Visual Culture and Scopic Custom in Jane Eyre and Villette

Abstract

Art making and art viewing activities steeped in assumptions about gender recur throughout Jane Eyre and Villette. This paper will argue that Charlotte Bronte developed these fine arts devices as part of a carefully crafted feminist critique of spectatorship and representation. Bronte pursued this end by demonstrating that incidents relating to the production and reception of visual culture were relevant for visual experience more broadly understood by linking these events in the narrative to “scopic custom”; that is, the art experiences of Bronte's characters are presented as occurring in relation to the customary, gendered patterns of looking and being looked at which dominated Victorian society. This strategic interweaving of visual culture with scopic custom allows Bronte to accentuate their interdependence as a socio-cultural dynamic of critical significance, and to illuminate their share in the cultural and social constraints affecting women as producers and objects of representation.

5. Ekphrasis and the Novel/Narrative Fiction

“…Kromm 1998). Critics have long paid attention to the ekphrastic moment of chapter thirteen in Jane Eyre, where the heroine breaks the narrative flow and engages in a long description of her three watercolours (cf.…”