Studies in the Novel ISSN 0039-3827 1

Vol. 47 No. 1 (Spring), 2015 Pages 1–19

ILLEGIBLE MINDS: CHARLOTTE BRONTË’S

EARLY WRITINGS AND THE PSYCHOLOGY
OF MORAL MANAGEMENT IN JANE EYRE
AND VILLETTE

BETH TRESSLER

The work of Charlotte Brontë intersects with two fundamental elements in

nineteenth-century psychological thought: the practice of moral management
and the pseudo-science of phrenology. Both derive from the larger theory of
faculty psychology, and both connect the dangers of imaginative daydreaming
and reverie with the threat of insanity.1 Recent criticism emphasizes the role
of phrenology and/or traditional faculty psychology in Brontë’s novels and
in her philosophy.2 While the critical alliance of her novels with the tenets of
these theories is illuminating, I contend that it is ultimately misleading. These
critics tend to sustain the traditional Victorian binaries that put self-control
in conlict with imaginative states.3 Brontë’s writings depict her inversion
of the theories typically espoused by nineteenth-century psychologists, who
instigated a materialist reanimation of Descartes’s metaphysics in the form
of a binary set up between the waking, rational mind and the imaginatively
induced derivatives of sleep, such as somnambulism, trance, and waking
dreams. Brontë shows how it is the unrelenting regulation of the imagination
through incessant self-control that creates various forms of insanity and
becomes ultimately devastating to the self, depicting instead the moral basis of
a complex dialectic between self-control and ecstatic self-loss.
The children of the Brontë household, in addition to writing numerous,
fantastic stories and poems, were quite familiar with current theoretical
discourse.4 As Sally Shuttleworth successfully shows in her book Charlotte
Brontë and Victorian Psychology (1996), this discourse was accessible
to them through a variety of mediums. Patrick Brontë, Brontë’s father,
fastidiously implemented Thomas John Graham’s Modern Domestic Medicine
(1827) into the daily ritual and fabric of the Haworth household. Shuttleworth

Copyright © 2015 by the Johns Hopkins University Press and the University of North Texas.
2 / TRESSLER

describes how Graham’s work “held the place of secular Bible” for Brontë’s
father, and

[v]irtually every page of this work has been annotated by the Reverend Brontë,
offering a moving testimonial to the rigid regimen which governed the life
of the household. Patrick records not only his family’s physical ailments and
the remedies employed, but also his preoccupation with the threat of nervous
disease and insanity. (10-11)

In addition to the family’s knowledge of the Graham text and their

subscription to Blackwood’s Magazine, the family also utilized the library
holdings of the Keighly Mechanics’ Institute, which was “primarily devoted to
the natural sciences and philosophy” (Shuttleworth 26).5 Phrenology manuals
and guides for self-improvement lined the library shelves alongside works on
electricity as well as the psychological work of the French physician, Jean-
Étienne Dominique Esquirol, who wrote extensively on insanity. According to
Shuttleworth, “lectures at the institute seem to have followed [this] common
pattern: exhortations to self-development alternated with more practical
lectures on magnetism and geology” (26). From the hallowed place of
Graham’s text in her household to the library’s various holdings and lectures,
Brontë would undoubtedly have been aware of the growing popularity and
implementation of moral management and phrenology as well as many other
aspects of faculty psychology, particularly the close correlation between
the imagination and insanity. Yet Brontë’s intimate familiarity with these
psychological topics and theories did not mean that she indiscriminately
adopted their premises. Rather Brontë’s early writings—her journals, letters,
and her unpublished poetry—in conjunction with her novels attest to her
struggle with traditional faculty psychology: her critique of phrenology as
a device of power and her intense preoccupation with the punitive nature of
moral management.
Both phrenology and moral management were bound up with the
nineteenth-century theory of faculty psychology. Faculty psychology deined
the mind as a site of competing faculties or organs, each of which corresponded
to a different mental state. Phrenology, prevalent in early to mid-nineteenth-
century England, hinged upon the theory of physically legible opposing
faculties and was established by the Austrian Franz Joseph Gall in the 1790s.
Dividing the skull into various, competing organs meant that the “brains of
people with different personalities took on different shapes and sizes because
the exercise of particular mental powers altered the physical organ and its
form” (Reed 28).
Popularizing phrenology in England during the early 1820s, George
Combe combined the increasingly popular tenets of moral management
with phrenology, claiming that one could experience moral improvement
through the exercise and development of particular faculties.6 Self-control
 BRONTË / 3

was, of course, tantamount to the development of one set of faculties over

the other. Since phrenology was a “conception of the mind [that] was based,
like contemporary models of the economy, on the idea of iercely competing
energies” (Shuttleworth 62), only self-control enabled the exercise of the
morally superior faculties over their degenerative opposites, thus the practice
of moral management is implicit to all forms of faculty psychology.7
Rather than a precise medical procedure, moral management stemmed from
a widespread perception that emphasized the morality and rationality inherent
within the insane.8 By the mid-1830s, many psychologists had implemented
moral management in their medical practices to treat individuals aflicted with
various forms of mental illness. Once used solely in the insane asylum, moral
management evolved into a mindset that undergirded much of Victorian life,
including individual conduct. We see this in the works of nineteenth-century
psychologists such as Robert MacNish, John Abercrombie, James Prichard,
and Forbes Winslow, among several others.9 Moral management depended
upon the legibility of the psyche to the self as well as to the medical gaze of
the psychologist, transforming the self into a conlicted site of psychologist
and patient.
Both phrenology and moral management presented the mindscape as
one in which interiority could not be hidden. The decipherability of the inner
self through outward physical properties constituted a large part of the appeal
of phrenology. The cranial divisions of amativeness or individuality or
destructiveness were fully legible to the perceptive and skilled phrenological
reader, but more signiicantly, becoming such a skilled reader was not a dif-
icult achievement. The specialized knowledge and language of phrenology
was readily available to the intellectual layman and common reader
through publications like Combe’s and the many hundreds of phrenological
handbooks also published during this time; basically anyone able enough to
read could become a competent interpreter of the brain and moral condition
of anyone else.
Brontë’s work grappled with the theories of phrenology and moral
management. In particular, she resisted the aspect of these theories that
established a necessary relation between interior visibility or legibility and
self-regulation. During the early to mid-nineteenth century, the majority of
psychologists commonly associated any state of imaginative withdrawal,
such as daydream, reverie, trance, and iction reading, with a lack of inner
regulation and moral weakness, even with immorality, because these states
consistently interfered with and obstructed duty and proper conduct.10
Psychologists accentuated consciousness, will, and self-control as a bulwark
against the self-loss intrinsic to these ecstatic states, which occurred as
singular, unarticulated mental events, and could not be read in the ways
prescribed by the theories of faculty psychology. Physiological psychologists
provided descriptions and explanations of the outward manifestations
4 / TRESSLER

and probable causes of various imaginative states, but they had no access
to the particulars. Ecstatic states could have no credibility in a system of
decipherable and controllable interiority. But the various stages of Brontë’s
writing, including her novels, are permeated with a continual fall into such
illegible ecstatic states.
For instance, at the age of nineteen, as a teacher at Roe Head, Brontë
describes her secret imaginative sojourns as delicious luxuries occurring in
solitary shadows far from the gaze and demands of her students and the other
teachers: “[t]he Ladies went into the school-room to do their exercises and I
crept up in to the bed-room to be alone for the irst time that day. Delicious
was the sensation I experienced as I laid down on the spare-bed and resigned
myself to the Luxury of twilight and Solitude” (qtd. in Barker 236). Brontë
was constantly torn between her mundane and hated duties as a teacher and her
overwhelming desire to escape into the alternate realities of her fantasies.11 Her
journal from Roe Head describes one of these imaginative reveries:

Never shall I Charlotte Brontë forget what a voice of wild and wailing music
now came thrillingly to my mind’s almost to my body’s ear or how distinctly
I saw sitting in the schoolroom at Roe Head the Duke of Zamorna…the
moonlight so mild and so exquisitely tranquil sleeping upon that vast and
vacant road…I was quite gone I had really utterly forgot where I was and
all the gloom and cheerlessness of my situation [and] I felt myself breathing
quick and short.12

The wild, thrilling nature of Brontë’s illusion removes her from the grueling
reality of the schoolroom and relocates her in a heightened imaginative state.
Despite the ecstatic nature of being “quite gone,” Brontë experiences a multi-
sensory, multi-layered corporeal vision. The corporeality of the vision exists
both on the level of the dream’s narrative—the Duke sitting in the schoolroom—
and on the level of her bodily experience. What begins as an almost auditory
“wild and wailing music” within her mind translates into labored, excited
breathing. Her imagination converts the schoolroom into a highly fantastic
space in which even the Duke’s horse is grazing among the heather growing
within it, and the moon is shining on a “vast and vacant road” that extends out
of the transformed present into the realm of unknown, phantasmatic space.
Brontë’s journals and letters attest to how intrinsically these recurring ecstatic
states constituted her imaginative life and how inextricably they were bound
up with her writing. But Brontë’s waking dreams were continually interrupted
and obstructed by her students and the fellow teachers at Roe Head. Her
visions were contingent upon a doubled withdrawal: her physical withdrawal
from others—the vast and vacant road—as well as her mental withdrawal from
her tedious, external reality.
Delating the primacy of phrenology and exposing Brontë’s struggle with
moral management opens up the uniquely constructed mindscape of Brontë’s
 BRONTË / 5

novels. She not only confronts and undercuts the prevailing psychological
hierarchies, but she also reimagines the traditional underpinnings of faculty
psychology as she inverts its established trajectory. The illegibility associated
with the depiction of ecstatic states in Brontë’s novels offers the reader what
Brontë herself so ardently desired—delicious “twilight and solitude”—and
what the practices of popular psychology prohibited—a potentially limitless
imaginative space.
Apparent in her letters as well as in her ictional writings, Brontë not
only took up the role of psychologist herself, but she also resisted and revised
accepted psychological frameworks. Jane Eyre presents the various conlicts
surrounding ecstatic states: the conlict aroused by their illegibility to others,
as well as the conlict over their attempted regulation and prevention. The
narrative of Villette develops the signiicance of illegibility, exploring the natural
progression of the various psychological implications intimated in Jane Eyre.
Villette fully submerges itself into these conlicts and works to resolve them by
presenting illegibility as a more fully developed psychological alternative. Both
novels together illustrate Brontë’s ongoing quest for a psychological paradigm
that would incorporate rather than discipline ecstatic states, illustrating how
illegibility upholds the necessary intersection of potentiality and actuality
instead of being a problematic site of imaginative excess.

“To master oneself with a tyrant’s grip”: The Heger Letters and Brontë’s
Poetry
In her letters during 1845, we see Brontë’s struggle with the unyielding,
untenable binaries put forth by faculty psychology within the context of her
need to morally manage her unrequited love. The letters she writes to her
previous instructor Monsieur Heger, the master of the Pensionnat Heger in
Brussels, provide a context that opens up our understanding of the same types
of struggles present within her novels. Both Brontë and her sister Emily were
students at the Pensionnat Heger from 1842–1844, and Heger was “possibly
the greatest single inluence on Charlotte, both as a person and as a writer”
(Barker 412). But the exact nature of Brontë’s relationship with Heger has
eluded and fascinated Brontë scholars for more than a century.13 Heger is
one of the few who recognized and cultivated Brontë’s intellect. Brontë’s
high regard for Heger appears to have transformed into “an unhealthy and
obsessive dependency on [him] for every expression of approval” (Barker
419). On leaving Brussels, her passionate admiration and dependency seems
to transform into an ardent longing and unreturned desire for correspondence.
The loss of Heger’s presence and his long silences send Brontë hurtling
into dark places of passionate mental anguish. Her letters often echo the
disciplinary language of moral management, dramatizing the struggle
between her passionate, ecstatic, and sometimes morbid imagination and her
reason and self-control:
6 / TRESSLER

when one wants to master oneself with a tyrant’s grip—one’s faculties rise
in revolt—and one pays for outward calm by an almost unbearable inner
struggle. Day and night I ind neither rest nor peace—if I sleep I have
tormenting dreams in which I see you always severe, always saturnine and
angry with me….You will say that I am over-excited—that I have black
thoughts etc. So be it Monsieur. (Letters I 380)

Brontë attempts to master herself and her desire for Heger with a “tyrant’s
grip,” but she admits that her outward appearance of a calmly managed self
only covers over her “unbearable inner struggle.” She seems to be aware that
the revolt of her faculties against the rule of reason indicates that there is
something problematic in the punitive nature of her attempt. As John Maynard
writes in Charlotte Brontë and Sexuality, “[w]hen one dominates oneself
‘en tyran’ the faculties revolt….The entire process leads, she realizes, to the
appearance of derangement or minor insanity” (24).
In laying bare her struggle to Heger’s gaze, she anticipates his response;
he will respond as a psychologist would respond—that she is over-excited
and having black thoughts. As she sees it, making her interiority legible to
others, including Heger, invites indifferent and contemptuous diagnoses:
“there are some cold and rational people who would say on reading it [the
letter]—‘she is raving’—My sole revenge is to wish these people—a single
day of the torments that I have suffered for eight months—then we should
see whether they wouldn’t be raving too” (Letters I 381). The issue of
her mind’s visibility, even to Heger, haunts Brontë, and she inds that the
legibility associated with moral management actually promotes a continually
divided, dichotomous self, which can never be free from the omnipresent,
omniscient medical gaze or the necessity of vigilant, indiscriminate self-
regulation. By trying to supplant the tyranny of her desire with the tyranny
of reason, Brontë traps herself in an ultimately unproductive conlict in
which she has become the “slave of a dominant and ixed idea which has
become a tyrant over one’s mind” (Letters I 437). The passage reveals that
she has divided herself into the either/or paradigm characteristic of moral
management: either she is the slave to her morbid thoughts or she is the
tyrant in mastery over her thoughts. Either way she is caught in harsh,
oppressive binaries.
Brontë’s unpublished poem “Reason,” dated around 1845, dramatically
performs a similar struggle apparent in her letters to Heger. The poem depicts
her attempt to enthrone Reason as the rightful tyrant of her mind and her
perverse unwillingness to do so.14 “Reason” is believed to have been written in
response to her conlict and despair over Heger, but, in addition, it illustrates
the beginnings of a signiicant shift in her views concerning the tenets of
popular psychology and their reliance upon self-control.
Brontë beckons,
 BRONTË / 7

Come Reason—Science—Learning—Thought—
To you my heart I dedicate;
I have a faithful subject brought:
Faithful because most desolate.
Fear not a wandering, feeble mind:
Stern Sovereign, it is all your own
To crush, to cheer, to loose to bind:
Unclaimed, unshared, it seeks your throne. (“Reason” 21-28)

Brontë assures her “Stern Sovereign,” Reason, that he should not fear her
“wandering, feeble mind” because “it is all your own.” Despite her declaration
that her offering is an unclaimed, unshared, and thus “faithful subject,” her
admission that she offers “a wandering, feeble mind” immediately undermines
it. A wandering mind cannot be a faithful subject—it is insubordinate and
certainly not unshared—just as a feeble mind is a weak and sickly, perhaps
even offensive sacriicial offering. Deiantly, she views the so-called weakness
of her mind as paradoxically a strength. She writes that “the ire” of her “spirit’s
trampled yearning,” “[t]hough smothered, slacked, repelled” burns “stronger,
higher” than her obedience to the stern, disapproving god (“Reason” 33-34, 36).
Brontë further undercuts Reason’s mastery by ending the poem in
uncertainty, invoking an undeined future state instead of a state of submission.
She writes, “doubt not I shall be strong tomorrow. / Have I not led that I may
conquer? / Crost the dark sea in irmest faith / That I at last might plant my
anchor” (41-43). Her imperative “doubt not” achieves the opposite, suggesting
doubt, especially in the context of a wandering mind. The “may” and the
“might” also undercut any of her claims. Brontë refuses to end the poem with her
obedience and chooses the illegibility of an open-ended question instead. This
refusal expresses her own doubt about the eficacy of a single master-tyrant,
even if that tyrant is reason, and her quest for some other paradigm, a paradigm
marked by obscurity, by which to negotiate rather than eradicate “the lame /
I still feel inly, deeply burn” (“Reason” 10). Brontë does not depict Reason as
irmly enthroned, sitting in judgment over waking dreams and passions, but
she envisions instead a dark sea, an illegible, even turbulent, space in which
the ebb and low of thought would be imperceptible to the outside observer.
The obscured ending of “Reason” also offers this space to the reader. Brontë
leaves the reader in a state of limitless dreaming, leeing and crossing the black
sea along with her into the unknown. This concept of illegibility unravels as
it blurs the rigid divisions inherent within traditional moral management, the
same divisions that had caused Brontë so much personal inner turmoil and that
undergirded phrenology. Illegibility would become the cornerstone for Brontë’s
psychological theory, developing most obviously within the framework of her
novels, opening up for herself as well as for her reader access to the ininite
possibility of re-creation in open, undecidable space.
8 / TRESSLER

“A trile beside myself; or rather out of myself”: Jane Eyre

Within the irst few pages of Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre, she unapologetically
submerges her reader into various ecstatic states, such as waking dreams,
unrestrained passion, and madness. These unruly moments in the novel are
often understood as Brontë’s own acknowledgment and attempt to control
the dangers found in an unregulated and excessive imagination, a struggle
intimately familiar to her.15 I intend to show how Brontë’s Jane Eyre illustrates
a troubling power dynamic intrinsic to the established principles of moral
management and phrenology and the incompatibility of these tenets with states
of imaginative illegibility.
As the novel opens, Jane is in the midst of retreating from her obnoxious
cousins, the Reeds, into the scarlet conines of a window-seat within which she
is “shrined in double retirement” (8). Her “double retirement” is her double-
layered invisibility from the Reeds: the red curtained window-seat and within
that, the book: Bewick’s History of British Birds. Jane’s absorbed perusal
of Bewick in the window-seat positions her in an obscured, imaginative in-
between space that resembles her hidden, physical position between the
scarlet curtain and the window. Her mind, like her body, moves between
Bewick’s dreary, cold landscapes and her own highly intense imaginings. Jane
retrospectively explains the activity of her mind: “Of these death-white realms
I formed an idea of my own; shadowy, like all the half-comprehended notions
that loat dim through children’s brains, but strangely impressive” (8). Both the
words and the pictures produce singular fancies in Jane’s mind. Like the young
Brontë dreaming in twilight and solitude, Jane’s withdrawal in the window
seat resembles the same imaginative practice. While Jane is not “reading” in
the traditional sense, her mind is representative of the ecstatic possibilities
that Brontë envisions within the act of reading.16 “Each picture told a story,”
she says, “mysterious often to my undeveloped mind and imperfect feelings,
yet ever profoundly interesting” (9). Brontë does not give the reader access
to Jane’s stories, but her use of “mysterious” and “profoundly interesting”
arouses the reader’s interest just as the “strangely impressive” images arouse
Jane’s, creating the doubled, simultaneous states of Jane’s and the reader’s
concealed waking dreams. Lost in the stories of her own making and “[w]ith
Bewick on my knee, I was then happy…I feared nothing but interruption, and
that came too soon” (9).
John Reed’s cruel, malignant interruption and violent punishment sets up
and relects the punitive response ecstatic states often incited in the medical
community. When John Reed throws Bewick’s Birds at Jane’s head, he punishes
Jane for her solitary pleasure, transforming Jane’s impetus toward absorbed
happiness into one of pain and retribution. Psychologists often situated ecstatic
states on a continuum with insanity; thus they were in effect throwing Jane’s
book back at her head—transforming the source of an illegible, ungovernable
pleasure into a punishment.
 BRONTË / 9

John’s attempt to discipline Jane has the opposite effect. Instead of

controlling Jane, he turns Jane into the typical patient envisioned by moral
managers. His vicious attack incites Jane’s mania, showing how Brontë sets up
Jane’s struggle with John to act out the internal struggle that traditional moral
management produces. Translating Jean-Étienne Esquirol’s description of the
maniac, the psychologist James Cowles Prichard writes:

[E]verything irritates them, distracts them, and excites their aversion. In

constant opposition to all that surrounds them, they soon persuade themselves
that persons are combined to injure them…the regimen and prohibitions which
are called for by their situation, and to which their attendants wish to subject
them, appear to them cruel persecutions…the heart of the insane cherishes no
feeling but mistrust…he is troubled as soon as anyone approaches him. (282)

Like Esquirol’s maniac, Jane inds herself in opposition to the Reed household,
particularly John. She distrusts him; he irritates and cruelly persecutes her,
exciting her anger, fear, and hatred. And Jane does not disappoint the outside
observer: “my terror had passed its climax; other feelings succeeded…I felt a
drop or two of blood from my head trickle down my neck, and was sensible of
somewhat pungent suffering: these sensations for the time predominated over
fear, and I received him in frantic sort. I don’t very well know what I did with
my hands” (11). Obviously not conscious of her physical violence towards
John, Jane is caught up in overwhelming sensations that displace her conscious
self. She acts devoid of reason or will, retrospectively saying as much herself:
“I was a trile beside myself; or rather out of myself” (12).
Prichard claims that under such strong excitement, the maniac “during
paroxysms of raving madness, require[s] personal coercion and even strict
coninement of body and limbs…[this] abstracts them from the morbid
impressions and associations which may have excited and fostered their mental
disease” (279). Interpreting Jane’s response and envisioning her as just such
a maniac, the Reed household acts out Prichard’s treatment—locking Jane in
the red room—but this imprisonment only creates further mania rather than
preventing it.
The coninement that the Reeds enact is an externalized, obligatory form
of corporeal self-regulation. It is dependent upon the supposed legibility
of Jane’s mind, and it changes Jane’s daydreams in the window-seat into
involuntary nightmare and mania: “my heart beat thick, my head grew hot;
a sound illed my ears, which I deemed the rushing of wings: something
seemed near me; I was oppressed, suffocated: endurance broke down—I
uttered a wild, involuntary cry” (17). Jane’s “wild, involuntary cry” in the
red room substantiates the household’s already-held belief in her madness,
particularly Miss Abbot’s and Mrs. Reed’s. Miss Abbot has long looked
“darkly and doubtfully on my face, as incredulous of my sanity,” just as Mrs.
Reed “looked on me as a compound of virulent passions, mean spirit, and
10 / TRESSLER

dangerous duplicity” (12, 18). The typical psychological position, which

the Reed household represents, is the overwhelming need for legibility
when these states occur. When John Reed inds Jane in the window seat, he
interrogates her, demanding to know “[w]hat you [were] doing behind the
curtain” (8). The immediate reaction of the household when Jane attacks John
is to name her response—“she’s like a mad cat”—and to punish it—“take her
away to the red room and lock her in there” (11, 12). The unruly appearance
of Jane’s mental states incites fear, so interpreting her interiority provides a
semblance of control and assuages that fear.
That Brontë would associate the diagnosis of madness with the Reeds
undermines its reliability for the reader, since the reader, located in tandem
with Jane, is already positioned in opposition to them. Jane’s own description
of these terrifying moments refuses a legible explanation and the suggestion of
madness: “I suppose I had a species of it: unconsciousness closed the scene”
(18). Even retrospectively, Jane rejects any kind of self-diagnosis, preferring to
leave the moment in the darkness of illegibility. Her refusal to grant legibility
even to the reader—“I don’t very well know what I did with my hands,” “I
suppose I had a species of it”—parallels Jane’s own experience. The reader,
like Jane, is left to “suppose” what has happened.
Like the Reeds, Rochester also desires full legibility and control but for
different reasons. For Rochester, the legibility of others empowers him to
more effectively spin his fantasies, facades, and delusions in order to evade
reality and conceal his secret: his mad wife Bertha concealed in the third-loor
attic of Thornield. He readily uses the language of phrenology and moral
management as his principal means of interrogation and control. The power
and knowledge that underlie both techniques seemingly provide the perfect
means for Rochester to achieve his clandestine purposes.
Since a phrenological reading is believed to make the truth of a person’s
character readily available to the observer/reader, the initial head-reading
scene between Jane and Rochester exposes and plays upon this common belief.
Rochester expects Jane to be an able phrenological reader just as he assumes
her to adopt the popular psychological viewpoint.17 But though Jane appears to
conduct a phrenological reading of Rochester’s head, Jane is more accurately a
passive spectator to what Rochester himself induces and insinuates: “Criticize
me: does my forehead not please you?” (131). Rochester lifts “up the sable
waves of hair which lay horizontally over his brow, and showed a solid enough
mass of intellectual organs; but an abrupt deiciency where the suave sign of
benevolence should have risen” (131). In a move that replicates the phrenologist
conducting a reading, Rochester lifts up his hair so that Jane, who has only
recently met him, can ascertain what lies beneath his hair. Jane, illustrating
her awareness, but not necessarily her acceptance, of phrenology, notes that
he appears to have a deiciency of benevolence.18 In answering her subsequent
and sardonic question, “whether you are a philanthropist,” Jane narrates how
 BRONTË / 11

Rochester points to “the prominences which are said to indicate” the faculty of
conscientiousness, “which fortunately for him, were suficiently conspicuous”
(131). In this scene, Rochester uses phrenology to draw Jane out, but he also
uses phrenology to control Jane’s interpretation of his character by directing
how she should know him. Jane’s wry responses indicate her awareness of
his schemes and suggest that her judgment of his character will not lie with
his cranial composition. Jane mockingly dismisses the phrenological reading,
remarking, “Decidedly, he has had too much wine” (132).19
The supposed truth-telling ability granted by phrenology provides the
perfect guise for Rochester’s duplicity, expressed in his gypsy costume and
charade later on in the novel. Rochester, garbed as a gypsy, uses his already
acquired knowledge of Jane to feign an objective phrenological reading
of her skull.20 Rochester lulls Jane into “a kind of dream. One unexpected
sentence came from her [Rochester’s] lips after another, till I got involved in
a web of mystiication; and wondered what unseen spirit had been sitting for
weeks by my heart, watching its workings, and taking record of every pulse”
(199). The initial part of Rochester’s reading originates in his observations
and interactions with her over the many weeks she has been his governess.
His artiice undercuts the reliability of his reading as unequivocally accurate,
or objective, or even as uncontested evidence of Brontë’s psychological
inclinations. Jane even initially warns the gypsy, “I have no faith” and, “I’m
not silly,” making Jane’s skepticism for the gypsy’s “art” immediately apparent
(196). Jane also notices the gypsy’s “feigned voice” and “her anxiety to conceal
her features” (202-03). Jane almost immediately realizes that she is involved
in some kind of masquerade, although she is unaware that Rochester hides
beneath the costume. Jane’s lines “Ah! now you are coming to reality…I shall
begin to put some faith in you presently” should then be considered in tandem
with Jane’s awareness of the gypsy’s pretense and her previous mockery (197).
Jane realizes that Rochester has “been trying to draw me out—or in: you
have been talking nonsense to make me talk nonsense” (202-03). Shuttleworth
notes that in this scene Rochester “enjoys free access to Jane’s unprotected
interiority” and the “gypsy’s ventriloquizing of the ‘speech’ of Jane’s forehead
is set in dialogue with her inner self” (171). The intention of Rochester’s gypsy
charade is to use the language of phrenology to discern and make legible
Jane’s interiority, “to penetrate and control the articulation of her psyche”
(Shuttleworth 171). Jane’s instinctive awareness of the masquerade and its
underlying nonsense does associate the reading, and not simply Rochester’s
costume, with a charade that they have both performed. As Shuttleworth
suggests, it is a charade with the quite serious intent of penetrating and
managing Jane’s inner self.
We see evidence of Brontë’s alternative theory, which echoes the ending
of her poem “Reason,” in a letter that she writes to her publisher and friend
George Smith several days after their joint visit to a phrenologist in 1851.
12 / TRESSLER

As Mr. and Miss Fraser, the two masqueraded for the doctor as brother and
sister, but after Brontë’s initial lippant responses to both readings in letters
to Smith, she writes a more serious relection, which seems to stem from
Smith’s unhappy reaction to his own reading. Although we do not have Smith’s
correspondence to Brontë, Smith does remark in his memoir that he was not all
that happy “with the estimate of his own head” (95).21 Afirming the limitations
of phrenology, she writes to Smith:

Whatever your present self may be—resolve with all your strength of
resolution—never to degenerate thence—. Be jealous of a shadow of falling
off. Determine rather to look above that standard and strive beyond it…if
there were but facilities allowed for cultivation and space given for growth. It
seems to me that even should such space and facilities be denied by stringent
circumstances and a rigid Fate—still it should do you good fully to know
and tenaciously to remember that you have such a capacity. (Letters II 664,
emphasis mine)

In this passage, Brontë depicts a theory dependent upon what she calls facilities
of growth rather than faculties in conlict. Her words to Smith demonstrate
her desire to overturn the customary tenets undergirding phrenology and by
extension faculty psychology. These tenets did not in fact possess potential
for personal cultivation or growth, since faculty psychology proposes that the
self is locked in iercely competing forces and faculties, which prohibit such
expansion. Brontë’s awareness of this inherent fundamental contradiction
prompts her reformulation of the idea of faculties as a psychological basis.
Her use of the word “facilities” suggests an intrinsic freedom, opportunity,
and capability for development and change. Her employment of the statement
“whatever your present self may be” similarly refuses a ixed interior legibility.
Here she is in fact expressing her own psychological terminology.22 In her
exhortation to Smith, Brontë illustrates her formulation of a moral theory
that is not contingent upon a stringent mastery or upon a preformulated
standard but one that is a striving beyond that standard, enabling the
possibility of a transformation of the self. Villette, published two years after
this letter, powerfully performs the theory apparent in her letter to Smith. Her
reconiguration allows for a signiicant re-reading of Lucy Snowe herself,
one that frees Lucy from the limiting bonds of psychological maladies and
sexual repression and makes the novel’s enigmatic conclusion both possible
and desirable.

“Let it be theirs”: Villette

Villette has often been identiied as a novel overtly concerned with the
gaze, specularity, and surveillance.23 The simultaneously spying/prying eyes
of Madame Beck, Monsieur Paul, Dr. John, and even, at times, Lucy herself
betray the novel’s preoccupation with forms and methods of legibility. This
 BRONTË / 13

legibility often seeks to access the interiority of another for the knowledge
as well as the power that access brings. As Dames writes, “the technique of
seeing…is a technique that promises mastery, and it promises mastery because
it forcefully places limits on the psyche” (82). Yet phrenology is not the seat
of this mastery in Villette, since of all Brontë’s novels Villette is the least
engaged with phrenology. Its minor role juxtaposed to the larger focus on
moral management enables Brontë to expose how this kind of mastery and
power is central to faculty psychology itself and not simply phrenology. As she
combats the limits of legibility, Brontë highlights the psychological import and
imaginative necessity of illegibility, which incorporates the free and invisible
ebb and low of conscious and unconscious states.
A ghostly, disturbing igure of a nun begins “haunting” Lucy shortly after
her arrival as a teacher at the Rue Fossette. Lucy narrates the story of the nun’s
horriic death, marked by a tree within the school’s garden, which stands above
“the bones of a girl whom a monkish conclave of the drear middle ages had here
buried alive, for some sin against her vow” (106). Despite its seeming allusion
to the attempted murder of a pregnant nun in Matthew Lewis’s gothic tale The
Monk, in Brontë’s text, the exact nature of the sin is much less signiicant than
the fact the nun succumbed to feeling and abandoned her self-control. Her
abandonment of self-control is so appalling that the monks have no choice but
to entomb her. Paradoxically, the monks’ act of burying the nun alive makes
outwardly visible her secret sin.
Likewise, Dr. John believes the appearance of the nun to Lucy makes visible
Lucy’s hidden mental malady. The contemporaneous medical community is
largely represented in the person of Dr. John. Shuttleworth writes, “Dr. John
directs onto Lucy the gaze of medical authority, calmly conident of his ability
to deine inner experience from outer signs” (220). Dr. John tells Lucy that
he does not look on her as a friend or relation, but “I look on you now from
a professional point of view, and I read, perhaps all you would conceal—in
your eye, which is curiously vivid and restless; in your cheek, which the blood
has forsaken; in your hand, which you cannot steady” (Villette 248). As a true
physician of faculty psychology and advocate of moral management, Dr. John
assesses her external symptoms, which, in his mind, enable him to penetrate
and know “all” that Lucy conceals. Her restless eye, her pale cheek, and her
shaking hands lay bare Lucy’s interiority, making her, he thinks, entirely
legible to his gaze. Yet the progression of the novel and the development of
Lucy contest Dr. John’s valuation of externality, revealing how Lucy’s self
remains beyond his scrutinizing eye.
Despite Lucy’s belief in a corporeal nun, Dr. John asserts that the repeated
appearance of the nun “is all a matter of nerves…a case of spectral illusion:
I fear following on and resulting from long-continued mental conlict” (249).
According to Dr. John, Lucy’s inability to fully manage her inner life has
led to the visibility of her melancholy in the spectral illusion of the nun. The
14 / TRESSLER

remedy is aligned with the tenets of moral management—“Happiness is the

cure—a cheerful mind the preventive: cultivate both” (250). Dr. John cannot
understand “why, Lucy, can’t you look and feel as I do—buoyant, courageous
and it to defy all the nuns and lirts in Christendom?” (250). If Lucy were truly
managing her mental states and her desires by cultivating happiness instead of
melancholy, as Dr. John is able to do, then no nun would appear to her, and if
a nun did appear, Lucy would snap her ingers and defy her.
The ghostly nun stands in stark contrast to the demonic, enigmatic
Vashti. As Vashti takes the stage before a teeming, hushed multitude, Lucy is
confronted with an inscrutable being, “neither of woman nor of man,” in whom
role and actress, fantasy and reality, spirit and substance are indistinguishable
(257). Whereas the spectral nun supposedly exhibits the visibility of Lucy’s
melancholic interiority, the physical Vashti exhibits the very essence of
impenetrability. During Vashti’s performance, Lucy inds herself viscerally
enthralled and lost in the mystery of Vashti. This igure provides Lucy an
illegible space within which she is able to imagine a being whose regal face is
a demonic mask portraying “Hate and Murder and Madness incarnate” (257).
What is important is not whether Vashti is such a being but that Vashti enables
such imaginative acts on the part of Lucy. Refusing to make a pronouncement
on Vashti’s character, “Vashti was not good, I was told; and I have said she
did not look good” (259), Lucy leaves Vashti as an essentially open space.
This openness enables Lucy to be consciously and bodily swept up into
the imaginative current Vashti creates: “I had seen acting before, but never
anything like this: never anything which astonished Hope and hushed Desire;
which outstripped Impulse and paled Conception…[it] disclosed power like a
deep, swollen, winter river, thundering in cataract and bearing the soul, like a
leaf, on the steep and steely sweep of its descent” (259).
Lucy’s opium-induced reverie during the midnight carnival invokes
a response quite similar to Lucy’s response to Vashti, but in this midnight
reverie, Lucy inds herself even more powerfully captivated by the luminous
power of Imagination. In the theater, Vashti is the center of Lucy’s reverie, and
despite Lucy’s feelings of imaginative ecstasy, Lucy is not physically as well
as mentally transported. The midnight reverie bathes Lucy in an electrifying
golden light, through which Lucy “became alive to new thought—to reverie
peculiar in coloring” (449). “Imagination was roused from her rest, and she
came forth impetuous and venturous,” luring Lucy out into “dew, coolness,
and glory” (450). Imagination leads Lucy into a Villette of limitless possibility,
a blaze of light, color, and life stranger than any dream. Instead of shunning
the blazing, exuberant Villette, Lucy intertwines her self with the imaginative
possibility of its vast illumination and power; she “mixed with the crowd
where it was deepest. To be still was not in my power, nor quietly to observe. I
took a revel of the scene; I drank the elastic night-air—the swell of sound, the
dubious light, now lashing, now fading. As to Happiness or Hope, they and I
 BRONTË / 15

had shaken hands…I scorned Despair” (454). In this moment, Lucy is doing
exactly what Dr. John has urged her to do, but it is not the morally managed
mind that empowers Lucy to scorn despair. Imagination, inally freed from her
bonds by the opium, has led Lucy into her limitless, glorious temple.
Thus empowered, Lucy refuses Dr. John’s insistent, oppressive eye when
she happens upon him during the carnival: “he could not see my face, I held
it down; surely, he could not recognize me; I stooped, I turned, I would not be
known” (457). Without negating her heightened, ecstatic state, she is able to
cloak herself in illegibility as if it were her hat and shawl. Extracting herself
from his gaze, refusing his desire for knowledge and mastery, Lucy destabilizes
the gaze that would know “all” that she might conceal: “[h]e might think, he
might even believe that Lucy was contained within that shawl, and sheltered
under that hat; he could never be certain, for he did not see my face” (457-
58). In the same spirit, when Lucy destroys the nun costume, she destroys
the visibility of her malady, the physical representation of the specter hiding
within her brain. Standing before the nun, Lucy does not scream; she is not
overcome. “Late incidents,” she states, have tempered her nerves, thus “warm
from illuminations, and music, and thronging thousands, thoroughly lashed
up by a new scourge, I deied spectra…I tore her up” (470). As Dr. John has
advised, Lucy deies the nun, and taking her by the hand, Lucy tears her up.
What enables Lucy’s dominion over the nun is what previously enabled her
triumph over Dr. John himself—the imagination. For Lucy “illuminations, and
music, and [the] thronging thousands” of an enchanted Villette enable her to
hold “her [the nun] on high—the goblin! I shook her loose—the mystery! And
down she fell—down all around me—down in shreds and fragments—and I
trode upon her” (470).
In Dr. John’s view, in order to discipline unregulated mental states, moral
management calls for the deliberate cultivation of happiness, which Dr. John
deines as a regulated mental state free from the “wild and intense, dangerous,
sudden, and laming” (259). Lucy recoils at Dr. John’s notion of cultivating
happiness as if it were “a potato, to be planted in mould and tilled with
manure,” stating instead that “[h]appiness is a glory shining far down upon
us….She is a divine dew” (250). Her description of happiness suggests her
previous portrayal of Imagination, the divine angel who “descend[s] with quiet
light…bringing all around her a sphere of air borrowed of eternal summer”
(230). This passage also anticipates the midnight carnival when Imagination
descends upon Lucy in all her glory, stating “this night I will have my will”
(450).
In constituting happiness as the imagination’s embrace, Brontë reveals the
intrinsic nature of the imagination to her conception of facilities of growth. In
Villette Brontë designates facilities of growth as the intersection of potentiality
and actuality. The open door leading to the midnight festival and a dynamic
Villette entreats Lucy to enter. Lucy moves within a festival thronging with
16 / TRESSLER

exquisite life and power, and yet for Lucy it is a vast and vacant road, one that
inally allows her mentally and physically to expand into unrestricted space. In
Lucy’s early description of Imagination, Brontë aligns the imagination with this
intersection: “A dwelling thou hast, too wide for walls, too high for dome—a
temple whose loors are space—rites whose mysteries transpire in presence, to
the kindling, the harmony of worlds” (230). The dwelling of the imagination
is a temple, but a temple with ceiling, walls, and loors of space. Rather than
limiting and disciplining the mind, the cultivation of the imagination allows
for the convergence of potentiality and actuality. This convergence can both
generate whole worlds and create harmonies between disparate worlds. This
romantic imagery enables Brontë to articulate a psychological theory that
deied the notion of legibility and devise a conceptual system absent from
contemporaneous psychology.
The troubling conclusion of Villette is thoroughly in keeping with Brontë’s
critique of legibility and her preference for the imaginative convergence
prohibited by faculty psychology. In the inal pages of the novel, M. Paul is
returning by ship to Lucy, and a storm ravages the Atlantic for a week’s time:

Oh! a thousand weepers, praying in agony on waiting shores, listened for

that voice, but it was not uttered—not uttered till, when the hush came, some
could not feel it: till when the sun returned, his light was night to some! Here
pause: pause at once. There is enough said. Trouble no quiet, kind heart;
leave sunny imaginations hope. Let it be theirs to conceive the delight of
joy born again fresh out of great terror, the rapture of rescue from peril, the
wondrous reprieve from dread, the fruition of return. Let them picture union
and a happy succeeding life. (495-96)

In a conclusion hinting both sarcasm and quiet resignation, Lucy enigmatically

and yet openly states, “Let it be theirs to conceive.” The ambiguities within
the statement itself vividly contrast a similar moment in the novel’s opening.
When narrating her early tragedy, Lucy similarly refuses to divulge details, but
she states that she “will permit the reader to picture me, for the next eight years,
as a bark slumbering through halcyon weather, in a harbour still as glass” (35,
emphasis mine). The imperative in “I will permit” occurs in her subsequent
command, “[p]icture me then idle, basking, plump, and happy, stretched on a
cushioned deck, warmed with constant sunshine, rocked by breezes indolently
soft” (35). Her use of sarcasm in these imperative statements highlights the
impossibility of this reality, thus emphasizing that an opposing, troubling
reality is undoubtedly the true one. Preferring to “[t]rouble no quiet, kind
heart,” Lucy replaces “I will permit the reader to picture me” with “Let it be
theirs to conceive.” Instead of illing in the contours of the reader’s imaginative
vision herself, eliding even the hint of another possibility, Lucy chooses to give
the reader imaginative license suggested in both “leave sunny imaginations
hope” and “let it be theirs.” Even in her statement, “Let them picture union and
 BRONTË / 17

a happy succeeding life,” her repeated use of “let” still hands greater control
over to the reader, a control absent in the novel’s opening. Though the dreaded,
unhappy reality is still present and perhaps the most likely one, Lucy’s ending
enables the reader to simultaneously entertain two contradictory realities—
the reality of M. Paul’s death and the reality of his enraptured reunion with
Lucy. These two contradictory realities create uncertainty, inducing conjecture
and an imaginative participation on the part of the reader—a space opening
outward. The conclusion leaves the reader imagining the rapture of M. Paul’s
rescue and the happily-ever-after he will have with Lucy, while at the same
time imagining Lucy’s indescribable grief and her life as a teacher, illing a
landscape of endless days with untold stories. This conclusion is made possible
by Lucy’s altered inclination for illegible, imaginative space—for herself as
well as for her reader.
Viewing Brontë’s novels through this paradigm of illegibility expands the
multi-faceted and intricate nature of the psychological complexities found in
her thinking. Brontë’s calculated use of phrenology and moral management
in her novels portrays these theories to be nothing more than empty costumes
masquerading as decipherable truth. For Brontë we see that it is the unrelenting
grip of cold rationality that transforms the ecstasy of the imagination into the
ravings of a maniac.

QUINCY UNIVERSITY

NOTES
1
Rick Rylance points out that faculty psychology is an inheritance from the eighteenth
century’s discourse on the soul. He claims that “[b]y the nineteenth century, it had become so
central a feature in the conceptual scenery…[that it] is the orthodoxy, the ‘common sense’, the
‘default position’, the ‘doxa’ of the psychology of the age. It is the background that shapes and
establishes the foreground when other theories are under consideration” (27).
2
Critics have long associated the work of Charlotte Brontë with psychological theory. See
Nicholas Dames, Nathan Elliott, and Sally Shuttleworth for current examples of phrenologically-
based criticism. See John Maynard; Elaine Showalter; and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar for
examples of Freudian-inluenced psychological criticism. See Debra Gettelman for a discussion of
the nineteenth-century implications of daydreaming. See the biographical work of Juliette Barker
and Winnifred Gérin, as well as the edition of Brontë’s letters by Margaret Smith.
3
Caldwell also observes how “most critics of Brontë have assumed that, because she used
phrenologic jargon, she quite soberly adopted phrenologic belief….But Brontë’s personal and
novelistic references to phrenology are frequently jocular, pointing out that the very literalization
that offered reassurance was absurdly inlexible” (109).
4
Brontë and her brother Branwell wrote stories about the mythic country of Angria, and
Emily and Anne collaborated upon tales and poems of the ictional island Gondol.
5
For further details, see Shuttleworth 19-33.
6
Combe helped establish the Edinburg Phrenological Society in 1820; he was inluenced by
Gall’s student and follower, Johann Spurzheim, during the 1810s, and became an avid proponent
of phrenology.
18 / TRESSLER

7
The status of phrenology as a legitimate medical practice and its place within the medical
establishment was often contested and never wholly accepted by the medical community. For
more on the history of phrenology in England, see Reed; Elliott; Shuttleworth 57-70; Taylor and
Shuttleworth 3-48; and Dames 80-102.
8
Moral management began with the York Retreat, established in 1792 by William Tuke to
treat the insane in a Quaker community. See Scull’s Most Solitary of Aflictions: Madness and
Society in Britain 1700-1900, 96-103.
9
For the principal works of these psychologists see John Abercrombie’s Intellectual Powers
and the Investigation of Truth; Jean Étienne Esquirol’s Mental Maladies: A Treatise on Insanity;
Robert MacNish’s The Philosophy of Sleep; James Prichard’s A Treatise on Insanity and Other
Disorders Affecting the Mind; and Forbes Winslow’s On Obscure Diseases of the Brain, and
Disorders of the Mind.
10
Patrick Brontë and the poet laureate, Robert Southey, to whom Brontë turned for
encouragement, appear to have also held this view. Patrick opens his moral story “The Cottage in
the Wood” (1816) with the following: “[t]he sensual novelist and his admirer, are beings of depraved
appetites and sickly imaginations, who having learnt the art of self-tormenting, are diligently and
zealously employed in creating an imaginary world, which they can never inhabit, only to make
the real world, with which they must be necessarily conversant, gloomy and insupportable” (qtd.
in Barker 243). In a return letter to Brontë, Southey states “there is a danger of which I would with
all kindness & all earnestness warn you. The daydreams in which you habitually indulge are likely
to induce a distempered state of mind, & in proportion as all the ‘ordinary uses of the world’ seem
to you ‘lat & unproitable’ you will be unitted for them” (Letters I 167-68).
11
Many of Brontë’s fantasies during her time at Roe Head revolve around her desire to
compose more of her and Branwell’s Angrian narratives.
12
This passage comes from the entry, “All this day I have been in a dream,” 11 August 1836,
MS Bon 98, page 2, Brontë Parsonage Museum, qtd. in Barker 238-39.
13
On account of Brontë’s estrangement from Madame Heger, there has been some suggestion
of an adulterous affair between Brontë and Heger, but Elizabeth Gaskell attributes Brontë’s
estrangement from Madame Heger to a religious divide between Brontë’s Protestantism and
Madame Heger’s Romanism. See Gaskell 194-96.
14
See Maynard 25. Also see Gérin 279-85.
15
See Dames; see Gettelman; see Showalter; and see Shuttleworth for Brontë’s struggle with
the dangers of the imagination.
16
Gettelman calls this “punctuated reading,” deriving the idea from Roland Barthes, who
suggests that distracted reading is in fact a sign of the deepest engagement: “in a word, haven’t you
ever happened to read while looking up from your book” (qtd. 568).
17
See Elliott 43-46 for his claim that “Jane’s initial phrenological encounter with Rochester is
in keeping with the more generalized approach” of phrenology (46), though his does ind Villette
to show more disdain towards the accuracy of phrenology.
18
George Combe published Essays on Phrenology, which later became Systems of Phrenology,
in 1819, a year possibly contemporaneous with the setting of the novel. This scene illustrates the
popularity of phrenology for the intellectual layperson, which Combe’s publication made possible.
19
Caldwell writes, “Jane’s teasing irony is effective because Rochester’s capacity for loving
people is ininitely more complicated, unpredictable, alternately stingy and extravagant, than the
presence or absence of a smooth, ‘suave’ sign could possibly communicate” (109).
20
The reading in this scene is more accurately a compilation of physiology. Brontë often uses
these two interchangeably or in tandem. Physiology emphasizes the features of the face rather than
the head.
21
In one of her irst letters following the visit, Brontë writes: “I wanted a portrait and have
now got one very much to ‘my’ mind. With the exception of that slight mistake between number
and Music ‘and the small vein of error which lows thence through the character’—it is a sort of
miracle—like—like—as the very life itself” (Letters II 657-58). Critics often see the line “it is a
sort of miracle—like—like—as the very life itself” as proof of her belief in phrenology, missing
both her initial mockery of the doctor’s errors, which is present in this and other letters, and the
ridiculous playfulness that generally marked her correspondence with Smith. See Gérin 473 and
Smith’s edition of Brontë’s letters, Vol. II, xxviii, for a discussion of Brontë’s frequently teasing
and nonsensical correspondence with Smith.
 BRONTË / 19

22
As Elaine Showalter claims in The Female Malady (1985), “out of her [Brontë’s] own
‘buried life’ and her own psychosomatic aflictions, she generated a symbolic lexicon that
sometimes borrows from earlier conventions but always reinvests these conventions with
authenticity, immediacy, and imaginative force” (66).
23
For discussions of Foucaultian surveillance, see Joseph Boone; also see D. A. Miller’s
seminal work The Novel and the Police (1988).

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