"I am a rising character": An analysis of Charlotte Brontë’s Experimental Narrator in Villette

The first part of this dissertation aims to provide a historical overview of nineteenth-century Britain in a context of religious tensions, political opposition, and social reforms. The second part aims to analyse Charlotte Brontë's cultural, educational, and religious upbringing within the Victorian context. Whereas the aim of the third part is to analyse how Charlotte Brontë’s last published novel introduces an innovative autodiegetic narrator that defies nineteenth-century literary conventions in three ways, namely, it leaves the novel’s ending open, it often withholds some relevant information from the reader, and it avoids the classical expected ending of the hero and heroine’s marriage. This study is based on an analysis of Villette’s narrative strategies and a comparison with Jane Eyre. The argument that is brought forward in this dissertation is that Charlotte Brontë’s novel is not a mere literary experiment with a loosely woven plot with an ambiguous ending and an unreliable narrator. But rather, the text attempts to forge an unconventional and autonomous female character whose act of writing a story allows her to manipulate her narrative and shape an identity of her own. In particular, this paper aims to explore how Villette is not about spinsterhood but rather the narration of an individual rejecting Jane Eyre’s domestic fate as a married woman. Consequently, Charlotte’s novel is innovative because Lucy’s story diverts from Samuel Richardson’s Pamela as well as from Jane Eyre’s courtship plot.