Curiosity, Surveillance and Detection in Charlotte Brontë'sVillette

Abstract

The article offers a contextualization of female curiosity by relating it to different characters who, in the course of Villette, adopt a criminal, sexual and clinical gaze and use it as a tool to make sense both of gendered and normative reality; I will discuss their self-fashioning in the light of — and as a response to — the constraints of the strictly patrolled and inquisitive patriarchal and religious community at the Pensionnat and in Villette as a whole. In reading the system of surveillance and detection at the Rue Fossette, I will relate questions of the marketability of commodified knowledge and a pseudo-scientific reliance on phrenology to Lucy Snowe's successful negotiation of this society by participating in an economics of love which remains untouched by the moral taint of espionage and the invasion and tradable uses of privacy.