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Narrative Surveillance and Social Control in Villette

1994; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 34; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/450872

1522-9270

Margaret Shaw,

Irish and British Studies

In his 1857 review of Elizabeth Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Bronte, W.C. Roscoe compared Bronte's work to the dark, somewhat disproportioned and forbidding aspect of a daguerreotype, the hard and dark qualities of which she was unaware. Particularly disturbing to the reviewer was Bronte's unrelenting pursuit of human character, an activity he continues to describe in terms of intense observation: [With] intent and resolute eyes she sits gazing into the human heart. Darkness shades its penetralia; but her keen vision shall pierce the veil; she will compel its secrets to the light.' In part, his complaint repeats charges of coarseness in speech and subject matter found in other reviews of Bronte's work, which commented on Bronte's laxity of tone or her manifest pleasure in dwelling even on the purely repulsive in human character.2 But for Roscoe, what is particularly annoying is this refusal to look away when confironted with the unpleasant: What she has that jars on us often in her writings is not so much these [violations of conventional proplrieties] as a certain harshness, a of the naked fact too unsparing, and a tendency to believe that what is attractive scarcely can be true.3 At one point in Villette, Bronte has Lucy Snowe express a similar love of the naked fact, but with a quite different and positive valuation of it: