Arrested Development: The Uncanny Child in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette

In his controversial yet powerful book, Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture, James R. Kincaid discusses the image of the child as pure, angelic, and asexual—a notion that he argues is quintessentially Victorian (57). In Kinkaid’s analysis, this cultural conception transforms the “true child” into a “false child” capable of embodying fantasy, obsession, and desire (196). In her third and last novel, Villette, Charlotte Brontë employs this trope through her portrayal of the girl-woman Paulina Home, whose transgression of age categories throughout the novel gives her an otherworldly quality, reified by other characters frequently calling her a “ghost” or “fairy.” Paulina’s most potent narrative function, however, is as a double for Lucy Snowe, Villette’s unreliable narrator. In Lucie Armitt’s reading, Paulina serves to cast “reflected light” on Lucy’s own traumatized past, which remains ungiven throughout the novel except for vague allusions to a “shipwreck” (Armitt 217). Paulina therefore acts as the uncanny reemergence of behaviors and desires that Lucy has repressed due to her trauma—such an uncanny experience occurs when, in the account given by Freud in his 1919 essay “The Uncanny”, “infantile complexes which have been repressed are once more revived by some impression” (17). In using Paulina to voice and cope with her own troubled past however, Lucy often reinforces Paulina’s “unreal” qualities; it is only through Paulina’s disappearance from the narrative that she might free herself from Lucy’s problematic optics. As I investigate Paulina’s uncanniness in order to uncover Lucy’s secretive inner life, it will be necessary to remain cautious of how Lucy’s, and our own, unconscious uncomfortability with the subject of Paulina’s infantile sexuality may further construct Paulina into an erotic Other, and consequently overlook the “true child.”

Paulina’s uncanniness stems from her apparent backwards or stunted aging, a phenomenon that creates unease in Lucy, who runs from the events of her own childhood throughout the novel—Paulina therefore acts as the reappearance of Lucy’s infantile desires that the adult Lucy has repressed. The narrative introduces Paulina as a “shawled bundle,” evoking the image of a powerless infant (Brontë 7). These assumptions are immediately contradicted when a more mature voice from the shawl speaks: “Put me down, please […] and take off this shawl” (7-8). Lucy describes the “creature” that emerges from the shawl as a “mere doll [with a] neck [as] delicate as wax, her head [full] of silky curls” (8). By likening Paulina to a doll, Lucy projects an unreal light onto her, as the characterization does not “[allow] Polly to return to a ‘safe’ infantile image” (Armitt 3), but rather casts her as the porcelain replica of an infant, what Kincaid denotes as the “false child.” In doing so, Lucy can spectate and criticize Paulina’s behaviors without acknowledging their likeness to her own instincts. As Lucy looks upon Paulina, she envisions Paulina as “growing old and unearthly” despite her “infant visage” (12). While “old” at first gives the impression that Paulina is aging, paired with “unearthly” it may refer instead to the “oldness” of Freud’s “old, animistic conception of the universe,” which includes the “narcissistic overestimation of subjective mental processes” (Freud 12). We can identify this tendency in Paulina, as Lucy later finds her praying like “some precocious fanatic or untimely saint” for her father to return (Brontë 12), displaying what Freud may deem an irrational, primitive desire for an “instantaneous wish-fulfillment” (Freud 17). Although Freud distinguishes these “primitive beliefs” from “infantile complexes,” which refer more specifically to “the castration-complex, womb-phantasies, etc.,” for the purpose of our analysis of Paulina’s childishness, we can view these facets as related (17). For instance, because Paulina narcissistically believes that she can wish her father to return, she also displays a premature libidinal attachment to her father; both of these neuroses Freud suggests should be “surmounted” as one grows older (Freud 17). Thus, Paulina appears uncanny insofar as she reminds Lucy of these early stages of mental development, perhaps because it is in these stages where Lucy’s own trauma has taken place.

As Paulina is trapped at the border of child and adult, she also exists, in Lucy’s “discursive” vision, as existing in the boundaries between earthly and unearthly, living and dead (Brontë 12). When Paulina forms a crush on Graham—the son of Mrs. Bretton at whose house Lucy and Paulina both reside—she waits at the door to his playroom, seemingly unable to enter. Lucy asks what hinders her, and she replies: “I feel afraid: but may I try, do you think? May I knock at the door, and ask to be let in?” (26). Drawing from gothic tropes, Brontë portrays Paulina as a vampire, desirous but barred from certain realms without the permission of the occupant. Other monsters she is aligned with similarly rely on but are kept at a distance from the human world—Lucy describes Paulina once as a “small ghost gliding over the carpet” (34). If Paulina is a ghost, she haunts those that she craves love from. Once her father leaves the Bretton house, she begins to “nestle” into Graham (25). Lucy observes that “[o]ne would have thought the child had no mind or life of her own, but must necessarily live, move, and have her being in another” (25). When it is time for her to depart from Graham and the Brettons, Paulina cries, “I cannot—cannot sleep; and in this way I cannot—cannot live!” as though her physical separation from Graham will cause her demise, transforming her into an aimless spectre with no body to haunt (32). Notably, Lucy views these gothic characterizations as intrinsic to Paulina’s age and gender, which mirror her own. Reconciling Paulina, Lucy tells her that “he [Graham] is a boy and you are a girl,” and, as such, his nature is “strong and gay,” whereas Paulina’s is “otherwise,” equating girlishness with otherness (33). Paulina’s sexual feelings are treated in particular as monstrous or inhuman, revealing Lucy’s own hesitations about expressing desire, as she describes Paulina’s physical embrace of Graham as “strangely rash; exciting the feeling one might experience on seeing an animal” (29). Most telling in this statement is Lucy’s repression of those girlish displays of affection in herself; Paulina’s antics appear uncanny because they evoke in Lucy the memory of her own childish mannerisms.

Lurking behind Lucy’s fantastical narrations are the more sinister realities of Paulina’s frequent bouts of “home sickness,” wordplay that may connote her pathological relationship to her father, Mr. Home. During Paulina’s first night at the Brettons’, Lucy comes across her in a rapturous state, “kneeling upright in bed, and praying like some Catholic or Methodist enthusiast,” muttering, “Papa; my dear Papa!”” (12). Paulina’s prayers are so soft that “they were not whispered at all, but put up unuttered” (12). In Freud’s account of aphonia or the loss of one’s voice—an account that is scientifically dubious, but resonant with Victorian conceptions of child hysteria—aphonia may occur when one has lost the object of their verbal and oral activity. In one of Freud’s earliest case studies, Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1901), he writes of a young girl that, “[w]hen the man she loved was away she gave up speaking; speech had lost its value since she could not speak to him” (Freud 40). For Paulina, her hysterical symptom of aphonia may be rooted in the psychical significance of her father’s absence. Paulina’s physical condition and posture—kneeling in bed with her voice in strain—also suggests disturbingly the image of confession at the same time it does oral sex, reproducing Kincaid’s notion of the Victorian child as simultaneously pure and erotic. The double-imagery may indicate that Paulina’s relationship to her father contains some kind of sexual aberration. When Mr. Home visits his daughter at the Brettons’, Lucy, fixated on Paulina’s eyes, witnesses a “startling transfiguration” that betrays “sudden, dangerous natures—sensitive as they are called” (13). Lucy’s refusal to narrate Paulina’s “sensitive” indicates their taboo nature, as well as Lucy’s wish to conceal her own infantile neurosis—perhaps regarding a libidinal attachment to her own parental figures—and remain safely the onlooker of Paulina’s “spectacle” (13). 

Though Lucy and Paulina are the primary characters who “double” each other in Villette, another character who appears periodically throughout the novel may further elucidate each of their childish dispositions. Lucy is repeatedly haunted by the figure of a nun, who is suggested to be the ghost of a nun who broke her chastity vows and was buried alive as punishment. Lucy eventually assumes the nun to be the deceased girl Justine-Marie. In Victorian novelistic fashion, Lucy encounters the granddaughter of Justine-Marie and confuses her for Justine-Marie herself. The figure of Justine-Marie, though an adult, is labelled by Lucy as “the child of malady” (Brontë 252). The “malady” remains ungiven, but Lucy notes that she is herself “of that malady the prey,” hinting at a trauma that affects her and Justine-Marie in similar ways (252). Thus we can consider Paulina, Justine-Marie, and Lucy as a trifecta of girl-women, all stuck in their metaphorical pasts: Justine-Marie, through her painful death and continuous rebirth in her offspring, Paulina through her inability to overcome her premature sexual desires, and Lucy through her refusal to process, and thus move on from, the scene of her trauma. As Armitt puts it, Lucy is unable to leave behind the infantile phase of her life, “enabl[ing] her to retain an ongoing ‘feel’ for the uncanny, but restrict[ing] her access to fully-fledged adult sexuality; […] [her character] comes to rest in a limbo-land defined in relation to children” (Armitt 4).

The nun also projects her image onto Paulina, hinting at the origin of Paulina’s neurotic sexuality. During Mr. Home’s visit to the Brettons’, Lucy watches as Paulina sits beside him like a “doll” in a “mourning frock and white chemisette” (Brontë 15). Donning the outfit of the ostracized nun, Paulina bears “perseveringly” at a shred of handkerchief, such that when her hand slips, the “skewer” “inflict[s] a deeper stab than usual” and spills “minute red dots” of her blood on the white fabric. Thus, with the “perverse weapon” of the needle, Paulina, in an apparent trance, enacts a penetration onto herself (15). Through Lucy’s eyes, however, the scene plays out as continued evidence of Paulina’s unearthliness—Lucy narrates that “child” was “an inappropriate and undescriptive term” to refer to the “picture” of Paulina (15). In narratively complying with notions of Paulina as not a true child but an erotic Other, Lucy overwrites what she may find most uncanny: the encoded sexual abuse of Paulina by her father, as the blood-stained handkerchief is later revealed to be a gift “for ‘papa’” (19). 

Despite Lucy’s frequent narrative othering of Paulina, her identification with Paulina is evident in the words she uses to describe the young girl. While Graham and Mr. Home often suggest words like “changeling,” “daughterling,” and “fairy” to categorize Paulina, Lucy is more inclined to call her a “ghost,” “creature,” and employ language that evokes haunting. This etymological difference stems from Lucy’s greater empathy for Paulina, specifically the traumatic symptoms she recognizes in Paulina, whereas Graham and Mr. Home view Paulina through the excited optics of their erotic fantasies. Lucy displays a compulsion to “double” Paulina as early as their first night at the Brettons’, when Paulina insists they must sleep in the same chamber—notably, Paulina is the only character in Villette to share Lucy’s bed. That night, Paulina speaks to the nurse and tells her not to wake “the girl (meaning me, who now lay with my eyes shut)” (9). The clarification here feels unnecessary, and could function rather as evidence of Lucy needing to remind herself of her identity, revealing that she has fallen already into the trap of misrecognition. Frequently, after Lucy criticizes Paulina’s displays of emotion, she states her own name, as if wanting to distinguish herself from the infantile impulses she sees in Paulina that she finds repulsive in herself. For instance, as Paulina weeps when her father leaves after his visit, Lucy expresses sympathy, commenting that Paulina “went through, in that brief interval of her infant life, emotions such as some never feel; it was in her constitution” (22). Although the “shipwreck” where Lucy claims her family members perished occurs after Lucy’s stay at the Brettons’, her characterization of Paulina’s grief appears strongly as an omission of her own trauma. Immediately afterward she, in a moment of clarity, asserts, “I, Lucy Snowe, was calm” (22). 

Where Lucy sees Paulina as a decoy through which she can narrate details of her difficult childhood, Paulina too views Lucy as a way to mitigate and diffuse painful emotions. When Paulina must leave Graham, she readies Lucy to deliver the news, “arrang[ing] a locket-ribbon about [Lucy’s] neck” and “comb[ing] [her] hair,” fashioning Lucy like a girl would a doll; Lucy becomes her surrogate (31). As Graham says goodbye to Paulina, Lucy notes that Paulina was “again kissed, restored to me, and I carried her away; but, alas! not soothed” (32). The intentional omission of a pronoun before “not soothed” indicates that Lucy has absorbed Paulina’s anxieties—their united consciousness appears in the linguistic dimensions of the text. The scene ends with Lucy telling Paulina to climb into bed with her, “[taking] [Paulina] in [and] warm[ing] her in [her] arms” (34). As Lucy does so, she narrates, “[Paulina] trembled nervously; I soothed her” (34). The phrase “I soothed her” contrasts with the previous one, as Lucy more strongly delineates between herself and Paulina in order to “soothe.” Still, Lucy views Paulina as an extension of herself, and her soothing Paulina can be read instead as an act of self-soothing. As Lucy looks at Paulina’s sleeping figure, she thinks, “[h]ow will she get through this world, or battle with this life? How will she bear the shocks and repulses, the humiliations and desolations which books, and my own reason tell me are prepared for all flesh?” (34). These are Lucy’s questions for herself, which she must contend with as Paulina “depart[s] the next day; trembling like a leaf when she took leave, but exercising self-command” (34). The sensitive Paulina departs from the narrative, and Lucy, exercising her own form of self-command (her internal regulation of Reason and Feeling), must begin her story. 

Lucy, though often expressing disgust and aversion at Paulina and Justine-Marie’s replication of childlike behaviors, seems unable to temper those infantile impulses in herself—as such, she suffers from the dissonance between wanting to exist as a full-fledged adult but still relying on infantile expression to cope with the trauma of losing her parents. Her desire to be like Paulina and Justine-Marie, both girl-women who are unable to age past the scenes of their trauma and continue to haunt the objects of their affections, is revealed in her admission during her trying “Long Vacation” alone at Madame Beck’s school; she wishes she could be “covered in with earth and turf, deep out of [the] influence of [others] for [she] could not live on in their light, nor make them comrades, nor yield them affection” (158). Lucy wishes to be “dead” in the same way Paulina and Justine-Marie are, because she feels that her emotional proximity to her dead parents in the spirit world makes her unable to exist fully in the corporeal world. She also acknowledges the stunted mannerisms of Paulina and Justine-Marie as a buffer against trauma and suffering—their existence in the threshold between the dead and the living allows them to not suffer as immensely from rejections and disappointments, and their haunting allows them to be cherished and remembered. At the same time, she fears turning into them, shown through her burying her letters with Graham which, as Hennelly Jr. points out in his analysis, “address and adorn” her doll-like aspects (Hennelly Jr. 10), because she knows playing into arrested development will only lead to narrative stagnation, which is, for Lucy, akin to death.

Paulina’s return in Chapter 23, after having disappeared from the narrative since her departure from the Brettons’, shows her escape from Lucy’s uncanny projections and progress towards self-actualization. Armitt accounts for Paulina’s absence in accordance with the fairy archetype in Victorian mythology, proposing that she has “retreated from sight by searching out the same fairy ‘barrow’ or ‘mound’ to which her mother has adjourned ‘in death,’ returning (as is customary) to find the human world changed, but the fairy herself eternally young” (6). But this interpretation runs the risk of replicating fantastical notions about children onto Paulina. Rather, Paulina’s complete narrative disappearance momentarily freed her from the unreal optics of the text. When she reappears, she seems closer aligned with Freud’s “heimlich,” an adult who has overcome her infantile stages of sexual development such that she can fashion herself into a sexual and sexually desirable person according to her liking (Freud 2). While other characters and the narrative itself still refer to Paulina as an otherworldly being, there is an increased emphasis within the text on “looking”: Mr. Home looks at Paulina as “men do look on what is the apple of their eye” (280) and Graham “follow[s] [Paulina’s movements] with his eye” (291). Unearthliness, rather than seeming inherent to the child Paulina, is the result of other characters’ fantasies, and perpetuated by her only when beneficial. As Paulina “t[akes] immediate possession of her father; mak[es] him her entire property; [brings him] into [her] dominion,” so does she with the reader, exerting erotic control over how we perceive her (291). At the same time, she is quick to note to Lucy (and to us) that while “papa [looks] on [her] as a baby,” she is decidedly “verging on [her] nineteenth year” (304).

Paulina’s detachment from her role as the uncanny manifestation of Lucy’s past, and her overcoming of her child complex, sheds light on Lucy’s own development. When Lucy first encounters Paulina as an adult, Lucy remarks that Paulina “would retain and add […] and so grow in harmony and consistency as she grew in years,” admiring Paulina’s ability to remember her childhood but not linger in it (276). Lucy however realizes that Paulina’s childhood “which now crowded upon [Lucy]” was not as “vivid and visible” to Paulina (276). She recounts the events of their shared stay at the Brettons’—”[Paulina’s] fond attachments, her sports and contests with a well-loved playmate, the patient, true devotion of her child’s heart, her fears, her delicate reserves, her little trials, the last piercing pain of separation”—with a fondness, as though they were her own memories (276). Because Lucy relies on Paulina as a double to articulate her own traumas, Paulina moving on from their synthesized childhood only makes Lucy, who has not yet processed her childhood emotions, cling onto them all the more tightly. Their difference in growth is most visible when they are once again at the Brettons’ home, a full circle to the setting of the earliest, more fantastical chapters of Villette. Revealing her own underestimation of Paulina’s and Lucy’s growth, Mrs. Bretton calls, “[c]hildren, come down!” (278). While “Paulina […] still […] linger[s],” Lucy “incline[s] to descend: [they] [Lucy and Paulina] went down” (278). Paulina’s hesitation contrasted with Lucy’s immediate willingness “to descend” imparts visually that while Paulina is wary that choosing to descend the stairs—a possible metaphor for the way one can sink into (the textual world of) a book—will cast her once again in the early part of the novel’s unreal light and make her appear falsely like a child, Lucy, in spite of her fears of stagnation, has not yet surrendered her desire to be, and be viewed as, a child.

Contending with the depiction of the “erotic child” in Villette forces us to evaluate our own participation in Lucy’s construction of Paulina Home as unreal and unearthly, a position that Kincaid argues, in one of his most contentious statements, allows modern audiences to disguise their own pedophilia. Certainly, the question stands: By reading Paulina as a literal ghost or fairy, are we complicit in fantastical notions about children that transform the true child into a perverted Other? Does insisting on the child’s otherness reinforce our belief in its natural purity, while all the same making us, as Claudia Nelson sums up of Kincaid’s argument, “more convinced of the child’s essential eroticism” (Nelson 55)? Indeed, what we perceive as uncanny may have entirely to do with what we find uncomfortable about ourselves. As Freud would put it, the uncanny occurs when what has been repressed on a cultural and individual level—the possibility of infantile sexuality that can be molded by adults in a child’s early life—becomes revived in front of us: in the form of an unaging, desirous child. Notably, Brontë approaches but never explicitly addresses the subject of Paulina’s rape, characteristic perhaps of a Victorian fascination with the child, while simultaneously eliding the realities of child prostitution, abuse, and neglect, whether legally or culturally. It is up to contemporary audiences, as descendants of the Victorians, to recognize and reform our entrenched but hidden norms about children and child-rearing; that is to say rather than fearing the “small ghost gliding over the carpet” (Brontë 34), perhaps it is necessary to attend to the double sleeping in our own beds.