Abstract
This chapter charts the ways in which Charlotte Brontë uses sartorial details to fashion and re-fashion a possible model of femininity in her last novel, Villette. The protagonist Lucy Snowe, a young woman in her mid-twenties, is situated in between, on the one hand, two teenage girls and, on the other hand, two middle-aged women, who between them represent four different models of fashionable femininity. Lucy’s oscillation between attraction and repulsion, identification and rejection, when it comes to her employer, Madame Beck, is at the heart of the text. As Lucy moves from plain all-grey dresses towards a final acceptance of rosy pink—a colour she has initially rejected vehemently—she also negotiates her way towards sexual and emotional maturity.
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Notes
- 1.
See Houghton (203) for this estimate, based on an examination of Brontë’s remaining dresses as well as on statements from those who knew her.
- 2.
Barker’s description makes it clear that the style of clothing that Charlotte Brontë now adapted was not just more fashionable as well as more becoming, but also simpler, plainer, and all in all more inconspicuous.
- 3.
At least to Charlotte. People who knew the sisters in Brussels claimed that Emily, unlike Charlotte, never took any interest in her appearance and did not care what other people thought of her (Barker 393). If, as Nussey suggests, Emily too changed her way of dressing after Brussels, it seems likely that it was because Charlotte made her and because she did not care anyway.
- 4.
When the manuscript of Villette had been sent to George Smith, she asked him to have it published wholly anonymously, eschewing the Currer Bell pseudonym. Not surprisingly, he would not allow this (Letters III:74).
- 5.
In buying what she already had and felt safe with, however, Charlotte Brontë was no different from all the women today who return from yet another a shopping expedition with yet another black pencil skirt, grey sweater or pair of blue jeans, although their wardrobes are bulging with almost identical items.
- 6.
The similarities between Lucy Snowe and Jane Eyre as well as the autobiographical element were noticed and commented on by readers and reviewers early on. ‘Villette is Brussels, and Currer Bell might have called her new novel “Passages from the Life of a Teacher in a Girls’ School at Brussels, written by herself”’ said the reviewer in The Spectator (155); while the one in The Guardian briefly stated, ‘Lucy Snowe is Jane Eyre over again; both are reflections of Currer Bell’ (128).
- 7.
Smith admitted as much himself in his memoir (Smith 103) and his close colleague and friend Sidney Lee wrote about him after his death: ‘No one who either knew Mr. Smith or heard him speak of his mother can fail to detect their two likenesses in Mrs. Bretton and Dr. John. To the portrayal of the son Charlotte Brontë brought her keen power of observation in its fullest blossom’ (Lee 122). Brontë’s complex feelings for Smith, very much resembling those of Lucy Snowe for Dr. John, are also obvious from her letters.
- 8.
As pointed out by Sally Shuttleworth, he even misreads Lucy in his professional capacity, believing that her encounters with the mysterious nun are figments of her imagination, signs of hysteria, whereas the truth is exactly the opposite. The nun is real enough and Lucy’s symptoms of shock—widened pupils and a heightened pulse—are the effect, not the cause, of her experience (Shuttleworth 220).
- 9.
The indolence and indulgence, bordering on indecency, of the loose dress are also illustrated in The Awakening Conscience, Holman Hunt’s famous painting from 1853 (the same year as the publication of Villette ), which depicts a man and his kept mistress. The loose morals of the young woman are reflected both in her hair, which falls loosely down her shoulders and back, and in her loose gown, obviously worn without stays. A French conduct book from 1868 even warns against wrappers generally, since they may induce ‘harmful habits: one no longer laces oneself, decides that simple cleanliness suffices, neglects elegance, and avoids discomfort’ (Dash 93).
- 10.
The review of Villette in The Guardian referred to Paulina as ‘the perfect character, represented as a miracle of innocence and delicate perception’ (Guardian 128), whereas The Athenaeum regretted that Paulina was not the protagonist of the novel rather than ‘the ill-looking and impassioned narrator’ (Athenaeum 188).
- 11.
Washing dresses was a tricky business, since many fabrics, such as silk and velvet as well as some kinds of wool, were simply not washable at the time (Foster and Walkley 29, 33). Clothes were aired and brushed and stains were painstakingly removed. If more drastic cleaning was needed, unpicking a delicate dress completely before cleaning it seems not to have been unusual (ibid., 34).
- 12.
Although we are not told very much about Lucy’s background, her relationship to Mrs. Bretton as well as the reference to ‘an old servant of our family – once my nurse’ (103) point to an earlier state of some affluence. Her comment ‘I know not that I was of a self-reliant or active nature; but self-reliance and exertion were forced upon me by circumstances’ (95) likewise points to this interpretation of her situation as a girl from a relatively wealthy middle-class background who has not been brought up to earn her living and who would not want to be associated with an uneducated working-class girl like Rosine. See also Lescart 103–4 on Lucy’s fear of being associated with the ‘grisette’ character.
- 13.
‘Black laces and nets (of either silk or linen thread) were fashionable in the 1830s and 1840s and were often used for evening dresses over a silk foundation in such colours as rose pink and citron yellow’ (Byrde 42).
- 14.
She apparently wore a barège dress with a moss green pattern in June 1850 for a dinner party at the home of William Makepeace Thackeray in London (Houghton 211–12, 215).
- 15.
See object D74.1 in the Brontë Parsonage Museum online catalogue, dated 1854-06-29 and described as ‘shot silk with silvered background and dark mauve (originally lavender) stripes’.
- 16.
In Jane Austen’s 1814 novel Mansfield Park, two housemaids are dismissed ‘for wearing white gowns’. The implication is that they have dressed above their station (Austen 132).
- 17.
Smith is not entirely convinced, though. She says the recipient of the letter ‘may be Mrs. Gaskell’, but points out that it is signed ‘CB-’, whereas Charlotte usually signed her letters to Gaskell ‘C. Brontë’. She also suggests Ellen Nussey or Amelia Taylor (sister-in-law of Charlotte Brontë’s and Ellen Nussey’s mutual friend Mary Taylor) as a possible recipient. Another possibility, not suggested by Smith, would be Miss Wooler, Charlotte Brontë’s former teacher at Roe Head School, who was by now a close friend; but if that were the case, and if Ellen Nussey and Amelia Taylor were the friends present, they would most certainly have been mentioned by name, as Miss Wooler knew them both.
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Berglund, B. (2020). Fashioning Femininity in the 1840s: Charlotte Brontë and Villette. In: Egan, G. (eds) Fashion and Authorship. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26898-5_7
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