"I, Lucy Snowe:" Identity as Performance in Villette Kayla Kibbe College

Following a foray into third-person omniscience in her second novel, Shirley, Charlotte Brontë’s Villette returns to the first-person narration for which Jane Eyre remains famous. Unlike that novel’s immediately vivid and feisty eponymous narrator, however, Villette’s Lucy Snowe begins and ends the novel a shadowy, largely unknowable figure. As narrator, Lucy seizes absolute control of her narrative, and yet her characterization is rife with contradiction. Lucy, who rejects and condemns performance even as she recognizes an affinity for it in herself, fails to recognize the inherently performative nature of her own identity. In her very attempt to avoid performance, Lucy actively constructs and controls her character, enacting for the reader a carefully rehearsed role of Lucy Snowe. Meanwhile, just as Lucy fails to recognize her own inevitable tendency to perform, she likewise fails to recognize that even the most calculated performance is subject to interpretation by the audience. In her constant attempt to maintain complete control over both her own characterization and her representation of others, Lucy bristles when other characters exercise this same right, repeatedly rejecting other interpretations of her character even...