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The Affective World of Charlotte Bronte's Villette

Matthew Arnold's comment that Villette was a "disagreeable" novel was, nonetheless, a testimony to the text's extraordinary emotional power, a feature that drew a different kind of evaluation from George Eliot, who wrote with astonishment that "I am only just returned to a sense of the real world about me, for I have been reading Villette, a still more wonderful book than Jane Eyre. There is something almost preternatural in its power."' This article is an attempt to give an account of the distinctive affective world into which the reader is introduced in Villette; it is also prompted, in part, by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's dictum that "[a] great novelist is above all an artist who invents unknown or unrecognized affects and brings them to light as the becoming of his characters."2 Implicit in Deleuze and Guattari's comment is their conception of the novel, particularly the Anglo-American novel, as an experimental means for wholly original contemplations and expressions of feeling and thought. The novelist, in this view, intervenes against established schemes of representation and embarks on raising to the condition of art the sensations and perceptions of a hitherto unarticulated viewpoint on experience. One of the advantages of Deleuze and Guattari's view of literature is that it prompts one to thinking about what a fictional text does, how it conveys to the reader the effects of the unique experience that it elaborates at the level of content. As they write elsewhere, "There is no difference between what a book talks about and how it is made."3 In what follows, my theme, to put it broadly, will be that Villette is a great novel of affective estrangement, a profound artistic investigation of