“Villette” (post 6) by Charlotte Brontë (post 18): Narrator-protagonist, Lucy Snowe, on the multiplicity of her creative process and sense of identity

“I, to whom nature had denied the impromptu faculty; who, in public, was by nature a cypher; whose time of mental activity, even when alone…needed the fresh silence of morning, or the recluse peace of evening, to win from the Creative Impulse one evidence of his presence, one proof of his force; I, with whom that Impulse was the most intractable, the most capricious, the most maddening of masters…—a deity, which sometimes…would not speak when questioned, would not hear when appealed to, would not, when sought, be found; but would stand, all cold…all granite…like the stone face of a tomb; and again, suddenly, at some turn, some sound, some long-trembling sob of the wind…the irrational demon would wake unsolicited, would stir strangely alive…perhaps filling its temple with a strange hum of oracles, but sure to give half the significance to fateful winds, and grudging to the desperate listener even a miserable remnant…” (1, p. 356).

“Is there another Lucy Snowe?” (1, p. 486).

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