Primary Sources and the MA Student

Abstract

I have a clear memory of the point at which, as a student of nineteenth-century literature, I became committed to what I was doing. We had read and discussed, closely and carefully, John Stuart Mill’s “The Enfranchisement of Women” (Westminster Review, 1851).¹ In the following seminar we read Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853), together with a letter (to Elizabeth Gaskell) recording the author’s equivocal response to Mill’s thesis, thus:

I believe J. S. Mill would make a hard, dry, dismal world of it; and yet he speaks admirable sense through a great portion of his article – especially when he says that if there be a natural unfitness in women for men’s employment, there is no need to make laws on the subject … In short J. S. Mill’s head is, I dare say, very good, but I feel disposed to scorn his heart. You are right when you say there is a large margin in human nature over which the logicians have no dominion: glad am I that it is so. (qtd. in Gaskell 1996, p. 390)

Having just experienced, from the inside, the rich and complex resistance in Villette even to narrative explanation of its protagonist Lucy Snowe, the relative reductionism of Mill’s logic was hard to deny. On the other hand, how did my acquiescence to Charlotte Brontë’s criticism square with my rapt acceptance of Mill’s thesis only a few days before? Was it worthless after all? What was the relation between these two discourses?