‘A Still Ecstasy of Freedom and Enjoyment’: Walking the City in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette

Abstract

This article situates Charlotte Brontë’s writing within the context of mid-nineteenth-century discourses of gender and travel, and posits that Brontë contributes to the discursive construct of the flâneuse through her writing about women walking the city in her letters from Belgium and in the novel Villette (1853). Through a critical framework drawing together literary historicism on women in the Victorian city and mobility theories of embodied and sensory movement, the analysis reveals how Brontë foregrounds the experience of the body in her writing of women walking, and uses this as a mode through which to explore gendered discourses of mobility, and especially women’s urban walking. It argues that Brontë offers a new model of female urban spectatorship which privileges the body of the flâneuse as the prime site of knowing the city; this positively reconfigures the possibilities for autonomy and agency that urban walking affords, while at the same time making the body a site through which ambivalence about women’s mobility is expressed. The article reveals Charlotte Brontë to be a writer actively engaged with discourses of mobility and modernity that have been overlooked in her work, and situates Brontë as a significant contributor to debates about women and the city. It advances literary histories of city walking by locating Villette as a key participant within the field, and contributes to Brontë studies by revealing new perspectives on the significance of women’s travel in her works.

Keywords:

• walking
• mobility
• urban
• gender
• embodiment
• Charlotte Brontë
• Villette

Notes

1. Charlotte Brontë, Villette, ed. Helen M. Cooper (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 54.

2. Wendy Parkins’s Mobility and Modernity in Women’s Novels 1850s–1930s: Women Moving Dangerously (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) represents the most substantial consideration of women’s fictional mobilities, while more recently Anna Despotopoulou’s Women and the Railway, 1850–1915 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015) examines women’s cultural interactions within the context of the railway. On George Eliot, see Kathleen McCormack, George Eliot’s English Travels: Composite Characters and Coded Communications (London: Routledge, 2005) and George Eliot in Society: Travels Abroad and Sundays at the Priory (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013). On Elizabeth Gaskell, see chapter 5 of Deborah Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City (London: Cornell University Press, 1995) and Sue Zemka, ‘Brief Encounters: Street Scenes in Gaskell’s Manchester’, ELH 76.3 (2009), 793–819.

3. Works such as Enid Duthie’s The Foreign Vision of Charlotte Brontë (London: Macmillan, 1975) and Herbert E. Wroot’s The Sources of Charlotte Brontë’s Novels (Shipley: Caxton Press, 1935) detail the connections between people and places in Brontë’s life and writing in Brussels. On cosmopolitanism in Brontë’s Belgium, see for example James Buzard, Disorienting Fiction: the Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005) and Amanda Anderson, The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001). Some consideration has been given to the context of emigration in Brontë’s works: see Rita S. Kranidis, The Victorian Spinster and Colonial Emigration: Contested Subjects (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999) and Anne Longmuir, ‘Emigrant Spinsters and the Construction of Englishness in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette’, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 4.3 (2008) <http://www.ncgsjournal.com/issue43/issue43.htm>.

4. See Deborah Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City, and Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets; and most recently, Lauren Elkin, Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London (London: Chatto & Windus, 2016).

5. Letter of 29th September 1841 to Elizabeth Branwell, in Charlotte Brontë, The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, ed. Margaret Smith, vol. I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 268. The plan was dropped as the sisters failed to secure any pupils for the school: see 14th November 1844 to Ellen Nussey, in Brontë, Letters, vol. I, p. 373–4.

6. 29th September 1841 to Elizabeth Branwell, in Brontë, Letters, vol. I, p. 268.

7. 29th September 1841 to Elizabeth Branwell, in Brontë, Letters, vol. I, p. 268.

8. 29th September 1841 to Elizabeth Branwell, in Brontë, Letters, vol. I, p. 268.

9. Charlotte’s friend Mary Taylor departed for New Zealand in March 1845 and the pair corresponded for the rest of Charlotte’s life. James Taylor of Smith, Elder & Co. (of no relation to Mary Taylor) went to India in 1851 to manage a branch of the company under the title of Smith, Taylor & Co.; see 4–5th April 1851 to Ellen Nussey on his departure, in Charlotte Brontë, The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, ed. Margaret Smith, vol. II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), p. 597–8. Thereafter, there are intermittent references to James Taylor’s time in India, with fears over the absence of letters from him for some months – ‘all is silent as the grave’, writes Brontë to Ellen Nussey on 1st July 1852, in Charlotte Brontë, The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, ed. Margaret Smith, vol. III (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), p. 57 – and ‘complaints of his temper and nerves being rendered dreadfully excitable by the hot climate’; 11th January 1853 to Ellen Nussey, in Brontë, Letters, vol. III, p. 103.

10. 14th August 1839 to Ellen Nussey, in Brontë, Letters, vol. I, p. 200.

11. 13th July 1848 to W. S. Williams, in Brontë, Letters, vol. II, p. 84.

12. 4th September 1848 to Mary Taylor, in Brontë, Letters, vol. II, p. 112.

13. Brontë visited London again in 1849, 1850, 1851 and 1853; Edinburgh was visited in 1850; her honeymoon journey to Ireland came in 1854; see 18th July 1854 to Catherine Wooler on the packet steamer, in Brontë, Letters, vol. III, p. 278.

14. See for example Brontë’s letter to Margaret Wooler detailing the advice of her doctor to travel to the northern seaside rather than the south; 12th March 1852, in Brontë, Letters, vol. III, p. 29. She discusses her stay in a further letter of 23rd June 1852 to Margaret Wooler, in Brontë, Letters, vol. III, p. 55–6.

15. 5th January 1855 to Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, in Brontë, Letters, vol. III, p. 318.

16. See Lucasta Miller, The Brontë Myth (London: Vintage, 2002), p. 2.

17. 28th December 1846 to Ellen Nussey, in Brontë, Letters, vol. I, p. 509.

18. 7th August 1841 to Ellen Nussey, in Brontë, Letters, vol. I, p. 266.

19. 6th November 1851 to Elizabeth Gaskell, in Brontë, Letters, vol. II, p. 710.

20. For longer discussion of these episodes of travel, see chapters 1 and 3 of Charlotte Mathieson, Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

21. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847), ed. Margaret Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 109.

22. 2nd September 1843 to Emily Brontë, in Brontë, Letters, vol. I, p. 329.

23. Filipa Matos Wunderlich, ‘Walking and Rhythmicity: Sensing Urban Space’, Journal of Urban Design 13.1 (2008), 125–39 (p. 132).

24. There is a wealth of writing on the problematic relationship between women and the city in the mid-nineteenth century: see Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets; Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis; Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women (London: Virago, 1991); Mary Ryan, Women in Public Places: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825 – 1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).

25. Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women 1850–1920 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992), p. 297.

26. Wunderlich, ‘Walking and Rhythmicity’, p. 132.

27. See Tim Cresswell, ‘Towards a Politics of Mobility’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28 (2010), 17–31 (p. 25), on the work of the body in producing mobility and travel as travail.

28. David Macauley, ‘Walking the City: An Essay on Peripatetic Practices and Politics’, Capitalism Nature Socialism 11.4 (2000), 3–43 (p. 7).

29. Cresswell, ‘Towards a Politics of Mobility’, p. 20.

30. Brontë, Villette, p. 49. Subsequent references appear in parentheses in the text.

31. Paul Rodaway, Sensuous Geographies: Body, Sense and Place (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 148.

32. Luce Irigaray, ‘Interview with Luce Irigaray’ in Marie-Françoise Hans and Gilles Lapouge, Les Femmes, La Pornographie et L’Erotisme (Paris: Seuil, 1978), p. 50.

33. Rodaway, Sensuous Geographies, p. 49, p. 44.

34. Rodaway, Sensuous Geographies, p. 42.

35. Rodaway, Sensuous Geographies, p. 125.

36. Rodaway, Sensuous Geographies, p. 50.

37. Wunderlich, ‘Walking and Rhythmicity’, p. 128.

38. Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets, p. 3.

39. Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets, p. 143.

40. Parkins, Mobility and Modernity in Women’s Novels, p. 2, p. 13.

41. On Brontë’s sea-sickness during crossing, see Claire Harman, Charlotte Brontë: A Life (London: Viking, 2015), p. 137. On the Channel crossing in Villette, and especially Lucy’s sea-sickness, see chapter 3 of Mathieson, Mobility in the Victorian Novel. As Smith notes, Brontë appears to combine both the 1842 journey with her family and her solo 1843 voyage into the Villette passage: see Brontë, Letters, vol. I, p. 309, n. 2–3. Both Brontë and Lucy Snowe appear to travel in mixed company, with no special provision for solo women.

42. Linda McDowell, Gender, Identity and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), p. 154.

43. See Villette, chapter 20.