Illegible Minds: Charlotte Brontë’s Early Writings and the Psychology of Moral Management in Jane Eyre and Villette

This essay situates Charlotte Brontë’s novels Jane Eyre and Villette, along with her letters and unpublished poetry, within the nineteenth-century discourse of phrenology and moral management, exposing her ultimate critique of these popular theories as devices of power. Deriving from faculty psychology, both hinged upon self-regulation as a moral necessity, determined by the decipherability of the self. Brontë resisted this established relation between legibility and self-regulation, preferring a theory predicated upon her own developing concept of illegibility -- a potentially limitless imaginative space. The majority of psychologists commonly associated any state of imaginative withdrawal with a lack of inner regulation and moral weakness leading to immorality and insanity. Brontë’s work shows how it is the unrelenting regulation of the imagination through incessant self-control that creates various forms of insanity and becomes ultimately devastating to the self, advocating instead the moral basis of a complex dialectic between self-control and ecstatic self-loss.