Melting Miss Snowe: Charlotte's Message to the English Church

Author: Armitage, Nicholas

Source: Bronte Studies, Volume 34, Number 3, November 2009 , pp. 209-219(11)

Publisher: Maney Publishing

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Abstract:

Lucy Snowe, Charlotte Brontë's heroine in Villette, paints an unflattering image of Roman Catholicism. But Charlotte distanced herself from Lucy, something that should perhaps encourage us to see the anti-Catholic rhetoric of the novel as at least partly a literary device. Lucy's identification of Catholicism with Sentimentalism appears to be mirrored by her own identification of Protestantism with Reason, such that Charlotte may be saying that in their different ways, both understandings of Christianity romanticize self-sacrifice. Her message seems to be that the true gospel is neither of these, but a liberty which is paradoxically better demonstrated by the Catholic Paul Emanuel than by the Protestant Lucy herself.

Keywords: EVANGELICALISM; ROMAN CATHOLICISM; CHARLOTTE BRONTE; REASON; LIBERTY

Document Type: Research article

DOI: 10.1179/147489309X12470507051742

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