humanities Article Nomadic Narrative in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette Jungah Kim Department of English, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843, USA;
[email protected] Received: 17 November 2018; Accepted: 22 March 2019; Published: 28 March 2019 Abstract: Various critics have examined Charlotte Brontë’s Villette’s missing ending as a proof of Lucy Snowe’s unreliability in leaving the narrative purposefully ambiguous to escape her possible negative ending. I, however, interpret the ending as one of the ways in which she actively and positively refuses the concept of closure, and rather, creates, what I would call, a nomadic narrative. Nomadic narrative is term I coined based on the idea of Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic theory and Georg Lukács’s The Theory of the Novel to re-imagine Lucy’s narration and narrative, not as a concealment, but as an embracement of her nomadic subjectivity and acknowledgement that she has no true end. I further argue that nomadic narrative is a narrative that fractures and recreates itself through its gaps and rewritten portions, gaining its own sense of agency. Unlike narratives that only fixate on protagonists, nomadic narrative becomes an open and posthuman space that allows the incorporation of nonhuman subjects. Keywords: nomadic narrative; nomadic subjectivity; sexual differences; spatiality; Villette; posthumanism; women’s writing; Lucy Snowe; Rosi Braidotti; Theory of the Novel 1. Introduction At a crucial moment, in the final scene of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853), Lucy Snowe commands the readers to “pause at once” (Brontë 2008, p. 496), deceitfully luring the readers to imagine a “sunny” ending1.