On the Edge of a Moral Volcano

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Footnotes

2:19 – “Student evaluations have been a common practice in college classrooms for almost a century now…”

According to Susanna Calkins and Mariana Micari, student evaluations were first used in the college classroom in the late 1920’s. See “Less-Than-Perfect Judges: Evaluating Student Evaluations,” Thought & Action (Fall 2010), p. 7.

5:17 – “There’s been a lot said about how problematic teaching evaluations are—how they often discriminate against instructors from marginalized groups…”

See, for instance, MacNell, Lillian, Adam Driscoll, and Andrea Hunt, “What’s in a Name: Exposing Gender Bias in Student Ratings of Teaching,” Innovative Higher Education 40.4 (2015): 291-303; Smith, Bettye P. and Billy Hawkins, “Examining Student Evaluations of Black College Faculty: Does Race Matter?” The Journal of Negro Education 80.2 (2011): 149-172.

5:21 – “…how they position students as consumers and teachers as commodities …”

For a discussion of the impact of neoliberal politics on education, including the role of student evaluations in commodifying higher ed, see Hewitt, Kimberly Kappler and Audrey Amreain-Beardsley (Eds), Student Growth Measures in Policy and Practice: Intended and Unintended Consequences of High-Stakes Teacher Evaluation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

5:26 – “how they’re not even all that good at measuring what they’re supposed to measure, which is teaching effectiveness.”

Again, see Calkins and Micari.

8:54 – “…even many years later as she narrates the novel...”

While it’s unclear exactly how many years have passed between the events that transpire in Villette and Lucy Snowe’s narration of them, the text does offer a few clues. First, when Lucy and the Brettons are reunited at the beginning of Volume Two during her convalescence at La Terrasse, she reveals that she is 24 years old: “Ten years ago I bade them good-bye; since my fourteenth year they and I had never met” (202). At this point, Lucy has been in Villette for approximately eight months: we know she arrived at the Pensionnat on March 3 because her journey began on March 1 and lasted two days (52-65), and at the time of her falling ill, it is the end of autumnal break, which spans from early September to late October (179). Since we know she was employed at the Pensionnat for a total of eighteen months (569), another ten months will pass before she begins teaching at the Faubourg Clotilde, when she is likely 25 years old. From her comments on the children of Paulina and Graham Bretton, who marry around the time Lucy is 25, it seems that at least 20 to 25 years have passed since the events that conclude her narrative. Wrapping up Paulina and Graham’s story at the end of the chapter titled “Sunshine,” she reveals that they have had several children who seem to be adults themselves at the time of her writing: “Dr. Bretton saw himself live again in a son who inherited his looks and his disposition; he had stately daughters, too” (507). So, it seems that Lucy Snowe is likely between 45 and 50 at the time of her narration of Villette.

9:20 – “The entire novel of Villette, in fact, can be read as a study of its heroine’s vulnerability—her susceptibility to danger or injury—which makes it fit easily into the Female Gothic tradition.”

According to Gary Kelly in his intro to the Pickering and Chatto collection Varieties of Female Gothic, a defining feature of the Female Gothic genre is the heroine whose “subjective merit […] remains at odds with her or his social identity and status,” leading to a tension between the treatment readers believe she deserves and the treatment she actually receives from other characters in the novel. In other words, her vulnerability (xx).

11:41 – “So, while it leans much more toward realism than Udolpho or Frankenstein, Villette is still heavily informed by the Gothic genre…”

I am not the only person to read Villette as a novel informed by the Gothic genre. See, for instance, Emily Heady’s “‘Must I Render an Account?: Genre and Self-Narration in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette” (Narrative Theory 36.3 [Fall 2006]: 341-364); Sue Lonoff’s “Broadening Minds with the Brontës” (Brontë Studies 28.3 [November 2003]: 195-204); Michael Schmidt’s “Gothic Romance: Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anne Brontë” (in The Novel: A Biography. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2014. p. 284-294); Michiko Soya’s “Villette: Gothic Literature and the ‘Homely Web of Truth’” (Gothic Studies 28.1 [March 2003]: 15-24; Albrecht Süner’s “Spectral Narration and the House of Desire in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette” (College Literature 44.3 [Summer 2017]: 315-343); Robyn Warhol’s “Double Gender, Double Genre in Jane Eyre and Villette” (Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 36.4 [Autumn 1996]: 857-875); and Toni Wein’s “Gothic Desire in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette” (Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 [Autumn 1999]: 733-746). For a discussion of Villette as an example of proto-detective fiction – a genre that would grow out of the Gothic tradition – see Sandro Jung, “Curiosity, Surveillance and Detection in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (Brontë Studies 35.2 [July 2010]: 160-171).

33:52 – “Although it may seem surprising and completely unrelated, Brontë’s metaphor for M. Paul’s pedagogy bears a striking resemblance to something from our modern context: hazing. Specifically, the kind you might find in a college frat house.”

In her article “Hazing and Higher Education: State Laws, Liability, and Institutional Implications,” Jacinda Boucher also includes “sleep deprivation” in her definition of hazing (par. 2). This practice is listed among the most common forms of hazing in the anti-hazing legislature of at least four U.S. states—West Virginia, Utah, Texas, and Rhode Island. See https://www.stophazing.org/?s=sleep&submit=Search.

37:24 – “If we can take any insight from the Pensionnat’s real-life counterpart—the Belgian school Brontë attended herself—then the chief mission of Madame Beck’s school was to prepare its ‘demoiselles’ to be good wives and mothers.”

Sue Lonoff asserts this point in her article “The Education of Charlotte Brontë” (2001): “By and large, both Hegers believed that education should prepare young women to be suitable partners: wives and mothers with solid moral values and more than a smattering of culture” (464).

42:02 – “As many Brontë biographers and scholars have pointed out, the M. Paul of Villette seems quite clearly to be modeled on the real-life Constantin Héger.”

See, for instance, Sue Lonoff’s “The Three Faces of Constantin Heger” (Brontë Studies 36.1, January 2011), Juliet Barker’s The Brontës (2010), and Marianne Thormählen’s The Brontës and Education (2007).

44:30 – “In psychology, the victim-to-victimizer hypothesis is ubiquitous...”

A landmark work that was among the first to present abuse as cyclical is The Battered Child (1968), especially the chapter by B.F. Steele and C.D. Pollock titled “A Psychiatric Study of Parents Who Abuse Infants and Small Children.”

44:55 – “A constant crusade against the amour-propre…”

Amour-propre is a term that is also frequently used (and condemned) by William Crimsworth, protagonist of Brontë’s The Professor (1857)—widely considered to be a first draft of Villette that was only published after her death. Tellingly, given the sado-masochistic elements in the teacher-student relationships at the heart of both novels, The Professor was first titled The Master.

45:05 – This term – “amour-propre” – means “personal pride,”

For the translation/definition of Brontë’s “amour propre,” see Sally Minogue’s notes to The Professor (Wordsworth Classics, 2010), p. 207.