Having always been fascinated by the power of isolation and displacement upon the mind, Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853), compelled me to analyse it with almost the same minute detail through which Snowe examines her own self. With Villette being a novel with a religiously close examination of human psychology, I deem it to be one of the best novels to exemplify the effects of isolation and repression from an introspective exclusively feminine perspective. My aim is to compare the lone displaced female figure Lucy Snowe of Villette with similar figures from other Brontëan novels and other assorted contemporary works from later American authors. Exploring the effects of isolation and insular spaces upon the female psyche in the novel and comparing the perhaps dichotomous differing aspects of other female literary characters from similar texts.
The research I have undertaken in this endeavour so far has been unearthing texts with an archetypal lone female figure or governess particular in a novel.text with similar themes and a Gothic setting, a figure who has been displaced and uprooted from her home. With the intent of examining the manner in which various authors have altered the character and her psychological development I will compare how they tackle to varying degrees the figure of the solitary quintessential protagonist Brontë originally fashioned. Intending to dedicate a chapter each to a novel I will be examining and utilising other texts to varying degrees in order to add depth to my argument and comparisons. Central to my thesis are the texts The Turn of the Screw (1898) by Henry James, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), by Jean Rhys and The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
I will be continuously updating this blog in the coming weeks and filling it with new information upon this topic and the ways in which I research the topic and adding various critical essays’ information. I plan to include the critical text The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar for reference in order to thoroughly explore the narratives of each novel and analyse the texts themselves accordingly.
The female protagonists hailing from these respective texts are all repressed and enclosed within dark unforgiving spaces. Many of the texts I will be examining are centred in rural, pastoral settings with sublime elements infused in the prose. Examining the differences in behaviour and psychology between the eponymous Jane Eyre and her spectacularly cold counterpart Lucy Snowe will no doubt be unerringly engaging as will analysing the governess in The Turn of the Screw in a more contemporary novel.
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