The “Double Personalities” in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette

To cite this article: WANG Xin. (2021). The “Double Personalities” in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette. Asia-Pacific Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 1(4), 009-018, DOI: 10.53789/j.1653-0465.2021.0104.002

To link this article: https://doi.org/10.53789/j.1653-0465.2021.0104.002

Abstract: In Charlotte Brontë’s novel Villette, the protagonist Lucy Snowe is characteristic of double personalities explicitly exhibited in three pairs-sexual desire against self-repression, imagination against reason, and split self of Ginevra Fanshawe against the other-self Paulina Marry. The paper probes into how Brontë uses the contradictory metaphor of “flame” and “frost” to represent Lucy’s double personalities and analyzes how she eventually integrates dualities. Her experience manifests Brontë’s double bind as a female writer. A feminist perspective is adopted to discuss the writer’s inner conflicts between the will to write and female conformity based on her portrayal of Lucy’s double personalities and realistic experiences. It suggests that Charlotte Brontë strives to seek a moderate and compromising integration between social and private identities, male and female lines, as a possible solution to deal with the dilemma of “double bind”.

Keywords: “double personalities”; flame; frost; compromising integration

WANG Xin Number 4 APJHSS.pdf