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Like the speakers in many Dickinson poems, Lucy Snowe, the narrator of Charlotte Brontë's final novel Villette, teases her readers with a provoking tendency to withhold information while inviting them to share an unsettling intimacy. Dickinson, when read against Villette, tends to elevate Lucy's chronic, embattled loneliness to an existential condition, woven into human consciousness and available to all. In Trying to Think with Emily Dickinson, Jed Deppman places many of Dickinson's poems within an ongoing conversation that begins with the Romantic German philosophy of consciousness that American transcendentalists, especially Emerson, read and transformed.1 Deppman also assumes that the novels of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, and Charlotte Brontë take part in that same conversation.2 Reading Dickinson and Brontë together reinforces the claim that each of them is a writer engaged with fundamental questions about subjectivity that were prominent in the extended Romantic era.
Dickinson and Brontë's thematic affinities are reflected in the authors' narrative strategies. Both Lucy Snowe and Dickinson's speakers give readers sketchy contexts for extreme emotional states, challenging readers who expect coherent narratives that will explain them. Sharon Cameron, who focuses on Dickinson to illustrate how lyric poetry manipulates time, distinguishes between "the novel or narrative, which connects isolated moments of time to create a story multiply peopled and framed by social context," and "the lyric voice [which] is solitary and generally speaks out of a single moment in time" (23). This distinction holds in comparing Villette to Dickinson's lyric poems, although the connections fray in Villette, and the moments in Dickinson's poems spin into sequences that expand and contract in unusually extreme ways, as Cameron and others have noted.3 I maintain that Villette, relative to the conventions of the novel, and Dickinson's poems, relative to the conventions of the lyric, disturb or refuse narrative closure partly as a means of questioning perceptions of identity. Unraveling narrative, our most reliable framework for a consistent identity over time, demonstrates the fraught nature of our ability to regard ourselves and each other in coherent and meaningful ways. In requiring her readers to bear witness to a painful but only partially explicated inner life while refusing them the comfortable and familiar novel reader's position as confidant, Lucy conjures a fully self-conscious presence that cannot be...