Despite its author’s “ostrich longing for concealment,” Villette, unlike Jane Eyre, makes no secret of its obsession with the theater and theatricality. This obsession becomes most obvious in the numerous episodes of acting and theatergoing that punctuate the narrative and that constitute so many flamboyant, though not exactly extraneous, “set-pieces.”^[9] Yet Brontë’s insistent concern with theatrical issues is also evident in the way that theatrical imagery and vocabulary virtually permeate the text, providing it with its self-consciously meta-Gothic machinery, encoding the action as a series of “scenes” and “spectacles,” defining the characters in terms of their “roles,” even populating the narrator-heroine’s claustral and jealously guarded consciousness with a stock company composed of such allegorical players as Impulse, Temptation, Reason, Imagination, Hope, and Desire. And since the novel interprets theatricality not just as a form of extravagance but also as a system of artifice and deception, the narrative itself may properly be called theatrical insofar as Lucy Snowe deploys a whole repertoire of evasive and duplicitous tactics in telling—and not telling—her story. A thorough study of the theater and its diffusion throughout Villette would require far more space than this chapter will allow. For now, we must content ourselves with examining some of the more telling excitations that the theatrical problem induces in the text.^[10]

This problem manifests itself most tellingly in the way in which the novel’s thematics of acting and spectatorship overlap and merge continually with its thematics of teaching and governance. Like Jane Eyre, and like Brontë herself in her earlier life, Lucy Snowe devotes her quotidian energies to the business of pedagogy: in the course of the novel, she moves from governess to schoolteacher to proprietor and director of her own school. Yet, while the narrative keeps positing an opposition between the disciplinary activity of the governess/teacher on the one hand and the flamboyant career of the actress on the other hand, it also keeps undermining this opposition, so that Lucy is at once the self-effacing antithesis and the unlikely double of a character such as the “demoniac” (p. 339) Vashti or the narcissistic Ginevra Fanshawe, whose chief skills are “music, singing, and dancing” (p. 151).

That Vashti and Ginevra inhabit the same culpably public sphere points to another one of the major differences between Villette and Jane Eyre. For if much of the official ideological labor of the latter consists in the segregation of the “demoniac” from the (merely) frivolous, the former displays a curious nonchalance not only about the mixing of those two registers but also about Lucy’s frequent excursions into the composite space thus constituted. As we will see when we touch on the “Gothic” subplot revolving around the figure of “the nun,” the generic and social barriers that were imposed in Jane Eyre seem considerably more permeable and provisional in the later novel. The fact that the teacher here appears less closely tied to her intermediate post may have something to do with the novel’s foreign setting: Villette would seem to present us with an instance of ideology on holiday, as it were, no longer so concerned with the policing of domestic relations, where “domestic” applies to both the household and the nation. This relative relaxation of disciplinary constraints may also have something to do with the different career moves of the two pedagogical heroines: while Jane Eyre does spend time as a schoolteacher, what defines her more centrally is her activity as a governess; conversely, while Lucy starts out as a governess, she quickly assumes the more public, and more frankly histrionic, role of the schoolteacher.

In other words, if the novel’s primary spatial foci are the schoolroom and the theater, it conflates these two venues as much as it separates them, so that each in its own way becomes a scene of instruction. On the one hand, Madame Beck’s pensionnat seems to require, for its proper administration, a certain calculated deployment of theatrical effects; the most sustained example of this theatricalization of power is the episode of the school play in chapter 14; the most recurrent, the tendency of the narrative to frame the teacher’s estrade as a stage. On the other hand, Lucy’s visits to the theater tend to have a didactic, rather heavily allegorical character; in the epistemologically anxious world of the novel, the theater becomes a meaning-fraught arena where one goes to Learn Lessons. And if we expect a dialectical resolution to emerge from the novel’s third overcharged space, the hated yet surreptitiously admired Catholic Church, we can only be disappointed, for this indulgently tyrannical institution merely replicates the tension at work in each of the other spheres, disseminating its supposedly corrupt teaching as the “subtle essence of Romanism” that “pervades” (p. 195) Madame Beck’s school, and exhibiting the incursion of theatricality in the “painted and meretricious face” (p. 516) of its decadent pageantry.

Yet it would be a mistake to see these more or less open displacements as signs of deconstructive “subversion”: when ideology goes on holiday, it unwinds only to expand its reach. When, as so often happens in Villette, ostensible opposites end up imitating each other, and potential alternative spaces turn out to have been mirages, the most noticeable effect is not usually one of heady destabilization but of stasis or even imprisonment. Many critics have commented upon the oppressive atmosphere of Villette: despite, or perhaps because of, the heroine’s upward mobility, the same paternalistic structure seems to contain and neutralize every incipient attempt at resistance or bid for autonomy, and repetition seems to preempt any move toward genuine difference.^[11] For this reason, the novel’s motif of female androgyny or transvestism—as when Lucy dresses partly as a man for the school play, or when we are told that Madame Beck “did not wear a woman’s aspect, but rather a man’s” (p. 141)—appears not so much daringly iconoclastic as grimly expressive of the ambitious woman’s confinement to male impersonation.^[12] At these moments, theatricality itself wears an aspect that alternates painfully between the liberation of role-playing and the conventionality that circumscribes and ironizes any such improvisatory freedom.

A number of critics have also observed that, although Lucy rightly views the mannish Madame Beck as her adversary, she in some sense resembles and even surpasses this simulacrum of both “first minister” and “superintendent of police” (p. 137), mastering the art—amply if inadvertently demonstrated by her unobliging mentor—of transforming theatrical spectatorship into a technology of surveillance.^[13] “ ‘Surveillance,’ ‘espionage,’ these were her watch-words” (p. 135), Lucy says of the way Madame Beck manages her pensionnat but these are the watch-words (the pun is all too appropriate) of Lucy’s narrative as well. By the end of the novel, when Lucy sets up her own school—thanks, of course, to Monsieur Paul—she has already proven herself a formidable rival of Madame Beck, in whose establishment she has studied and internalized a complex “system for managing and regulating” (p. 135) others, a system that Lucy even uses to manage and regulate her relationship with the reader.

For Lucy’s famous “perversity,” however protomodernist a narrative it may appear to generate, derives its logic from the material exigencies of a more or less abject power struggle distinctively enacted between women, who can overcome their disenfranchisement and claim some of the prerogatives of male authority only by battling each other in a game of silence and indirection. Lucy’s narrative stance is modeled on the “pantomime” (p. 131), performed on her first night at the school, in which she colludes and competes with her employer: while Madame Beck inspects Lucy and her belongings, Lucy, “feign[ing] sleep” (p. 131), spies on her. As Tony Tanner points out, “the spier spied on is not an uncommon situation in this world” (p. 19).

Yet it is not just the characters who feel the unpleasant effects of the manipulative and antagonistic voyeurism that dominates Villette: to the extent that reading here is not so much a “masquerade” (to use Helena Michie’s term) as itself a kind of spying—an equation that the novel does not fail to underline—we repeatedly find ourselves inserted in the discomforting, even humiliating, position of Madame Beck, by the kind of rhetorical one-upmanship in which Lucy excels.^[14] And though this experience is bound to be different for male and female readers, the difference may be more elusive than we would think, since to be cast as the outwitted Madame Beck is to be characterized as at once “too masculine” and “not masculine enough,” as a monstrous conjunction of the illegitimately “male” and the inescapably “female.”^[15]

The most notorious instance of the way the reader is made to perform as the narrator’s dupe occurs at the beginning of volume 2, where Lucy reveals that the alluring “Dr. John” is the same person as Graham Bretton. By the time she finishes explaining why she has left us in the dark, along with Graham, Lucy has instilled in us the very suspicion and anxiety from which we may have thought we could enjoy a safe readerly detachment. Lucy recognized Graham long before this revelation, but

to say anything on the subject, to hint at my discovery, had not suited my habits of thought, or assimilated with my system of feeling. On the contrary, I had preferred to keep the matter to myself. I liked entering his presence covered with a cloud he had not seen through, while he stood before me under a ray of special illumination, which shone all partial over his head, trembled about his feet, and cast light no farther.

Like Madame Beck’s system of management and regulation on which it is based—and which it seeks rivalrously to “assimilate”—Lucy’s “system of feeling” sustains a veiled yet watchful subjectivity, one that functions primarily by gathering information about (and withholding it from) other selves, “cast[ing] light no farther” than a “tremblingly” furtive scopophilia will allow. Lucy repeatedly invokes the sheltering shadow of an incognito, not for herself, but to hide from the reader the identities of other characters.^[16] These acts of renaming, however, keep her “covered with a cloud” of mystery as well—“Who are you, Miss Snowe?” (p. 392), we wonder with Ginevra Fanshawe—and this opacity is as aggressively (and pruriently) strategic as it is defensively sheltering.

In this light, as we have already rather suspected, Charlotte Brontë’s own wish for a sheltering shadow betokens not an antitheatrical posture, but indeed an intensely theatrical penchant for disguise and dissimulation.^[17] If she refuses to make a spectacle of herself, Brontë merely ends up exchanging theatrical self-display for theatrical self-concealment. Dreaming of what in effect would be a second incognito—for the putatively androgynous pseudonym, “Currer Bell,” had of course served initially as a mask in its own right—Brontë imagines an “anonymity” that, while keeping her out of the public eye, would enable her to eye the public with redoubled efficacy. Without going so far as to portray Brontë as the agent of some kind of Victorian Big Brother, we should emphasize here her predilection for the trappings of patriarchal power—the power to objectify and scrutinize others while exempting oneself from similar treatment.

Becoming trapped inside a borrowed costume is indeed one of the risks that Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar suggest when they argue that, in Brontë’s novels, “escape becomes increasingly difficult as women internalize the destructive strictures of patriarchy.”^[18] Impersonating Madame Beck’s impersonation of a first minister-cum-superintendent of police, Lucy also mimes her author’s response to Robert Southey’s advice that, since “literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life,” she content herself with “writ[ing] poetry for its own sake; not in a spirit of emulation, and not with a view to celebrity.”^[19] Her obedient promises to Southey and herself notwithstanding, Brontë, as we know, does not ultimately follow this advice. Yet, though she does not restrict her literary activity to the writing of poems, and though she does publish, Brontë’s intractability is as problematic as Kemble’s acquiescence. For she figures her “business” as an author in terms that imply a certain compromise, whereby she engages in the forbidden act of “emulation” but emulates what looks like the permissible “business of a woman’s life.”

As we have seen, that is, Brontë models her novel-writing persona not on the attention-craving actress, but on the correctly self-denying pedagogue, a role she knows well. For Brontë and for Southey, as for certain contemporary schools of literary criticism, writing suggests a kind of naughty “celebrity” that verges on notoriety, and that can be avoided only if writing emulates not the (bad) emulation typical of acting but the (good) emulation proper to learning and teaching. What is inscribed or contained here is thus a particular characterization of writing itself. Barred from the pursuit of literary fame, the novelist-as-teacher settles for the humbler privilege of disciplinary license, renouncing theatricality as a mode of self-exposure to recover it, in far less glamorous form, as an obliquely and tenuously empowering paradigm for supervision. Assuming the gray uniform of the schoolmistress is as close as she will get to putting on the patriarchal trousers. If the female novelist achieves moral respectability by investing herself in an educating heroine rather than a performing one, she also takes political shelter—but ambiguous shelter, since what protects her at the same time contains her—under an ideological system that inscribes and appropriates theatricality as a metaphor for governance.^[20]

But the distance between a governess and a governor, or between a mistress and a master, is as great as that between Madame Beck, or Lucy, and a real minister or police superintendent.^[21] Lucy makes this distance explicit when she writes: “That school offered for [Madame Beck’s] powers too limited a sphere; she ought to have swayed a nation: she should have been the leader of a turbulent legislative assembly” (p. 137). Yet if an energizing turbulence is denied these two ambitious women in the larger political sphere, it shows up not only in the theatricalized schoolroom, but in the textual politics of this bildungsroman itself. When Lucy describes how Madame Beck forced her to take over as the school’s English teacher, she admits, “I shall never forget that first lesson, nor all the under-current of life and feeling it opened up to me” (p. 142). But when Lucy mounts the estrade, she gains access not so much to “life and feeling” in their unmediated form as to energies of enactment that the inscription of theatricality has had to keep under or keep down. The “under-currents” “opened up to” her remind us that the scene of instruction is still a scene, and that the act of writing about teaching is still an act.

Admittedly, the intrinsic fluidity of the pedagogical theater is not always cause for celebration: Villette frames the scene of instruction as a hazardously volatile space, in which the autocratically “histrionic lessons” (p. 197) of a teacher like Paul Emanuel risk degenerating into “the ravings of a third-rate London actor” (p. 455). Moreover, the teacher’s vulnerability is matched by his or her own power to inflict violence. Though the staginess of teaching may at times diminish its disciplinary impact, it serves more often to secure it. Indeed, what makes Lucy’s “first lesson” so memorable is the almost terroristic efficacy of the coups de théâtre with which she silences the “mutinous mass” (p. 143) of her pupils. And while this inaugural scene of instruction is also, as it happens, a scene of writing, the writing in question takes place under the oppressive heading of “dictation” (p. 144): what surfaces here is not—or at least, not yet—the decentering force of écriture; rather, we seem to be back in the Lowood schoolroom of Jane Eyre, where writing is a form of manual labor, not an act of disruption.

If the scene nonetheless has the capacity to intimate a reversal of the inscription of theatricality into the theatricality of inscription, this is because the repetition implicit in the process of dictation figures the more ambiguous repetition that the narrative itself performs. For though, as I have argued, the repetitiveness produced by the novel’s collapsing of oppositions is more claustrophobic than liberating, the novel also uses repetition in a less constraining way, as an integral component of its distinctive narrative structure. I have referred to its “obsessive” concern with theatricality, but I want now to qualify this quasi-psychoanalytic term. As Karen Lawrence has shown, while Villette apparently lends itself to discussion in terms of the Freudian narrative theory elaborated by Peter Brooks and D. A. Miller, that model, especially as represented by Brooks, may be limited by its androcentrism.^[22] I would merely point out one aspect of Brooks’s theory that Lawrence does not discuss, but that supports her thesis. It is significant that Brooks draws on the Freudian topos of the child’s game of fort/da, which I invoked in the previous chapter to describe Brontë’s rather impertinent way of “playing with” the very disciplinary machinery of which her work seems to be an instance. Yet Brooks, following Freud, tends to see the reversals and repetitions in the game of fort/da as essentially conservative functions under the aegis of the death-drive: the mastery that the child achieves in “staging” over and over the disappearance (fort) and return (da) of a toy—interestingly, Freud himself uses the theatrical term (inszenieren)—seems akin to the quiescence achieved through death.^[23]

To be sure, it would not be terribly difficult to subordinate Villette’s narrative structure, which obsessively stages and restages the disappearance and return of the theater, to this reading of “Freud’s Masterplot,” as Brooks calls it. In an article on the image of Rachel Félix in Villette and other Victorian novels, John Stokes has identified repetition as a salient feature of dramatic criticism in the period, even or especially in the writing of so distinguished a critic as George Henry Lewes, Brontë’s would-be mentor (and, as we will see, an important interpreter of theatricality to George Eliot).^[24] While Stokes thus argues for “the superiority of novels [to criticism] when it comes to rendering the evanescence of theatrical experience,” in its general outlines, at any rate, Villette may recall all too well the “homogenizing tendency”^[25] that Stokes finds in the discourse of dramatic criticism. But though Brontë participates in that discourse more compromisingly than Stokes would allow, her stance within it at the same time suggests a saving difference. For if Jane Eyre’s occasional appearance of “out-governessing the governess” can create a little too much excitement in both the text and many of its readers, Lucy Snowe’s emulative project of out-teaching the teacher involves, as I will show in the next section, a more importunate pattern of doings and undoings, a more persistently unsettling play of fort and da than Jane’s less perverse narrative will accommodate. Much as they would effect a binding (a term Brooks favors) of potentially provocative “under-currents,” the obsessive comings and goings of the theatrical motif in Villette, both in and out of school, may also imply a peculiarly feminist strategy of repetition that “opens up” the master’s discourse, and the master’s plot, from within. Interestingly, in French, the language that Brontë disseminates so lavishly throughout this francophobic text, répétition means, among other things, “rehearsal.” As “drama critics” in their own right, both Brontë and Kemble (who herself cunningly repeats theatricality in another place) anticipate the French feminism of Luce Irigaray, the theorist of “mimicry,” against a certain Freudianism, as repetition with a difference:

To play with mimesis is…, for a woman, to try to recover the place of her exploitation by discourse, without allowing herself to be simply reduced to it. It means to resubmit herself—inasmuch as she is on the side of the “perceptible,” of “matter”—to “ideas,” in particular to ideas about herself, that are elaborated in/by a masculine logic, but so as to make “visible,” by an effect of playful repetition, what was supposed to remain invisible: the cover-up of a possible operation of the feminine in language. It also means to “unveil” the fact that, if women are such good mimics, it is because they are not simply resorbed in this function. They also remain elsewhere: another case of the persistence of “matter,” but also of “sexual pleasure.”^[26]