Charlotte Brontë's Villette and the Book of Esther: A Pioneering Hermeneutic on Sexism and Xenophobia

Throughout her literary career, Charlotte Bronte sustained a prolonged intertextual relationship with the Book of Esther, which reached its peak in Villette (1853). While most scholarship on the topic has focused on Bronte's Vashti, a renowned actress, a close reading of the novel belies an adaptation of the whole Book of Esther that is focused on the compounded forms of oppression Lucy must face simultaneously as a woman, an English national and a Protestant. Considered in light of contemporary readings of the Book of Esther as an intersectional narrative on sexism (Esther 1, Vashti's rebellion and the edict against women) and antisemitism (Esther 3-4, Mordecai's rebellion and the edict against Jews) overlapping most acutely in its heroine, a Jewish woman, I argue that Bronte uses the biblical story to address sexism and xenophobia with a triply disadvantaged Esther figure in Lucy Snowe. Villette thus offers one of the first proto-feminist, intersectional readings of Vashti and Esther, setting the stage for more emphatic female-authored exegesis to champion Vashti and Esther as paragons of action against oppression. In this sense, Bronte's approach to the Book of Esther as a source text for her unique brand of fictionalised proto-feminism and social criticism is an as yet unrecognised pioneer of such hermeneutics.