Villette and the Victorian Paul

Joshua Brorby, “Villette and the Victorian Paul: Religious Nationalism, Identity, and Non-Conversion” (pp. 111–138) This essay addresses two gaps in criticism of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853)—the lack of incisive analysis of its Hindu imagery, and inattention to the specifically Victorian commentaries on Paul the Apostle that the novel harnesses—to argue that they are crucially connected in the novel’s conception of religious identity. Villette’s anti-Catholic rhetoric has been explored extensively, particularly with regard to Lucy’s acceptance of M. Paul’s faith. What Villette’s strained, qualified toleration of Catholicism intimates, carried along to readers in its Pauline allusions, is a surprising extension of near-universal forbearance and a mobile view of religious identity, which together permit a richer critical vision of midcentury anxieties around nationalism and empire. With attention to missionary writing and liberal broad-church theology, this essay traces overlaps in midcentury discussions of Paul and imperial worries over the conversion of Hindus, which Brontë exploits with carefully placed references to Hinduism and other alternatives to orthodox Christianity. Additionally, the essay argues that Brontë deserves status as an imaginative Biblical hermeneut whose dramatic interpretation of Paul places her alongside Matthew Arnold as one of Victorian England’s principal literary readers of the Apostle.