Ophthalmoscopy in Charlotte Brontë's Villette

This essay re-examines the representation of scopic conflict and discipline in Charlotte Brontë's novel, Villette (1853), within the context of the reconfiguration of the eye during the 1850s. Villette is pioneering in its representation of an ophthalmoscopic conception of the eye, as an organ which could be looked into by medical practitioners as well as looked at. This notion of the eye was only possible after Hermann von Helmholtz's invention of the ophthalmoscope in 1850. Villette is thus one of the first literary responses to the newly visible living retina. This essay argues that in light of the novel's emphasis on a penetrable, legible eye, the critical emphasis that scholars have placed on surveillance as a disciplinary model in Villette is overstated. Visual exchanges are described not in the disembodied abstractions of panopticism, but with references to a violent lexicon derived, in part, from the novel terminology of ophthalmoscopy. The prominence of opthalmoscopy points towards a remedial narrative in which diagnosis is succeeded by surgical intervention, and ultimately the restoration of sight. M. Paul Emanuel is the principal emblem of this visual practice: a merciless autocratic ophthalmologist who brings pain but also palliation. Villette's remedial narrative is organized around three devices designed to respectively look into, perforate, and enhance the human eye: the ophthalmoscope, the stylet (an instrument used in eye-surgery), and spectacles. This analysis adopts a historicist approach to re-contextualize Brontë's imaginative depiction of optical technology and perception within the mid-century emergence of ophthalmology.