This essay explores one version of a recurring pattern in the Victorian novel, the tendency to compare English and French models of national character. While many novelists, including Charlotte Brontë, portray French women as possessing an immoral theatricality, and deploying deceptive “public” personae that contrast with the Englishwoman’s devotion to her national and domestic homes, Brontë’s Villette endows French theater with the power to question British national gender ideals.
June 2010: Julia Kent was Assistant Professor of English at the American University of Beirut in 2007--2008, and has published articles on Victorian literature and culture in Nineteenth Century Contexts and RaVoN (Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net). Her essay is part of a larger project that examines Victorian novelists’ use of French characterological structures and aesthetic forms to question British national ideals.
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