Title: The Construction of Female Subjectivity: Psychiatry and Educational Space in Villette

Abstract: With the development of psychiatry and the accumulation of “madness” culture, mental illness has shifted from being a physical issue to a moral one. In the “increasingly refined” Victorian society, marginalized groups who deviated from social norms were morally condemned and branded as “mad.” Mental illness also became a “feminized” condition. Victorian women, constrained by domestic life, became detached from society with the home becoming their safe space, while the social sphere turned into a physical and psychological forbidden zone. The disease and spatial writings in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette intend to challenge and even counter various power relations, presenting an anti-power narrative, so as to construct the female subjectivity of the narrator Lucy. From the perspective of special writings of Charlotte Brontë that subvert traditional societal expectations for female writing, this paper explores the “self-help” of women in the 19th century.

Keywords: Villette, psychiatric writing, educational space, female subjectivity, Charlotte Brontë

Authors: Jingbo Zhang, Professor, College of Foreign Languages, Shandong University of Science and Technology, Qingdao, Shandong, China; Xuemeng Wang, College of Foreign Languages, Shandong University of Science and Technology, Qingdao, Shandong, China.

DOI: 10.19967/j.cnki.flc.2025.01.011