Charlotte Bronte's Villette: The First Moment Of Surveillance

Charlotte Bronte’s last novel, Villette (1853), tells the story of Lucy Snowe, our narrator, who is particularly unforthcoming with information about herself and as a result, characters like Headmistress Madame Beck and Lucy’s eventual lover, M. Paul Emanuel, resort to spying on Lucy in order to learn more about her. Lucy Snowe, too, uses surveillance to learn more about the people she is with. It’s important to acknowledge these moments of surveillance because “there are more than 175 occasions when Lucy or other characters in the novel observe individuals while assessing their character” (May 51) which help Lucy become her own person. Therefore, surveillance becomes a prominent part of Villette and has been a topic of discussion for many

Through her observing, she is able to learn for herself how passion can be expressed, and the silliness of the way Polly expresses her passion, as she watches a young Polly interactions with Graham. Through her observations of Polly, Lucy examines what it means to be raised as a proper woman of a particular status and how Polly conforms to those societal expectations. Lucy is shocked by her behavior when she sits on Graham’s lap: “The action, I remember, struck me as strangely rash; exciting the feeling one might experience on seeing an animal dangerous by nature, and but half-tamed by art, too heedlessly fondled. Not that I feared Graham would hurt her, or very roughly check her; but I though she can risk of incurring such a careless, impatient repulse, as would be worse almost to her than a blow” (33). It is within these moments that we can see the first signs of autonomy that Lucy will continue to develop as the narrative moves along. In her observations, Lucy learns about how men – in particular Graham – can monopolize a woman into thinking that her only desire is to entertain and satisfy the opposite gender and what little power Lucy has to stop either Polly or Graham from behaving in this