“Villette” (post 4) by Charlotte Brontë (post 16): Plot twist—Dr. John is Graham from Lucy Snowe’s past—means protagonist has multiple personality

The protagonist-narrator, Lucy Snowe, 24, is working as an English teacher in Belgium. Dr. John is the visiting physician for the school. Lucy gets depressed when she remains at the school while almost everyone else is on holiday. Then, out at night, she faints or blacks out. When she wakes up, she doesn’t know where she is, but the place has furnishings that she clearly recalls from visits to her godmother ten years earlier. She can’t account for it:

“Where was I? Not only in what spot of the world, but in what year of our Lord? For all these objects were of past days, and of a distant country. Ten years ago I bade them good-bye; since my fourteenth year they and I had never met. I gasped audibly, ‘Where am I?’ ” (1, pp. 166-167).

It turns out that Dr. John is Dr. John Graham Bretton, the son of Lucy’s godmother, Mrs. Bretton, both of whom Lucy had known very well from visits to her godmother ten years ago. Recently, when Dr. John and Lucy have met at the school, he has not recognized her as being Lucy Snowe from his past. In contrast, she now says that she has recognized who he was for months, but has not felt like saying so until now.

However, if for months, Lucy had recognized Dr. John as the Graham she had known very well from visits to her godmother’s house years ago, then why, when she now wakes up and sees all those old familiar furnishings, doesn’t she immediately come to the obvious conclusion, that she must be in Dr. John Graham Bretton’s house?

The explanation (not given in the novel or Wikipedia) is that Lucy had more than one personality. The personality that had, for months, recognized Dr. John as her godmother’s son, was not the same personality who woke up in his house.

And though Dr. John now recognizes Lucy as his old acquaintance, why hadn’t he recognized her the various times they had met at the school? Apparently, her teacher personality was not the personality he had previously known, and different personalities may have such different attitudes, facial expressions, and body language that they can seem like different people.

In short, this “plot twist” and “unreliable narrator” is actually a revelation that the protagonist has multiple personality, even if the author did not think of it in those terms.

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