Abstract
“Grossly material” is the description Lucy Snowe, heroine of Charlotte Brontë’s 1853 novel, Villette, ascribes to a Catholic mass. Yet her Christian name belongs to the martyr whose story epitomizes the lurid tales of saints Brontë’s heroine abhors. In some versions of the Saint Lucy narrative, her eyes were gouged out, and representations have portrayed Lucy holding a dish upon which rests her eyes—“grossly material” indeed and an example of how Brontë’s Lucy is separate from, but also bound up in, Catholic material culture. This chapter shows how Villette implicates itself in Jesuit deployments of objects and images which mediate Lucy Snowe’s experience and underline the author’s concerns with relationships between the intangible and the tangible and the significance of material culture in religion.
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Notes
- 1.
Thomas Carlyle, “Jesuitism,” 300.
- 2.
Carlyle, “Jesuitism,” 305.
- 3.
John W. O’Malley, The First Jesuits, 23–50. For more reading on the history of the Jesuits, see Francis Edwards, The Jesuits in England and Thomas Worcester, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits.
- 4.
Carlyle, “Jesuitism,” 310, 319.
- 5.
Charlotte Brontë, Villette, 494, 427. Subsequent citations are referenced by page number in the text.
- 6.
Simon Skinner, “Religion,” 103.
- 7.
Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 3rd series (1830–91), vol. 80, 1225, 617.
- 8.
Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 3rd series (1830–91), vol. 80, 617.
- 9.
See Jeffrey D. Burson and Jonathan Wright, eds., The Jesuit Suppression.
- 10.
Scholarship on nineteenth-century anti-Catholicism includes the following: Monika Mazurek, The Unknown Relatives; Michael E. Schiefelbein, The Lure of Babylon; Michael Wheeler, The Old Enemies.
- 11.
See the following: Susan M. Griffin, Anti-Catholicism; John Wolffe, “The Jesuit as Villain”; Judith Wilt, “Three Women Writers.”
- 12.
O’Malley, “Historiography,” in The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 11. Further examples of nineteenth-century anti-Jesuit novels include the following: John Frederick Smith, The Jesuit (1832); Ned Buntline, The Jesuit’s Daughter: A Novel for Americans to Read (1854); Helen Dhu, Stanhope Burleigh: The Jesuits in Our Homes (1855); Catherine Sinclair, Beatrice; Or, The Unknown Relatives (1855); Jemima Luke, The Female Jesuit (1853); Charles Kingsley, Westward Ho! (1855); Wilkie Collins, The Black Robe (1881).
- 13.
Charlotte Brontë to William Smith Williams, 28 January 1848, in Margaret Smith, Letters, vol. 2, 23.
- 14.
See Smith, Letters, vol. 3, 17–18. Brontë considered that Henry Esmond was fine on historical detail about the Queen Anne period, but she was disappointed overall with the work, particularly William Makepeace Thackeray’s depiction of women.
- 15.
See David Mitchell, The Jesuits: A History, 221. On excluding Jesuits from the Catholic Emancipation Act, see E. R. Norman, Anti-Catholicism, 85.
- 16.
Wilt, “Reading the Arts” in A Companion to the Brontës, 465.
- 17.
Terry Eagleton, Myths of Power, 66.
- 18.
Mitchell, The Jesuits: A History, 221. On the importance of material objects in Catholicism, see Henning Laugerud and Laura Katrine Skinnebach, eds., Instruments of Devotion and Virginia C. Raugin, ed., Catholic Collecting 1538–1850.
- 19.
John T. McGreevy, American Jesuits and the World, 2.
- 20.
Marcus B. Burke, Jesuit Art, 2. For further reading on the Jesuits and art, see Evonne Levy, “The ‘Jesuit Style,’” chapter one in Propaganda.
- 21.
Burke, Jesuit Art, 2.
- 22.
Peter M. Daly and G. Richard Dimler, The Jesuit Emblem, 4.
- 23.
O’Malley and Gauvin Alexander, eds., Jesuits and the Arts, 6.
- 24.
O’Malley, The Jesuits: A History, 40.
- 25.
Alison Saunders, The French Emblem, 148–9.
- 26.
Thomas Westwood 21 February 1870. See Brontë, Letters, Smith, vol. 1, 93.
- 27.
Sue Lonoff de Cuevas, “The Tutelage of Charlotte and Emily Brontë.”
- 28.
“Retreats for Laymen,” 445.
- 29.
Pieter François, “Belgium—Country of Liberals,” 672. See also Urs Altematt, Jan de Maeyer, and Franziska Metzger, eds., Religious Institutes, 163–4.
- 30.
See Philip Mansel, “Nation-Building”; Jan Craeybeckx, Els Witte and Alain Meynen, eds., Political History of Belgium, 18–43; Paul Arblaster, A History of the Low Countries, 303–18; and Jo Tollebeek, “Historical Representation.”
- 31.
Daniel O’Connell, Observations on Corn Laws, 112–3.
- 32.
See Mitchell, 164 and Michael P. Carroll, Catholic Cults, 138.
- 33.
Heinrich Pfeiffer, “Iconography,” in Jesuits and the Arts, 201–28. See also David Morgan, The Sacred Heart.
- 34.
McGreevy, American Jesuits, 100.
- 35.
Tine Van Osselaer, The Pious Sex, 99–122.
- 36.
Brontë, in Smith, Letters, vol. 2, 383.
- 37.
Brontë to Constantin Heger, 8 January 1845, in Smith, Letters, vol. 1, 379.
- 38.
Willibald Sauerlȃnder, The Catholic Rubens, 81–93. See also Thomas L. Glen, Rubens and the Counter-Reformation.
- 39.
Jane Kromm, “Visual Culture,” 389. Meghan Freeman suggests in “Cordons of Protection” that “La vie d’une femme” is inspired by a work by Fanny Geefs that Brontë would have seen in Brussels. Jill Matus argues in “Looking at Cleopatra” that the “Cleopatra” painting is based on another work Brontë saw in Brussels, “A Dancing Girl” by Edouard De Biefve (1808–82).
- 40.
Thackeray, “From Richmond to Brussels,” 337.
- 41.
Lut Pil, “Painting,” 43.
- 42.
Jenny Graham, “Picturing Patriotism,” 171.
- 43.
See William B. Ashworth, “Christianity and Early Modern Science,” 154. Ashworth gives examples including François d’Aguilon (1566–1617), a polymath and professor of theology at the Jesuit College in Antwerp, who wrote Opticorum Libri Sex (Six Books of Optics), which probed the nature of vision, and the Jesuit priest and astronomer, Christopher Grienberger (1551–1636), who helped develop methods of seeing sunspots and other celestial images.
- 44.
Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 33.
- 45.
Mitchell, The Jesuits: A History, 141. Mitchell describes one of many Jesuit dramas as follows: “St. Ignatius appeared above a roof and, descending by a mechanical device, set fire to a castle representing Protestant heresy and filled with fireworks.”
- 46.
Brontë, “The Immensity of God,” 48–51.
- 47.
Brontë, “The Immensity of God,” 54.
- 48.
Roger Ariew, “Descartes and the Jesuits,” 157. See also John V. Fleming, The Dark Side, 75–79.
- 49.
Sally M. Promey, “Religion, Sensation, and Materiality,” 14.
- 50.
Marianne Thormählen, The Brontës and Religion, 30.
- 51.
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 37.
- 52.
de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 37.
- 53.
Ian Buchanan, Michel de Certeau, 2.
- 54.
Miriam Allott, The Critical Heritage, 171–74. Harriet Martineau reviewed Villette in The Daily News for 3 February 1853.
- 55.
Brontë, in Smith, Letters, vol. 2, 517.
- 56.
Brontë, in Smith, Letters, vol. 2, 517.
- 57.
Brontë to George Smith, 3 December 1850, in Smith, Letters, vol. 2, 522.
- 58.
Brontë, in Smith, Letters, vol. 2, 492.
- 59.
Dublin Review, vol. 40 (Mar 1856), 273.
- 60.
Bentley’s Monthly Magazine, vol. 2 (November 1853–April 1854), 105.
- 61.
See Malcolm Cook, Bernadin de Saint Pierre, x.
- 62.
Robert Corniven, “Guadeloupe.” See Mitchell, 220 and 225 on the Jesuit promulgation of the Virgin Mary.
- 63.
Helen M. Cooper, introduction to Villette, xliv.
- 64.
Micael Clarke, “Charlotte Brontë’s Villette,” 973.
- 65.
Deborah Lutz, Brontë Cabinet, 50.
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Donovan, J. (2020). “Grossly Material”: Catholic Things and the Jesuit Order in Villette. In: Pizzo, J., Houghton, E. (eds) Charlotte Brontë, Embodiment and the Material World. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34855-7_5
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