Beneath the surface story that resembles so many other romance novels of the Victorian period, Charlotte Brontë examines in Villette several important and enduring questions about women’s roles in society and their obligations to others and to themselves.

Brontë originally intended to name her heroine Lucy Frost; the name and the change are significant. Although both names convey the heroine’s cold nature, Frost suggests a frigidity not softened by the paradoxical warmth conveyed by snow. There is significance in the given name as well; Lucy calls to mind images of lumination or lucidity but also suggests the pride exhibited by the first light-bearer, Lucifer. Lucy Snowe is a proud young woman, too proud on occasion to reveal her innermost thoughts not only to other characters but also to readers. As a result, she is an unreliable narrator, and readers are often left wondering how to interpret the actions of those whose stories Lucy relates, or those of the heroine herself.

Brontë’s chief concern in Villette is to expose and examine the role of women in her society. Having been the jilted lover in a triangle that included an older teacher when she was a governess, Brontë fully understands the plight of her heroine. She realizes the expectations society places on women such as Lucy, who are constricted in their opportunities for both economic and personal advancement. Although she seldom talks candidly to the reader, Lucy Snowe is clearly a woman with a sensitive nature and a strong personal desire to succeed in the world on her own terms and to make choices about her lifestyle. Unfortunately, being a single woman in her century, she finds herself circumscribed by convention and law, forced to accept the supervision and direction of others whose help she requires if she is to survive without benefit of marriage. In one sense, the novel is a Bildungsroman, the story of the heroine’s growth toward self-awareness and, more important, self-acceptance. The adventures of her youth steel her for the long life she is to lead as an unmarried schoolteacher.

The novel is also a tale of alienation, highlighting the plight of individuals who find themselves alone in a society in which few understand them and few care about them as persons. Brontë accentuates her heroine’s isolation in many ways: Lucy is an orphan; she is plain of feature in a society in which female beauty is valued; she is set amid a group of foreigners in Villette who find her odd and aloof; she is a staunch Protestant in a land where Roman Catholicism is the dominant religion; she is unable to communicate her feelings for Graham Bretton, and she must watch as he pays court first to Ginevra Fanshawe and then to Polly de Bassompierre.

The focus of attention on Lucy Snowe may tend to obscure another important theme: Brontë’s investigation of the society in which her heroine lives. Although the novel seems to focus on the heroine’s exploits—paralleling many popular and sentimental romances that were consumed with great zeal by Victorian readers—the author is concurrently concerned about the larger social issues that force Lucy to become the reserved, alienated, and sometimes manipulative figure she appears to be. Brontë offers a subtle hint of her aims in the title of the novel: Villette is not the name of the heroine but that of the city in which she passes her life. Brontë wants readers to realize that the story of Lucy Snowe is not simply one of character; it is also an exposé of the world that forces women to behave as Lucy does, and...