“Villette” (post 2) by Charlotte Brontë (post 14): Metaphor, Word Choice, and Multiple Personality; “Faculties” may mean her Alternate Personalities

During Lucy Snowe’s brief first visit to London, she has interesting ways of thinking when she is by herself; interesting, that is, if you assume, as I do, that Brontë’s metaphor and choice of words were meaningful to her.

Common-sense as a Personality

“Into the hands of Common-sense I confided the matter. Common-sense, however, was as chilled and bewildered as all my other faculties, and it was only under the spur of an inexorable necessity that she spasmodically executed her trust. Thus urged, she paid the porter: considering the crisis, I did not blame her too much that she was hugely cheated…” (1, p. 46).

She says, “I said” while alone (to whom?)

“I did well to come,” I said, proceeding to dress with speed and care. “I like the spirit of this great London which I feel around me. Who but a coward would pass his whole life in hamlets, and for ever abandon his faculties to the eating rust of obscurity” (1, p. 48).

But four pages later, she says “I reflected” and “this thought was crossing my mind” (1, p. 52). That is, when she experiences herself as having her own thought, she says so. Which raises the question as to whom she experiences herself as talking, when, by herself, she says “I said.”

Comment

Is “Common-sense” the name Brontë has given to one of her alternate personalities? And when she is alone, but says rather than thinks something, is she speaking to an alternate personality? And is “faculties” her euphemism for alternate personalities? If, as most great fiction writers, Brontë had multiple personality trait, the answers are probably yes.

1. Charlotte Brontë. Villette [1853]. Edited by Margaret Smith and Herbert Rosengarten. Introduction and Notes by Tim Dolan. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000/2008.