Symbolic Meanings of Violets in Villette

Abstract

Charlotte Brontë bestows symbolic meanings in her novels on some of the vegetation based on their popular meanings and images, and she would have expected contemporary readers to know the meanings of such vegetation. Villette (1853) is marked by the symbolical use of violets. Supported by the image of violets from the language of flowers that was popular in nineteenth-century Britain, this article explores several meanings at play in Brontë’s symbolic use of violets. Firstly, she uses a violet to contrast Paulina’s beauty with Ginevra’s. Secondly, M. Paul Emanuel also communicates his messages through violets. Thirdly, Lucy Snowe reminds us of Lucy Gray from Wordsworth’s poems because both women are associated with violets. And finally, M. Paul is linked to violets to both accentuate his Napoleonic characteristics and to symbolise his short life, evoking Hamlet. They imply his death and the end of his relationship with Lucy, an ending which is not clearly described at the end of the novel.

Keywords:

• Villette
• language of flowers
• Shakespeare
• Wordsworth
• Napoleon

Acknowledgements

I express my sincere gratitude to the editors and reviewers for their constructive feedback and valuable suggestions, which significantly improved this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For the popularity of physiognomy in nineteenth-century Britain and its use in Charlotte Brontë’s novels, see Jack (1970).

2 Violets or white violets appear in the following poems written by Charlotte: 18, ‘Ive [sic] been wandering in the greenwoods’; 24, ‘Winter A short poem, by C. Bronte’; 34, ‘The Evening Walk: An Irregular Poem: By the II Marquis of Douro’; 51, ‘The Violet by Charlotte’; 59, ‘Scene: thick forest, under the tree of which Lady Zenobia Ellrington is reposing, dressed in her usual attire of a crimson-velvet robe and black plumes’; 63, ‘The trumpet hath sounded, its voice is gone forth’; 65, ‘The Bridal’; 188, ‘The Wood’. Poem numbers and titles or first lines are taken from Victor A. Neufeldt, The Poems of Charlotte Brontë.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Miwa Uhara

Miwa Uhara is an associate professor at the School of Science and Engineering of Kindai University, Japan. She received an MA and PhD in Literature from Kansai University, Japan, and an MPhil in English from Birmingham University, UK. She is a co-translator of a Japanese translation of The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf, edited by Christine Alexander and Juliet McMaster (Cambridge University Press, 2010); Emily’s Journal, by Sarah Fermi (Pegasus Books, 2006); and The Brontës in Context, edited by Marianne Thormählen (Cambridge University Press, 2014).