Charlotte Bronte's realism reconsidered (villette and monomyth)

Charlotte Bronte's Villette (1853), her most painfully confessional, yet largely underestimated novel, is considered in the article from the standpoint of the monomyth theory, one of the most prolific ideas of the archetypal literary criticism school. Such a perspective allows the author of the study to anatomize the plot structure of the novel and present it as a special interpretation of the 'hero's journey', i. e. the basic plot of transcendence, in which the universal hero has to exceed the bounds of reality in order to be transformed, according to J. Campbell's theory. Lucy Snowe's journey to the fictional country of Labassecour serves as a powerful metaphor for the heroine's spiritual quest. Not only does the chosen approach allow us to dive deeper into Bronte's imagination and the artistic world of Villette, but it also makes us reconsider the existing attitude to it as to a quintessential realist text. As we try to analyze Charlotte Bronte's strategies of dealing with a myth as a universal language of art, we come closer to recognizing her personal style as a phenomenon of transition from Romanticism to Realism (mythical aesthetics is merged here with the strictly realist novel approach), and, more importantly, from Realism to the 20th-century literature and the so-called «mythologizing» novel, in which myth is exploited as a structuralizing tool.