The Gendering of Art and Science in Charlotte Bronte's Villette

In her novel Villette, begun around 1850, Charlotte Bronte explores the semantic opposition that was emerging between the terms 'art' and 'science' during the time she was writing. The terms were no longer interchangeable as they had been in the eighteenth century, though they remained closely associated. At first glance, it appears that Charlotte positions the nascent binary of art and science along gender lines: most of the men in Villette are characterized by scientific associations, and most of the women are distinguished by artistic sensibility, the most prominent of which is the opposition between Doctor John and the narrator, Lucy Snowe. Since Charlotte's narrative is told from the first-person point of view of a somewhat irrational and artistically inclined woman who seems thwarted by science, it would appear that Charlotte directs the reader's sympathy towards art, women and the irrational. Given that Victorians perceived male-dominated scientific pursuits as a masculine control of nature and, by extension, control of the female sex with whom nature has long been linked, it would follow that Villette overthrows male authority as it overthrows rational thought. However, Charlotte also collapses the distinctions she makes between the terms art and science and the two genders over the course of her novel. In blurring these binaries, she strives to dissolve what the Victorians perceived as the binary natures of men and women.