Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, September 22nd, 2005
[W]hat a melancholy pleasure I should feel in dwelling on the recollection of my early friend! --Charlotte Bronte (1)
This essay intends to dwell (2) on obsession's implication in the melancholic pleasure structuring Charlotte Bronte's Villette (1853). Specifically, it chronicles how the novel's narrator, Lucy Snowe, manipulates various forms of mental fixation in an attempt to find her authorial voice and, consequently, to avoid the rest cure (or, worse yet, the sanitarium) to which many presumably "neurotic" nineteenth-century women were subjected. Quite often, Lucy pacifies her monomani...
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