ABSTRACT
The language of utility undergoes a parallel fragmentation, bearing up less coherently as Lucy's observations turn more cynically to the 'wretched untidiness' of pots and pans, flowers and upholstery that constitute the bric-a-brac of the painting. The pages of Villette are also punctuated with other 'pages', handwritten correspondence that Kathryn Crowther has argued propose a solution to Charlotte Bronte's anxieties about the work of art in an age of mass print culture. Perhaps most tellingly, one has Bronte's working title for the novel: Choseville translates from the French as 'Thing town'. Women artists and art critics, in particular, were deeply involved in debates about the unreliability of discourses founded upon traditional masculine modes of spectatorship. Lee makes the separation of shapes from things an issue of three dimensions rather than of two, and in doing so begins to enter the territory of Bill Brown's fundamental distinction between the ideas of things and the ideas in them.
