Why Is There So Much French in Villette?

When English-speaking writers of the nineteenth century employ the French language, they demonstrate cultural capital and educational attainment, conventionally evoking signs of democracy, revolution, libertinism, and sophistication. For professional writers not entirely fluent in the language, using French is especially risky, even as it provides opportunities for productive deformations of narrative style. Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, the canonical Victorian novel that contains more French than any other, offers antic displays of French that bear cultural, biographical, and literary meanings. Through its fantastic forms of linguistic estrangement, the novel poses questions about the nature of reality and its relationship to fiction.