Charlotte Brontë’s Villette and the Book of Esther: A Pioneering Hermeneutic on Sexism and Xenophobia

Abstract

Throughout her literary career, Charlotte Brontë sustained a prolonged intertextual relationship with the Book of Esther, which reached its peak in Villette (1853). While most scholarship on the topic has focused on Brontë’s Vashti, a renowned actress, a close reading of the novel belies an adaptation of the whole Book of Esther that is focused on the compounded forms of oppression Lucy must face simultaneously as a woman, an English national and a Protestant. Considered in light of contemporary readings of the Book of Esther as an intersectional narrative on sexism (Esther 1, Vashti’s rebellion and the edict against women) and antisemitism (Esther 3–4, Mordecai’s rebellion and the edict against Jews) overlapping most acutely in its heroine, a Jewish woman, I argue that Brontë uses the biblical story to address sexism and xenophobia with a triply disadvantaged Esther figure in Lucy Snowe. Villette thus offers one of the first proto-feminist, intersectional readings of Vashti and Esther, setting the stage for more emphatic female-authored exegesis to champion Vashti and Esther as paragons of action against oppression. In this sense, Brontë’s approach to the Book of Esther as a source text for her unique brand of fictionalised proto-feminism and social criticism is an as yet unrecognised pioneer of such hermeneutics.

Keywords:

• Charlotte Brontë
• Book of Esther
• biblical hermeneutics
• Villette
• proto-feminism

From within her nuanced brand of Anglicanism, Charlotte Brontë held the Bible close—and in her vocation as a writer, she held the Book of Esther even closer. An undercurrent of biblical hermeneutics animates the proto-feminism and social critique of Charlotte Brontë’s novels and affords special privilege to the Book of Esther. In Jane Eyre (1847), Shirley (1849) and Villette (1853), engagement with the tale abounds, and it seems that the source of Brontë’s fascination with the story was both personal and pragmatic. From an early age, Charlotte was exposed to the Book of Esther in bold, dramatic measure: she was only fourteen when her brother, Branwell, painted a piece titled Queen Esther after an engraving by John Martin,¹ and it acquired a fixed place on the parsonage walls. The painting features an impressive pillared hall where Esther holds a banquet with King Ahasuerus and Haman, in which she finally outs the latter (Esther 7–8) at the very height of the narrative drama (see Figure 1). Christine Alexander notes ‘the influence [of Queen Esther] … on Charlotte, and its associations with a dramatic biblical narrative’ (1995, 319).

Figure 1. Branwell Brontë, Queen Esther, 1830. Courtesy of © The Brontë Society.

That she was meditating on the Book of Esther throughout her career, there can be no doubt; its figures—from Vashti’s mutinous, dramatic and tragic character to Esther’s demure, strategic and successfully heroic one, and from Ahasuerus’ egoistic self-service to Haman’s vindictive power-hunger—serve Brontë well. Brontë’s works are part and parcel of the revolution in readings of Esther in the Victorian period, and in the advent of proto-feminist Bible commentary generally. Villette amplifies and popularises proto-feminist readings of Vashti and Esther found in ‘Sacred Heroine’ Bible commentaries of the time, such as Clara Lucas Balfour’s Women of Scripture (1847), and serves as a stepping stone towards even more radical female-authored exegesis, such as in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Woman in Sacred History (1873) and Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s The Woman’s Bible (1895), who champion Vashti and Esther as divinely sanctioned paragons of independent action. Brontë’s novels gave early articulation to what was becoming a widespread phenomenon: women reclaiming the biblical narrative, specifically narratives of women in the Bible, with Vashti and Esther drawing significant attention.

In Shirley, Brontë presents us with the character of Hesther Yorke.² Hesther is married to Hiram only after he is jilted by his first choice (similar to Esther’s arrival on the scene after Vashti’s refusal of Ahasuerus) and she is cynical of marriage and humanity despite devoting herself to her husband and family (reflective of Esther’s marital tragedy). Jane Eyre demonstrates a stronger take on Queen Esther as someone who has a refined sense of right and wrong and exercises greater choice based on her conscience, and against her self-interest. Brontë offers an overt window into her reappropriation when Mr Rochester, eager to secure the novel’s heroine as his wife, presses the wary Jane to make her request and says, ‘Utter it, Jane: but I wish that instead of a mere inquiry into, perhaps, a secret, it was a wish for half my estate’, to which she replies, ‘Now, King Ahasuerus! What do I want with half your estate?’ (Brontë [1847] 2019, 290). The allusion casts Jane in the role of Queen Esther and Rochester in that of King Ahasuerus, with Jane mirroring Esther’s choice of morality and justice above material gain and self-promotion, or in Jane’s case, love and marriage. Rochester entices her with a domestic ‘dream’—marrying the wealthy upper-class man she loves—but once she meets his ‘mad’ wife, Bertha, the Vashti figure in their dynamic (Shuttleworth 1996, 169–70; Zonana 1993, 81) whom Rochester has banished and imprisoned in the attic for her ‘madness’, Jane resists on principle.

Villette marks a further evolution in Brontë’s hermeneutic on the Book of Esther, one in which Vashti is revived in full force (Shuttleworth 1996, 169–70; Zonana 1993, 81). On some level, the purpose of the Vashti figure in both Jane Eyre and Villette is similar: to shake the Estheric protagonists, Jane and Lucy, away from maintaining the status quo in their longings for domestic bliss and towards an understanding of male control over women, sparking renegade choices of conscience. However, whereas Jane is only narrowly confronted with the existence of Bertha as a Vashti figure, in Villette Brontë names and places Vashti front and centre for all to see, an actress whose performance publicises and validates a woman’s obligation to resist tyrannical patriarchy. The deeper relationship between the Book of Esther and Villette bespeaks a novel that de-emphasises the importance of romantic fulfilment in her heroine’s Bildungsroman and centralises Lucy’s enfranchisement. Lucy Snowe is a more developed and liberated Esther figure, taking up the mantle of Vashti’s cause and defending her gender as much as her national–religious identity, and finding peace not in marriage, but in her victory in the war over her identity and in achieving independence.

In contradistinction to most scholarship on the topic, I argue that Brontë uses the whole of the Book of Esther as a tableau upon which to build a modern iconoclast Esther in Lucy, one who resists the sexism and xenophobia she faces and asserts herself as a woman and as a foreigner. Vashti is the catalyst in a larger intertext, one in which Lucy transitions from a demure, young orphaned Esther figure under the protection of her godbrother Graham Bretton, her Mordecai, to an emboldened Queen Esther figure who defends herself as a Protestant Englishwoman against the abusive Roman Catholic French tyrant M. Paul, a hybrid Ahasuerus/Haman. In this vein, Villette prefigured modern scholars who point to the compounded oppressions depicted in the Book of Esther.³ Let us briefly revisit the Book of Esther along these lines.

The tale begins with a farcically epicurean and patriarchal depiction of ancient Persia’s King Ahasuerus, nearing the grand finale of a half-year long drinking party in the royal palace. In an act of public rebellion, Queen Vashti refuses Ahasuerus’ voyeuristic request that she appear before the inebriated masses at his lavish feast wearing her crown. The advice of the King’s counsellors, and his agreement, proves the monarchy’s paranoia and misogyny: Ahasuerus deposes and banishes Vashti, and issues a new royal edict that ‘all the wives shall give to their husbands honour, both great and small’, and that ‘every man should bear rule in his own house’ (Esther 1:20, 1:22).⁴ To find Ahasuerus a new queen, the king’s advisors have all the beautiful virgins of the kingdom brought to the royal harem, and after a night of making each one his sex object, it is a beautiful orphaned Jewess, Esther, who wins his favour and is crowned; but at the behest of her cousin and guardian, Mordecai, she keeps silent about her Jewish heritage. Soon after, Mordecai’s singular refusal to bow to the king’s second-in-command, Haman, results in yet another edict—this time calling for a day ‘to destroy, to kill, and to cause to perish, all Jews’ (Esther 3:13). As Klara Butting notes, in the Book of Esther, ‘A whole group is identified with a single resistant person … the state persecution is aimed at all women and all Jews’ (1999, 234–44, emphasis in the original). Despite these two damning edicts, a most unlikely heroine surfaces. Ahasuerus’s new Queen Esther, both a woman and a Jew, risks everything to unmask Haman’s plot, asserting her Jewish identity and saving the Jews in a complete reversal of their fortunes. By recounting Vashti’s, Mordecai’s and Esther’s audacity, the Book of Esther unconventionally engages in those critical moments when women and oppressed minorities—and at its peak, their intersection—exercise their agency against all odds, to triumphant ends.

The Book of Esther must have appealed to Brontë for its challenge to sexism and xenophobia, highlighting not one but multiple untenable power hierarchies. Her hermeneutic demonstrates the subjugation of women as woven into a more complex tapestry of injustices, and the Book of Esther emerges as a sublime model for doing so, with iconoclast characters including Vashti, Mordecai and Esther challenging supreme authority and emerging as figures of pioneering proto-feminism and fighting for basic liberties on behalf of their peoples and identities. However, most scholars who analyse the Book of Esther in Villette focus their attention on the famed actress in Chapter XXIII, with the character and chapter title both bearing the name ‘Vashti’, and then almost exclusively consider its implications in terms of gender. Jo Carruthers aptly writes that Lucy experiences Vashti as ‘a female rebelling against the patriarchal order of things, even though she sees it may mean her demise’ and divines ‘the threat to order that is latent in the biblical depiction of the rebellious woman’ (2007, 105, 107). Sally Shuttleworth notes that ‘For Lucy, Vashti on stage transcends socially imposed sex-roles’ (1996, 125), and that she is revived to further ‘destabilize the realist narrative of self-improvement’ (2007, 27).⁵ Both are adding to the foundational feminist literary criticism of Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, who note that ‘Brontë’s actress, like the biblical queen, refuses to be treated as an object … Even as her drama proposes an alternative to patriarchal culture, then, it defines the pain of female artistry, and the revengeful power of female rebellion’ (1979, 424–25). All these analyses of Vashti are concerned with gender and gendered performance, but the few scholars who do move the discussion beyond gender tend to erroneously locate national, ethnic or religious ‘otherness’ in Vashti, and misdiagnose how Lucy’s experience of Vashti affects her self-perception regarding both her gendered and national and religious identities on trial as an English Protestant woman.

Ciolkowski considers ‘Brontë’s rendition of Vashti as the embodiment of undisciplined gender and uncontrollable desire’ (1994, 218), and then argues for Vashti’s transgressive ‘Jewishness’ as well. Surridge paints her likewise: ‘Vashti represents the expressive, the passionate, the woman in the public eye, the Jewish, the foreign, the French’ (1995, 9). Both, however, err in locating Vashti as a Jewish figure.⁶ Further, Ramli (2010)⁷ assumes Brontë’s Vashti’s racial foreignness without textual support, and Johnson (1990)⁸ refers to her as Jewish, with both compromising the authority of the text of Villette. Unlike Princess Alcharisi in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), the Vashti of Villette is nowhere mentioned as a Jewish, French or even of foreign character, just as the Vashti of the Book of Esther is none of these things, but rather simply Persian (if not quintessentially so, as queen of the Persian kingdom and ostensibly a descendant of its royal lineage). These analyses muddle the identities of Brontë and Lucy, Rachel and Vashti, and do not support an explanation of Lucy Snowe’s encounter with the actress Vashti and its subsequent import within the novel’s wider Book of Esther context.

Much closer to the mark, Joyce Zonana provides a paragraph-long sketch of the Book of Esther in Villette and Jane Eyre that recognises its wider significance in Brontë’s writing:

The relationship between Vashti’s rebellion and Esther’s triumph are central to understanding Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Villette. Each novel is, like the Book of Esther, a ‘romance of providence’ (Gill 8), a Bildungsroman detailing the rise to power and position of ‘an orphan and an exile’ (McCrie 312); in each, a tyrannically Orientalist—or darkly Catholic—background provides the context for the heroine’s assertion of alternative Protestant values. Focusing in each novel on the transformation of despotic men, Brontë uses the underpattern of Esther to explore the consequences of overt defiance of patriarchal power and to provide religious sanction for the class mobility and romantic fulfillment of her struggling young women. Each of her heroines writes the story of her life like Esther who ‘with full authority’ writes to confirm the annual celebration of Purim (9: 29)—and who was believed by some commentators to have been the author of her Book. And in each novel, Brontë’s heroine, as Esther, encounters a Vashti whose rebellion makes possible her own ultimate success. (1996, 241)

Zonana rightly locates Lucy as Esther based on her orphanhood, exile and defence of her minority religion, as well as one whose experience of a Vashti enables her defiance. Indeed, as a woman and a Protestant, Lucy must defy M. Paul to assert herself and her beliefs. However, Zonana ignores Lucy’s background beyond her religion, whereas Lucy is berated as an ethnic and national foreigner and as a native English speaker in a Francophone country. It is the compounded facets of Lucy’s gender and foreignness, as reflected in each of Lucy’s targeted sub-identities—her womanhood and her national and religious ‘otherness’—that harken back to the Book of Esther most clearly and are of greatest importance to the hermeneutic. This article thus focuses on Lucy’s gendered, national and religious identities by analysing the abuse she suffers as a Protestant English woman who is a stranger in a strange land and argues that Villette reflects an intersectional hermeneutic on the Book of Esther used to address sexism and xenophobia.

The intertextual links between the tales reflect the gendered, national and religious concerns common to both, as Lucy’s exponentially disadvantaged identity as a Protestant Englishwoman in Labassecour is foregrounded in Queen Esther’s exponentially disadvantaged identity as a Jewish woman in ancient Persia. A close reading of Lucy as Esther also reveals the influence of Vashti on her emergence from passive to active and serves to locate her male counterparts in their parallel biblical roles. M. Paul’s egoistical, vindictive and sexually charged relationship with Lucy make him a hybrid Ahasuerus/Haman, whereas Dr Graham Bretton is cast in the part of filial guardian and potential husband modelled by Mordecai. The Book of Esther serves Villette as a loose literary model from the novel’s outset to its very end, and offers Brontë a template for expressing the multiplicities of prejudice faced by the national and religious foreigner who is also a woman, validating Lucy’s rebellion and victory against her own marginalisation, if not erasure.

Queen Esther and Lucy Snowe: Orphans, Foreigners and Passive-to-Active Protagonists

Considering them in tandem, Lucy Snowe’s early biography echoes that of Queen Esther. Like Esther, she is an orphan; apart from her cousin–guardian, Dr Bretton (her Mordecai), and his mother, she has no friends or family to speak of. Esther and Lucy are both tabula rasa: the events surrounding their orphanhood remain unknown, their pasts written off the page. Like Esther, who is first taken by Mordecai (Esther 2:7), then taken to the king’s harem by Hegai (2:8) and then taken before Ahasuerus (2:16), Lucy too is passively ‘taken’—taken in by the Brettons upon becoming an orphan (Brontë [1853] 1979, 62), taken up by the merest suggestions of strangers as to her next step (as when a waiter’s words lead her onto a ship, and Ginevra’s words lead Lucy to Rue Fossette) (110, 121), taken in to Madame Beck’s pensionnat (126), and then physically taken in again by her only family, the Brettons, when Dr Bretton finds her collapsed on the street (225). Like Esther, Lucy speaks little, and at one point she reflects inwardly: ‘Oh, my childhood! I had feelings: passive as I lived, little as I spoke, cold as I looked … I studiously held the quick of my nature’ (175). With Dr Bretton, too, Lucy is ‘not in the habit of speaking’, even in her defence, and holds the view that ‘in quarters where we can never be rightly known, we take pleasure, I think, in being consummately ignored’ (163–64). She maintains not only a tendency towards but a preference for going unnoticed.

Her exchanges with M. Paul, a most powerful figure at the Pensionnat, are often similar: ‘I was silent. He came into the room, sat down on the bench about two yards from me, and persevered long, and, for him, patiently, in attempts to draw me into conversation—attempts necessarily unavailing, because I could not talk. At last I entreated to be let alone’ (315). She sums herself up in a line: ‘Left alone, I was passive; repulsed, I withdrew; forgotten—my lips would not utter, nor my eyes dart a reminder’ (504). Like Esther, Lucy belongs to a society that values beauty above all and models femininity on speaking little and obeying much, deferring to the will of men and acting in an appropriately demure manner. As M. Paul goads Lucy:

A ‘woman of intellect,’ it appeared, was … a thing for which there was neither place nor use in creation, wanted neither as wife nor worker. Beauty anticipated her in the first office. He believed in his soul that lovely, placid, and passive feminine mediocrity was the only pillow on which manly thought and sense could find rest for its aching temples; and as to work, male mind alone could work to any good practical result—hein? (443)

Like Esther, the expectation falls on Lucy to be ‘seen, not heard’, to serve and to please, and to resist any expression of intellect or individual will. Lucy’s passive demeanour again wins out as she admits, ‘This “hein?” was a note of interrogation intended to draw from me contradiction or objection. However, I only said … “[That doesn’t concern me: I do not care about it]”’ (443, trans. 616n8).

As with the Book of Esther, Villette is also the story of the ‘stranger in a strange land’ (Exodus 2:22). Esther’s origins as a Jew in exile and her vulnerability as such in the Persian kingdom is echoed in Lucy’s vulnerability as a British Protestant among Roman Catholics in Labassecour. On her first night in the new country and town, Lucy asks for directions and admits, ‘I am quite a stranger in Villette’ (124). Once she arrives at Mme Beck’s pensionnat she narrates, ‘All this was very un-English: truly I was in a foreign land’ (132), echoing biblical language. As in the Book of Esther, Nebuchadnezzar, the king of exile, is referenced (Esther 2:6); in Lucy’s narration of her life in Villette he symbolises the religiously coercive figure (three times in fact; see pp. 163, 280, 356). Both Esther and Lucy speak the local language of their host polities, particularly to the men who insist upon imposing their linguistic dominance over them, and each carves out a space for herself in a house not her own and even advances within it—but their essential national and religious difference leaves them vulnerable.

Lastly, their character arcs follow similar trajectories from passive to active, displaying like narrative patterns. As Ahasuerus carts Esther to the royal harem to prepare and perform in the bedroom for him, M. Paul takes Lucy up to the school’s attic to prepare and perform in the school play for him. Timothy Beal notes that the sparse details in our introduction to Esther ‘make clear Esther’s precarious place as orphaned, exiled Jewoman within the story world while emphasising her potential status as an object of exchange among men. In this way she finds herself signed up before beginning to play’ (1997, 34–35). Similarly, Lucy finds herself signed up to perform a part in M. Paul’s vaudeville before beginning to play, locked into her role before she can contest. Having lost a student actress, M. Paul alights upon Lucy, berating her foreignness while making clear that she must obey or lose all his esteem:

it is the Englishwoman. Never mind. Although she is thoroughly English, and therefore thoroughly prudish—she will do what I require, or I will know why … Listen! … The case shall be stated, and you shall then answer me Yes or No; and according to your answer shall I ever after estimate you … it is not an interesting, not an amiable, part; their vile amour-propre—that base quality of which women have so much—would revolt from it. Englishwomen are either the best or the worst of their sex. God knows I hate them like the plague, ordinarily. (202, trans. 605n9, 10)

The allusion to sexuality with M. Paul’s accusation of Lucy as ‘thoroughly English, and therefore thoroughly prudish’ further emphasises the tensions that underpin this interaction and performance. M. Paul bullies Lucy by branding stereotypes of her nationality as much as her gender, cornering her into appearing in the play or else lose all his good opinion, and yet ironically suggesting that should she accept the part, it would be at the expense of her ‘amour-propre’ (self-respect).

The play itself is, incidentally, a kind of reverse Book of Esther: male suitors seek the hand of a coquette, vying for her attention and hoping to be chosen. Lucy is pressed to play one such suitor, and M. Paul locks her in the attic with rats and vermin for company, ‘fasting and in prison’ (205) for most of the day until she learns her lines. His abusive coercion and restriction of her place him in the role of powerful, native patriarchal tyrant, and Lucy in that of a powerless female foreign subject. She is forced to perform for him much as Esther is forced to ‘perform’ for Ahasuerus.

In the ensuing relationship between M. Paul and Lucy, she is intermittently praised and criticised, adored and despised, bestowed gifts and publicly humiliated depending on M. Paul’s erratic moods and behaviours. Both Esther and Lucy have their people and religion threatened by their respective Haman/Ahasuerus, and both become outspoken defenders of their very ‘otherness’. And yet both conclude their tales as women in positions of rare authority, and given their compounded disadvantages, are astonishing successes, whereas their male counterparts are either hanged (Haman), disappear into the background (Ahasuerus) or lost at sea (M. Paul).

Vashti Resurrected: The Queen, the Actress and a Woman’s Revolution

The trajectory of Lucy’s transformation from victim to heroine hinges upon an exceptionally public gender iconoclasm embodied by Vashti in the chapter so titled (Ch. XXIII), marking the height of the novel’s intertextuality with the Book of Esther. Brontë resurrects the demoted Persian queen to spark awareness and defiance in Lucy, reconfiguring Vashti from a hidden shame (Bertha Mason) in Jane Eyre, to a veritable celebrity in Villette. In the former, Bertha Mason’s anti-patriarchal rebellion by burning down Rochester’s house and blinding him (indicative of his blindness to his own sexism) may be overlooked by readers who dismiss her as ‘mad’. Further, the power imbalance persists, with Bertha suppressed to death while Rochester is free to marry Jane. By contrast, in Villette, Vashti is conspicuously named and expresses defiance openly on a grand stage; her performance, too, ignites a literal fire in the theatre indicative of social revolution, but as its harbinger, she walks out unscathed. Villette presents a new Vashti in Victorian culture—a heroine much more clearly defying systemic sexism and crying out for justice and women’s agency.

The Vashti of Villette is also a far more developed figure that reflects Brontë’s purpose: voicing the truth about women’s suffering irrespective of the social and theological difficulties it generates. Brontë’s Vashti is based on the author’s own experience watching the internationally renowned sensation Rachel Felix take to the stage, as recorded in a letter she wrote to Elizabeth Gaskell after seeing her perform in London in 1851: ‘Thackeray’s lectures and Rachel’s acting are the two things in this great Babylon which have stirred and interested me most—simply because in them I found most of what was genuine whether for good or evil’ (Wise and Symington [1851] 1932, 248). This remark is mirrored in Lucy’s impressions of Vashti in Villette and underpins Brontë’s rechristening of Rachel as Vashti. Unconcerned with how she will be perceived, Brontë notes, she airs what is rivetingly real. Brontë’s disregard for conventional morality as involves ‘good’ and ‘evil’ in the face of performances of truth lays the foundation for her Vashti as an anti-sexist, proto-feminist force.

When Lucy first lays eyes on the actress Vashti, she explains: ‘I had heard this woman termed “plain,” and I expected bony harshness and grimness—something large, angular, sallow. What I saw was the shadow of a royal Vashti: a queen, fair as the day once, turned pale now like twilight, and wasted like wax in flame’ (Brontë [1853] 1979, 339). Lucy sees not a reigning Queen Vashti, but a fallen and deposed Vashti, a banished former queen, passionate in her fury and revived to air the result of the exile and isolation she was forced into in exchange for asserting her dignity. Lucy’s subsequent experience and characterisation of her oscillates between ‘marvellous’ and ‘horrible’, ‘hell[ish]’ and ‘angel[ic]’ (339–40). Their stark contrast merits considering two of her descriptions in tandem:

For a while—a long while—I thought it was only a woman, though an unique woman, who moved in might and grace before this multitude. By-and-by I recognized my mistake. Behold! I found upon her something neither of woman nor of man: in each of her eyes sat a devil. These evil forces bore her through the tragedy, kept up her feeble strength—for she was but a frail creature; and as the action rose and the stir deepened, how wildly they shook her with their passions of the pit! They wrote HELL on her straight, haughty brow. (339)

Wicked, perhaps, she is, but also she is strong, and her strength has conquered Beauty, has overcome Grace, and bound both at her side … Her hair, flying loose in revel or war, is still an angel’s hair, and glorious under halo. Fallen, insurgent, banished, she remembers the heaven where she rebelled. Heaven’s light, following her exile, pierces its confines, and discloses their forlorn remoteness. (340)

Lucy is captivated by Vashti’s dual nature—simultaneously ‘devilish’ and a fallen ‘angel’ pursued by the divine—creating a fault line in her conceptions of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ but also of ‘male’ and ‘female’. Many scholars focus on the way Lucy’s cultural conditioning regarding gender and gender roles is challenged by Vashti, whose performance devastates its carefully erected boundaries. Being ‘neither of woman nor of man’ (339), Carruthers notes that ‘her example represents to Lucy the possibility of the deconstruction of gender’ (2007, 105). She crosses over the divide between male and female because her body is not the object on display, nor does she adhere to female gender codes; rather, she displays attributes considered male, and undesirable in a female—strength, thunderous self-expression, mutiny, violent struggle—to lay bare her torment as a woman. Her transformation on stage is so complete that she is unrecognisable as a woman, but neither is she a man. Vashti’s elective, performative, emotional nakedness contrasts the very source of the biblical Vashti’s plight—refusing Ahasuerus’s demand that she display her highly sexualised, physical beauty to satisfy his egoistic pleasure. Now, calculatedly choosing what to display and when to display it, it is the ugliness of her suffering, not the beauty of her body, that captures their attention—in both a poetic correction of, and a brutal war against, the terms of her banishment. She steps beyond the binaries of gender expectations and performs to a sea of onlookers who have no choice but to confront her ‘unsexed’ power and the tragedy of her fall from grace. For Lucy, Vashti’s example offers a radical answer to sexism: a cultural de-gendering of the self via a refusal to operate within normative gender constructs. As opposed to remaining silent, beautifying herself for men, repressing her innermost passions and hiding her intellect, she discovers the dehumanisation inherent in the objectification of women, the freedom of unrestrained self-expression, and the necessity and genius of openly revealing one’s capacities and passions.

The contradictory language in the Vashti scene is mirrored in Lucy’s cognitive dissonance, torn between her social conditioning and a more powerful truth challenging it. She narrates, ‘Vashti was not good, I was told; and I have said she did not look good: though a spirit, she was a spirit out of Tophet. Well, if so much of unholy force can arise from below, may not an equal efflux of sacred essence descend one day from above?’ (340). She begins to realise that she has been conditioned to believe in Vashti’s base origins; she has been told Vashti is not good; this is the judgement of others. She admits Vashti does not look good; this is the Book of Esther’s sex and beauty pageant impression. However, none of those impressions can shake Lucy’s confrontation with Vashti’s testimony. She begins to question the wholly demonic or devilish branding of Vashti’s energy and consider whether there is not an equally sacred source for her struggle, and a place in the future, ‘one day’, for the total reorientation of a woman’s life.

An Esther Transformed: Lucy after Experiencing Vashti

Lucy’s transformation after seeing Vashti is most observable in relation to M. Paul. Alternately favouring and humiliating Lucy, desirous of her admiration yet hostile to her nation, religion and gender, M. Paul reflects a hybrid monarch–tyrant whose moods and motives are never clear to Lucy, but who consistently abuses her as a Protestant Englishwoman. He is part Ahasuerus, who issues the decree against women, and part Haman, who issues the decree against the Jews, the ‘other’. As a hybrid of the two, M. Paul’s attack on Lucy’s identity is not divided into parts but remains whole—she is a worse English Protestant for being a woman, and a worse woman for being an English Protestant. Lucy transforms into an active, Vashti-inspired Esther vis-à-vis M. Paul’s role as an Ahasuerus–Haman, as though the two characters are two sides of his bipolarity: the one concerned only with his own self-aggrandisement, display, power and command—especially over women, and especially over Lucy—and the other a tyrant bent on her full submission to him (and thus her erasure), scornful of her foreign identity and values.

Throughout the narrative, regardless of Lucy’s behaviour, M. Paul manages to blame her manner and rail against her misconduct on account of her nationality, religion and gender—even when the characteristics he condemns as hers are completely at odds. On the one hand he berates Lucy for being ‘the Englishwoman … thoroughly English, and therefore thoroughly prudish’ (202), and on the other, for looking upon the painting of Cleopatra, he descries her ‘[a]stounding singular audacity!’ (277), maintaining, ‘[y]ou nurslings] of Protestantism astonish me. You unguarded Englishwomen walk calmly amidst red-hot ploughshares and escape burning’ (280). He publicly protests her dress, declaring that ‘Miss Lucy is as coquettish as ten Parisian women … Was there even an equal to this Englishwoman. Just look at her hat, her gloves, her boots!’ despite their neatness and simplicity (471, trans. 617n4) while elsewhere he calls her a ‘terrible Englishwoman—a virago’ (413, trans. 614n7). He attacks her faith as well, as a means of explaining her individuality: ‘He could see in me nothing Christian: like many other Protestants, I revelled in the pride and self-will of paganism’ (387), and repeatedly attempts to convert her. Lastly, he attacks her intellect as a woman—on the one hand, he ‘denounced my mingled rashness and ignorance’ (278) while on the other, he ‘threatened with I know not what doom, if I ever trespassed the limits proper to my sex, and conceived a contraband appetite for unfeminine knowledge’ (440). The inconsistency of his spiteful remarks—whether to defame her as prudish or unguarded, coquettish or a virago, too shy or too brazen, too religious yet not properly religious enough, too ignorant or too intellectually curious—underpins the fact of his resolve to injure her as a female and foreigner without reason. Like Ahasuerus and Haman, his motivation is personal—his actions are those of a moody god who has not won Lucy’s total self-prostration in worship.

Witnessing Vashti’s performance takes the impetus towards defiance that was latent in Lucy, and which she had tried to suppress, and increasingly brings it out of her as the novel progresses. Two scenes following her exposure to Vashti, both of which lean on the Book of Esther for their basic plot, depict Lucy’s newfound courage as an Esther figure. The first parallel scene is noted by Joyce Zonana, who observes that:

having witnessed and been inspired by Vashti, Lucy assumes the role of Esther, resolutely entering the despotic M. Paul’s classroom after he has threatened death by hanging to anyone who ventures in (410). The scene is written as comedy, but the allusion is to the Persian queen who risks her life when she enters Ahaseurus’s chamber. (1996, 242)

Just as in the Book of Esther all are aware that ‘whosoever, whether man or women, shall come unto the king into the inner court, who is not called, there is one law of his to put him to death’ (Esther 4:11), after repeated, unwelcomed interruptions during a lesson, M. Paul hyperbolically cries out, ‘From this moment—the classroom is forbidden. The first person to open that door or pass that division will be hanged—even if it is Madame Beck herself!’ (410, trans. 613n2). However, where Zonana’s analysis begins and ends in these two lines, the whole scene features a prolonged interplay with Esther’s appearance before Ahasuerus that directly addresses the sexism and xenophobia Lucy faces, and how she counters them as a resolute and rule-breaking Esther figure.

Brontë begins to play with questions of hierarchy in gender and in national–religious othering through the Book of Esther in this scene, specifically using Lucy’s embroidery and M. Paul’s ‘bonnet-grec’ as symbols to indicate traditional gender roles. Urged to enter M. Paul’s classroom, like Esther, Lucy initially pushes back, but ultimately she accepts her consignment and enters the forbidden space despite the risk. Though M. Paul is a caricature of disgruntlement when he demands ‘chord and gibbet’ with which to hang the intruder, Lucy produces her ‘needleful of embroidering thread with such accommodating civility as could not but allay some portion at least of his surplus irritation’ (411–12). While strategically disarming M. Paul with humour, she is also quintessentially Esther-like in this moment: she maintains a veneer of docile femininity, which she means him to read as servitude even as she defies him by flouting his rules. This, however, does not accomplish her goal; although Lucy succeeds in relaying the message, M. Paul still ‘would not leave his present class, let all the officials in Villette send for him’ (412).

Lucy takes a different approach when she at last reaches for M. Paul’s hat, as though willing him to prepare to leave. Gone is her charming docility, which is instead replaced by a highly unfeminine challenge to his law. As a result, he mutters, ‘if Miss Lucy meddled with his bonnet-grec—she might just put it on herself, turn garcon for the occasion, and benevolently go to the Athénée in his stead’ (412–13). The coarse allusion to her gender-swapping signifies M. Paul’s gendered critique of Lucy and harks back to Lucy’s exposure to cultural de-gendering through resistance via Vashti. Her shift from role-playing according to gender conventions (symbolised by the embroidery) to her insistence that he indeed heed her by taking up his hat (a symbol of his social status and power as a man) is felt as overly masculine, and his sarcastic suggestion is meant to remind her that it is not Lucy they want, but M. Paul. Lucy’s insistence, however, signifies her renewed courage and defiance after seeing Vashti. As Vashti is ‘neither of man nor of woman’, so too does Lucy begin to shed the binaries of societal gender norms to which she had hitherto adhered, and push boundaries in the face of a reigning patriarch.

When M. Paul refuses Lucy and does not take up his hat, it slides down the desk and pushes his glasses off, sending them shattering on the floor. While Lucy ‘trembles’ (413), her victory is inscribed in this moment—by becoming fearful of him again as opposed to insistent, she shatters his anger. Metaphorically, however, M. Paul’s inability to accept Lucy’s slight alteration of gender roles is underwritten as his being blind, symbolised by his broken glasses (harkening back, as well, to Rochester’s similar inability and subsequent blindness in Jane Eyre, where he too is the novel’s Ahasuerus figure). In all this, however, M. Paul maintains his Haman-like prejudices against her otherness, as a woman and as an Anglican:

Still gently railing at me as ‘une forte femme—une Anglaise terrible—une petite casse-tout [a formidable woman—a terrible Englishwoman—a virago]’—he declared that … it was absolutely like the ‘grand Empereur, smashing the vase to inspire dismay.’ So, at last, crowning himself with his bonnet-grec, and taking his ruined ‘lunettes’ from my hand … [he] went off to the Athénée … (413–14, trans. 614n7)

Despite his pliancy, he abuses her even as he adheres to her. She is a constant target of his sexism and xenophobia, and she must forever consider how to offset her ‘offending’ identities to achieve her aims. The language of royalty—comparing Lucy to the ‘grand Empereur’, and ‘crowning’ himself with his hat—closes the scene with a final allusion to its source text, and the royal couple. While deliberately farcical, the reappropriation of this high-court Bible scene to inform Lucy’s unique position, courage and success, despite her disadvantages, is forward-thinking in its use of the Book of Esther—both regarding Vashti, her inspiration, and Esther, her model.

Lucy publicly defies M. Paul again in a second scene, which follows the repeating internal pattern found in the Book of Esther of the lone rebel who is castigated and considered the representative of an entire people who are then subsequently oppressed. According to M. Paul’s desire, for his birthday fête, as he ‘sat throned on his estrade’ (423) every member of the school presented him with a bouquet of flowers. Lucy reneges: ‘I only had no bouquet … I look on them as things rootless and perishable; their likeness to life makes me sad. I never offer flowers to those I love’ (424). Her reasons, like Vashti’s and like Mordecai’s private reasons for refusing, are honourable enough to her, though unspoken.

But like Vashti’s failure to appear before Ahasuerus, and like Mordecai’s refusal to bow before Haman, Lucy’s omission is received as an affront to M. Paul’s honour and is met with hyperbolic anger. As M. Paul waits for Lucy to offer a bouquet that does not come, Mlle Zélie St. Pierre, who seeks M. Paul’s affections, outs Lucy by saying, ‘For Meess Lucie, Monsieur will kindly make allowance; as a foreigner, she probably did not know our customs, or did not appreciate their significance. Meess Lucie has regarded this ceremony as too frivolous to be honoured by her observance’ (427). Zélie points to Lucy’s status ‘as a foreigner’, inculpating her and excoriating her English identity. Despite the small mountain of bouquets beside him, M. Paul responds only to Lucy’s omission, and Lucy’s presumedly haughty insubordination is the only action—or rather, like Vashti and Mordecai, inaction—of import.

His response is a fiery vengeance of biblical proportions, humiliating Lucy with a public tirade against Englishwomen before the entire school, Lucy being their only representative:

Never have I heard English women handled as M. Paul that morning handled them: he spared nothing—neither their minds, morals, manners, nor personal appearance. I specially remember his abuse of their tall stature, their long necks, their thin arms, their slovenly dress, their pedantic education, their impious scepticism(!), their insufferable pride, their pretentious virtue: over which he ground his teeth malignantly, and looked as if, had he dared, he would have said singular things. (428)

While Lucy is the sole source of his anger, he directs his slurs at all Anglican women, as though English Protestants as a national–religious entity and its objectionable women as a subgroup constitute an undesirable population of their own. In context, his ire is kindled by only one offender—just as Vashti and Mordecai were offending parties of one—while his response is both Ahasuerus-like and Haman-like, evoking blanket oppression of all three of the populations Lucy is made to represent: English Protestant women. When he is finished berating them (that is, her), he moves on to vilify England itself, its women as well as its men:

For some time the abuse of England and the English found and left me stolid: I bore it some fifteen minutes stoically enough; but this hissing cockatrice was determined to sting, and he said such things at last—fastening not only upon our women, but upon our greatest names and best men; sullying, the shield of Britannia, and dabbling the union jack in mud—that I was stung. With vicious relish he brought up the most spicy current continental historical falsehoods—than which nothing can be conceived more offensive. Zélie, and the whole class, became one grin of vindictive delight; for it is curious to discover how these clowns of Labassecour secretly hate England. (429)

Having adequately addressed her gendered failings as an Englishwoman, he attacks her national ones as a Brit, in a scene that most significantly develops M. Paul’s oppression of all aspects of her identity and moves her to respond. And it is not only M. Paul’s sexism and xenophobia she faces, but indeed the entire class’s systemic, xenophobic disparagement and ‘othering’ as they take pleasure in his humiliation of her.

But due to Vashti’s example, Lucy’s latent defiance finds its voice. She cries out against this most protracted and public of her identity flogging for the first time:

At last, I struck a sharp stroke on my desk, opened my lips, and let loose this cry:—‘Vive l’Angleterre, l’Histoire et les Héros! A bas la France, la Fiction et les Faquins!’ [Long live England, History, and Heroes! Down with France, Fiction and Fops!] The class was struck of a heap. I suppose they thought me mad. (429, trans. 615n6)

At last Lucy openly defends herself by declaring allegiance to her nation and identity, a feat all the more impressive given that she is a woman who is expected to—and usually does—stay silent. Like the climactic moment in which Esther points to the wicked Haman and announces herself as both a Jew and his sworn enemy, here Lucy embraces her national heritage with dramatic pride, and even counters M. Paul with her own disparagement of France. There is a farcical irony to the scene that reflects the spirit of the Book of Esther, and its narrator’s pointed depiction of the court and kingdom as hypocritical and ludicrous while its women and minorities are in the right and yet oppressed. Not only are his spiteful words suffered silently by all present, but also taken as his due for Lucy’s lone omission. By no character (save Lucy) is it regarded as hysterical or extravagant; as the ruling Haman–Ahasuerus of the plot, his word is gold. By contrast, when Lucy the foreign woman utters but one rallying cry in her own just defence, she is ‘mad’.

Later, M. Paul also attempts to convert Lucy to Catholicism. When she rebuffs his attempts to sway her with an evangelical pamphlet, he says, ‘It is your religion—your strange, self-reliant, invulnerable creed, whose influence seems to clothe you in, I know not what, unblessed panoply … your terrible, proud, earnest Protestantism, there is the danger … just now—how you handled that tract—my God! I thought Lucifer smiled’ (512). Only after her outburst above can Lucy state, plainly and simply, to Monsieur Paul, even in the throes of their mutual affection, ‘I am a Protestant’ (584), echoing Esther’s self-assertion as a Jew. Like Esther, Lucy had no intention of serving as the token ‘type’ on behalf of her people and her sex; but once she is thus targeted, she rises to the occasion—and the narrative ultimately celebrates her unlikely success. After he has left on a sea voyage, M. Paul responds to her in one of his letters, ‘Remain a Protestant. My little English Puritan, I love Protestantism in you. I own its severe charm. There is something in its ritual I cannot receive myself, but it is the sole creed for “Lucy”’ (595). Such a transformation from his earlier attempts to convert her is attributable to her own staunch self-assertion, inspired by Vashti’s rebellion and Esther’s example.

As Esther is celebrated not in her role as adopted daughter/betrothed to Mordecai, nor as queen-wife to Ahasuerus, nor in motherhood (Esther has no children in the Book), but rather as heroine to the Jewish people, so too is Lucy defined not by the most common of womanly roles (by the end of the novel she is defined by none of them), but by her victorious retrenchment against attacks on her identity and by her success and power. By the close of the novel, with M. Paul apparently drowned in a shipwreck, she is directress of her own school for young women and beholden to no one. She may live an independent life without the many pressures dictating what she must be: nationally, religiously or as a woman.

Conclusion

From first to last, the Book of Esther provides Brontë with a prime biblical model for Lucy’s confrontations with sexism and xenophobia, offering us a window into the layered concerns of Villette. Considering Lucy’s journey as an Esther figure and the rest of Brontë’s personalities in light of the full biblical cast, we may divine how the Book of Esther proved attractive to Brontë as a religious and literary modality, ripe with imminently relevant themes. Such close reading brings Brontë’s insights and aspirations regarding women and subjugated national–religious classes into a sharper, more central focus, and engages Brontë in the hermeneutic discourse on the Book of Esther itself. In that sense, Brontë is one of the first to take part in its interpretation with an eye for its treatment of women and the national–religious minority, the ‘other’, in tandem. Those issues most at stake for Brontë—the arbitrary dominance of man and suppression of woman, and the unassailable moral right to a religious and national selfhood—find expression as poignantly in Villette as she divines them in the Book of Esther itself. And as the writer–protagonist of her own story, like Esther, it is Lucy’s own words—indeed Brontë’s words—that will live on to give her readers the courage to defy gender expectations and pursue a daring outer life that reflects their own inner will.

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Channah Damatov

Channah Damatov is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Comparative Literature at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. She is under review to receive her PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she was a Kaete Klausner Doctoral Fellow (2016–2022). Her dissertation and her continued research is on the reception of the Book of Esther in Victorian literature, with a focus on novels by Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot. Her wider research interests include biblical reception and hermeneutics, immigrant narratives, and feminist studies in literature.

Notes

1 He copied it ‘from Finden’s engraving in the Forget Me Not annual of 1831’ (Alexander 1995, 298n30).

2 Hester is a common Victorian variant of Esther, although Hesther with an extra ‘h’ is an unusual spelling.

3 Much of contemporary scholarship on the Book of Esther reads the story intersectionally, by considering the gender oppression and ethnic oppression therein as inextricably linked. Those who have informed my reading of the Book of Esther as such include Zonana (1993, 1996), Beal (1997), Butting (1999) and Sabato (2019), among others.

4 All biblical quotes are taken from the King James Version.

5 Anita Levy makes a similar argument concerning Villette’s Vashti breaking dividing lines, writing that ‘she transforms the binary dividing man from woman’, among other boundaries, to create a new middle (1999, 74).

6 Jo Carruthers also notes Surridge’s error and asserts that the Vashti of the Book of Esther is Persian, and that neither Vashti is Jewish (2007, 106).

7 Ramli erroneously argues that Villette ‘raises the issue of Vashti’s foreignness or racial difference’ (2010, 126).

8 Johnson conflates Rachel with Vashti, asserting that ‘she is a Jewess in the midst of Christians’ (1990, 624).