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Constructions of Caregiving in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette

This article revisits Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) in light of current debates surrounding illness and caregiving by asking: how can feminist ethics of care illuminate the place of characters with disabilities within cultures of self-reliance and self-sufficiency? By drawing on critical care ethics, I argue that caregiving communities engage more central characters into the peripheral narrative spaces inhabited by disabled minor characters like Miss Marchmont and Marie Broc. These are characters who, because of their disabilities, forge very few connections with others in the novel. In contrast, the networks of care that develop around characters with illnesses are extensive, involving friends, family, servants, strangers and medical professionals. By establishing a contrast between the experiences of illness and disability in Villette based on the research on care webs outlined in Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s Care Work (2018), I sketch the pre-history of caregiving practices since the mid-nineteenth century in Britain. I argue that Brontë’s representations of the ‘care web’ and the ‘care dyad’ highlight the need for ethics of radical care as they exist today.