Still Life: Suspended Animation in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette

This essay considers Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) as an intervention in Victorian literature’s assumptions about individual consciousness and its alliance with moral perfectionism. While the art theory and psychology of the mid-nineteenth century stressed cultivating vigilance, Brontë’s novel focuses its claims about aesthetics in scenes of stillness, passivity, reverie, and trance. Recent critics understand Villette as using models of autonomous action that privilege either resistance or subjection to the politics of social life, but the novel’s alternative modes of attention suggest a model of embodied, affective experience irreducible to individual agency.