Date of Award

1-2025

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

College/School

College of Humanities and Social Sciences

Department/Program

English

Thesis Sponsor/Dissertation Chair/Project Chair

Lee Behlman

Committee Member

Jonathan Greenberg

Committee Member

Jeffrey Gonzalez

Abstract

This thesis will explore Charlotte Brontë’s novel Villette and how it functions as an insight into the complicated ways in which Brontë’s Victorian world felt towards women’s education. The text focuses on the life of Lucy Snowe, a character often considered to be one of Charlotte Brontë’s most autobiographical, and her experiences in an all-girls’ school in the Brussels-inspired town of Villette. Education plays a large role in the events of Lucy’s life, which the novel explores, along with detailing the experiences of the characters of Ginevra Fanshawe and professor M. Paul Emmanuel. Despite their different conceptions of and relations to women’s education, education brings benefits to Ginevra and Lucy’s lives that would be otherwise unattainable. However, the supervisory nature of the French Catholic pensionnat suggests that strict limitations were placed upon female students, even with the benefits education could provide. M. Paul functions as an embodiment of education as both surveillance and a limited means of liberation, even though the education he provides his female students does not approach the standards of the masculine education he himself has received. Education functions in Villette as a tool of liberation, but within a certain threshold, as women could never obtain the same freedom or social status as men.

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