Berkeley Undergraduate Journal

This thesis addresses how Charlotte Brontë’s Villette creates a sympathetic economy that challenges nineteenth-century English gender convention and first-person novelistic narrator-reader tradition. It posits that Brontë’s social critique of gender convention in nineteenth-century England is related to her novelistic critique of narrator-reader tradition in first-person novels. In the same way that gender convention dictates the context in which social sympathy should be felt thereby perpetuating gendered power relationships, novelistic tradition also dictates the context in which readerly sympathy should be felt and also endorses a power relationship between narrator and reader. However, this thesis concludes that Brontë’s creation of a contentious and oppositional narrator in Villette ultimately reverses this latter power relationship between narrator and reader.