulties as you may imagine, and papa's whole anxiety now is to get the business over. Mr. Nicholls with his usual trustworthiness takes all the trouble of providing substitutes on his own shoulders." Despite the language of reluctance and regret, Charlotte Brontë was facing neither surgery nor the firing squad. Rather, the "it" she refers to in this letter to her friend, Ellen Nussey, is her long-deferred marriage. Admittedly, this letter carries biographical and psychological interest. But I am more interested in the way her characterization of Arthur Nicholls as "providing substitutes" announces a theme and dominant trope crucial to understanding Brontë's literary maneuverings. Like her future husband, Brontë works a series of substitutions in her novels. Much light has been shed by critics who have focused on these doublings, displacements, repressions, and...