In “Vashti,” a central chapter in Charlotte Brontë's novel Villette (1853), a combination of circumstances leads the narrator, Lucy Snowe, to a Continental hotel. Lucy, an English teacher in the imaginary kingdom of Labassecour, and Dr. John Graham Bretton, a fellow expatriate, are taken to “a suite of very handsome apartments” in the Hotel Crécy on the Rue Crécy and shown into “a drawing-room whose hearth glow[s] with an English fire, and whose walls [gleam] with foreign mirrors.”Footnote 1 The contrast between the welcoming warmth of the “English fire” and the cold gleam of the non-English mirrors appears to uphold the ideology of home—that most cherished of English institutions—as evidence of English national difference.Footnote 2 Moreover, the very name of the hotel and the street suggests that some kind of measuring of forces is taking place: both are named after the Battle of Crécy (1346), the second great battle of the Hundred Years’ War, in which a small English army ensured English dominion over northern France. Brontë, writing soon after the Great Exhibition of 1851, could be evoking the battle in order to refer mockingly to the peacetime struggle for industrial and cultural dominance waged under the roof of the Crystal Palace. Indeed, the scene in the Hotel Crécy (as well as several other scenes in the novel permeated by exhibition-induced imagery) relies on the widely used metaphor of the mirror, which the Crystal Palace embodied: the palace “encouraged many to view it as a mirror, a lens or a glass show-case revealing mid-Victorian Britain and its position in the world.”Footnote 3 More specifically, the unique national character and the international prestige the institution of home is meant to signal here—and in Villette as a whole—are viewed through the lens of England's relationship with Catholicism, for another reference to Crécy (the second of three in the novel) aligns the hotel with “a certain Carmelite convent on the Boulevard of Crécy” (163).

Yet the opposition between the English and the foreign, which the hearth and the mirrors seemingly establish in this scene, is not stable. The English identity that Brontë depicts is capable of accommodating the non-English and the Catholic. The handsome apartments in the Hotel Crécy belong to characters who first appear in the novel as part French and part Scottish: Mr. Home and his daughter Paulina (Polly), who is also part Saxon. During the encounter in the “Vashti” chapter, however, Mr. Home is identified only as English; not until the following chapter do Lucy and Dr. Bretton recognize the “English” gentleman—who, they discover, is now known as the Count de Bassompierre—as an old friend. The link that the name “Crécy” creates between Mr. Home's (or, rather, the Count de Bassompierre's) residence and the Carmelite convent further complicates his Englishness and especially that of his daughter, whom Brontë figures as a Catholic nun during her ensuing courtship with Dr. Bretton. In fact, Paulina continues symbolically to hold the same “Catholic” position even after she marries the young doctor and moves from her father's home in the Rue Crécy to Dr. Bretton's house near the Porte de Crécy. This eclectic Englishwoman's life is thus tied to the two English households whose figurative proximity to a Catholic convent and a fourteenth-century battle problematizes England's apparent abandonment of the faith it once shared with its adversaries on the Continent as well as any (domestic) superiority it might claim over them.

An instance of national self-reflection that at the time of Villette's conception located the essence of English national difference in English women's preservation of the Catholic tradition, and in the absorption of otherness the preservation enabled, was the divorce law reform, which officially began with the formation of the Royal Commission on the Law of Divorce in December of 1850 (less than five months before the Great Exhibition opened). As the public, Parliament, and the royal commission reviewed and debated England's and other nations’ divorce laws prior to the passage of the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, England's self-definition and civilizational achievements came to be viewed as deeply entangled with the concept of marital indissolubility, an arguably Catholic doctrine that the English, unlike the other Protestant nations, never abandoned. Nonetheless, contrary jurisdictions had developed after the Reformation, rendering marriage indissoluble only for women and thereby creating a gender divide that made English wives sole keepers of the Catholic legacy. A most intriguing aspect of this legal development was that the status of married women per se guaranteed the porousness of any ethnic or religious distinction: thanks to the gender divide that the indissolubility perpetuated, England resembled the Catholic and the Protestant nations of Europe—yet remained differentiated from them.

This legal conundrum is the starting point of this essay's inquiry into married women's place in the mid-Victorian nation. It is my contention that the figure of the wife, by embodying the Catholic tradition and thus maintaining the gender difference, stands in Villette for a vision of Englishness as encompassing of and, for that very reason, distinct from and superior to its others—Catholic, French, or Scottish. This pseudocosmopolitan inclusion and simultaneous exclusion of the other—or, as I will call it here, cosmopolitanism as nationalism—is central, I argue, to a nationalist vision of Englishness, one that emerges from the liberal tradition and rests on a firm gender binary. From the same tradition springs a challenge to this vision, a challenge rooted in “purer,” more inclusionary cosmopolitanism, suspicious of superiority that stems from ethnic difference and capable of conceiving a world beyond binaries. The debates on the divorce law reform and Brontë's exploration of marriage as the site of gender and ethnic division provide insight into these two versions of English cosmopolitanism. They also reveal that “Romanism” did not necessarily represent the threat that it is often perceived to have posed to nineteenth-century English maidens and wives and, through them, to English identity and patriarchal authority in general.Footnote 4 Nor did it epitomize “the primitive that Protestantism leaves behind.”Footnote 5

I derive my understanding of the nationalist co-option of liberal cosmopolitan ideas from Uday Singh Mehta's argument that nineteenth-century liberalism's “universality and politically inclusionary character” were undermined “by the systematic and sustained political exclusion of various groups and ‘types’ of people.”Footnote 6 Liberal theorists’ cosmopolitan and universalistic distaste for differences, Mehta claims, led them to focus on generalities, which eliminated differences by enabling comparisons. However, the “language of those comparisons is not neutral and cannot avoid notions of superiority and inferiority, backward and progressive.”Footnote 7 In other words, liberalism provided a means for exclusion of those whom it aimed to include. The idea of progress, which thus qualified liberal cosmopolitanism, was linear: societies moved along a “temporal grid” on “account of their difference”; that is, they developmentally preceded or lagged behind one another.Footnote 8 I construe (perhaps somewhat reductively) the exclusionary elements of liberal cosmopolitanism and the linear notion of progress as nationalistic, as that which enables conceptualization of an other. And although Mehta focuses primarily on how liberalism's limited universality justified the imperial project in the nineteenth century, I find his arguments helpful for my examination of England's position in respect to other European nations and detect the liberal discourse's inclusion/exclusion dialectic (as well as its imperialistic connotations) in arguments put forth by the opponents of the midcentury divorce law reform. The conservative legislators embraced cosmopolitanism as nationalism; by having one law for women and another one for men, the English, in their minds, differed from other Christians and epitomized what was the best in all of them. Villette's depiction of Dr. Bretton and Paulina's marriage represents, I further suggest, the same “cosmo-nationalist” vision of the English as a nation that blurs religious and ethnic differences yet distances itself from its others by preserving the gender binary.

By “nonnationalist cosmopolitanism,” on the other hand, I mean a cosmopolitanism more genuinely inclusive of an other, not invested in the idea of the “single axis of progress,” and, as such, attractive to the lawmakers who supported the reform and believed that true civilizational progress required that the indissolubility be eliminated, spouses be legally equal, and, by extension, England be less distinct from other Western nations.Footnote 9 Brontë's Lucy Snowe and M. Paul, a Continental Catholic with whom she forms a peculiar pseudomarital relationship, fully articulate this challenge to English cosmopolitanism as nationalism and take it to its logical ends beyond the gendered and the national. In discussing Brontë's feminist use of the nonnationalist cosmopolitanism, I draw on Amanda Anderson's and Judith Walkowitz's reexaminations of cosmopolitanism as a means of an “interrogation of [Victorian] cultural norms” and as a positive “cultural practice widely available to women.”Footnote 10 Anderson devotes a chapter in The Powers of Distance to Villette, suggesting that its “framework of cosmopolitan comparison” makes possible a critique of Victorian gender roles and a contemplation of feminine forms of detachment.Footnote 11 Walkowitz's study of a later era in British history underscores certain features of cosmopolitanism on which Brontë might have relied half a century earlier—namely, its ability to challenge, disrupt, and reorder existing hierarchies; to yoke the socially and geographically disparate; and, most important, to shift together conceptions of gender and national body.

My analysis brings together and extends several strands of recent Brontë scholarship. I build upon the work of critics who refuse to read Brontë's anti-Catholicism as literal and who discuss the anti-Catholic tropes in her novels as a veiled criticism of Protestant England, especially its gender ideologies.Footnote 12 I also join literary scholars who have pondered Brontë's admittance of religious and national otherness into Englishness or Britishness (most recently, James Buzard in Disorienting Fiction), but my historical reading of Villette often leads to diametrically opposite conclusions.Footnote 13 The histories of Victorian marriage laws that identify the figure of the wife as a site of cultural and national renegotiations, as well as my understanding of nations as always gendered, enable me to read Brontë as more suspicious of the national (as opposed to the cosmopolitan) than scholars like Buzard suggest.Footnote 14 The same considerations help me give a concrete national import and a more fully cosmopolitan inflection to what Anderson examines as Lucy Snowe's search for “a detachment she can call her own.”Footnote 15

By placing Villette in the context of the divorce law reform—a context so far overlooked by this novel's critics—I not only explore how Villette nuances the intricate relationship between English nationalism and cosmopolitanism in the 1850s but also cast new light on some aspects of the novel over which Brontë's readers have been puzzling for more than a century and a half. The debates and documents the reform generated offer new insights into the novel's enigmatic ending, its characters’ unorthodox gender positions, and the narrator's problematic relationship with both Englishness and Catholicism. My historically grounded double focus on gender and cosmopolitanism also problematizes the role Catholic religion played in the formation of English identity. Rather than seeing the Catholic nation as nothing more than the Protestant nation's religious opposite, I suggest that Catholicism could have, in some spheres of Victorian England's political and cultural life, served as a basis of cosmopolitan nationalism.Footnote 16

In order to weave my many-stranded argument, I will first turn to the image of England that the supporters of the Great Exhibition promoted and highlight some of the paradoxes inherent in nineteenth-century liberalism, whose triumph the exhibition marked. In the essay's second section, I will examine how those liberal contradictions gave rise to the contrary co-options of cosmopolitan ideas, and to the equally contrary notions of progress, by looking more closely at the legal debates on the divorce law. The focus on marital indissolubility as a trope for English national difference—and on the gender binary, which the difference demanded and the indissolubility perpetuated—will further clarify the nationalist and nonnationalist versions of cosmopolitan Englishness. In the third section, I will return to Villette's “Vashti” chapter as pivotal for the characters’ representations of the two versions of cosmopolitanism and investigate the ways in which the novel not only underscores the centrality of the gender difference to English nationalism but also speaks to the possibility of a simultaneous collapse of the gender and ethnic divisions.

Victorian Britain was a “consciously liberal society … bent on progress,” as Lauren Goodlad states, and early and mid-nineteenth-century liberalism was associated, broadly speaking, with “promotion of free trade policies” and “various issues of reform.”Footnote 17 The Great Exhibition of 1851 materialized Victorian liberal ideals: its organizers and supporters heralded the first “World Fair” as a sign of world peace and a celebration of free trade, the progress of all humans, and international brotherhood. The exhibition led to many international reforms as well. But mixed with its inclusionary (cosmopolitan and universalistic) purposes were the exclusionary (nationalistic, particularistic) ones.Footnote 18 Even the members of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce—who, together with their president, Prince Albert, defined the international spirit of the grand event—found it necessary to keep a distinction between the English and the foreign. They saw the very hosting of the Great Exhibition as a sign of English eminence and difference. As the exhibition's Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue declared, an exhibition of that kind, the first in the history of the world (previous exhibitions were national, not international), “could not have taken place at any earlier period, and perhaps not among any other people,” because of “the friendly confidence reposed by other nations in [their] institutions; the perfect security for property, the commercial freedom, and the facility of transport, which England pre-eminently possesses.”Footnote 19 Of course, divisions along ideological, class, and regional lines produced competing visions of the great fair and its host. The mere presence of other countries’ exhibits and nationals—in numbers and capacities never experienced before—aroused xenophobia. But the liberal vision, with its merging of nationalism and internationalism and with its belief in the civilizational continuum England represented, is the one Villette explores and the one from whose inherent paradoxes both the legal conservatives and the legal reformers drew their arguments.

The lecture Henry Cole gave on 1 December 1852 serves as an excellent illustration of this conception of Englishness. A leading liberal and the most influential person involved in the planning and management of the Great Exhibition, Cole opens the lecture—the last in a series of lectures on the results of the 1851 exhibition—by suggesting that the makeup of his nation was the first cause of the exhibition, for “there are some relations which may be really traced, between the holding of the first cosmopolitan Exhibition of Industry by the most cosmopolitan nation in the whole world, and the character of that nation.”Footnote 20 England's cosmopolitan character is evidenced in the fact that the English are “a people which beyond every other in the world is composed of all nations”; in the veins of Cole's audience flows “the blood of Saxons, Celts, Germans, Dutchmen, Frenchmen, Hindoos, and probably even Negroes.”Footnote 21 In support of these assertions, he quotes The Times on the same subject: “The average Englishman is a born cosmopolite, and to that mixed composition he owes the universality of his moral affinities and mental powers. No country in Europe has harboured so many migrations, whether as conquerors, as allies, as refugees, or simply as guests, and no people are so free as we are from the follies of nationality.”Footnote 22

There emerges a double movement in Cole's and The Times's portrayal of English identity: joined with a cosmopolitan tendency to erase ethnic differences is a nationalist need for some kind of other from whom England can be differentiated and to whom it can remain superior (“free … from the follies of nationality”). The ethnic mixing within England paradoxically produces an English/other binary—or, more precisely, an England/Continent binary, for although Cole includes “Hindoos” and “even Negroes” in the expandable category of Englishness, the nations with which the English compare themselves are, we soon discover, other advanced nations of the West. Its very cosmopolitanism, defined as absorption of all peoples, sets England apart from the rest of the world: the negation that follows the assertion that “the average Englishman is born a cosmopolite” establishes England's uniqueness, for “no country in Europe” and “no people” are like them. Cole thus positions England as a universal particular in the Hegelian sense: his nation is a particular entity “that contains, as its very content, the whole,” the world.Footnote 23 The ethnic difference, which has been eliminated within England, is externalized. This preservation of external ethnic difference through removal of internal ethnic difference becomes the essence of what I have termed “English cosmopolitanism as nationalism.”Footnote 24

The linear notion of progress Mehta warns about energizes the inclusion/exclusion dialectic of the cosmopolitanism as nationalism and further complicates the fluid opposition between Englishness and foreignness. The average, cosmopolite Englishman “owes the universality of his moral affinities and mental powers” to his “mixed composition,” a form of cultural and racial hybridity. Yet the same hybrid universality enables a different, progressivist universality, which posits civilizational progress as achievement of the very hybridity for which Englishness stands.Footnote 25 To put this another way, the ability to eliminate internal ethnic differences most effectively is what reinforces the external ethnic difference and places England at the top of the liberal hierarchy of progress. When Cole suggests that only the English could have risen to the task of hosting the Great Exhibition because they, “beyond every other [people] in the world,” are “composed of all nations,” he implies that the “Foreign,” a large category usually represented by France, has the same elements (“all nations”) as the English and that they, too, are in the process of appropriating their others but have not yet arrived where England already is. The possibility that external ethnic differences between nations could disappear remains open but is never realized; the delay in removing the developmental lag only perpetuates those differences.

Cole's figuration of the English as a people of indeterminate origins and of the cosmopolitan hybridization of differences as the pinnacle of civilizational advancement also reveals the imperial nation's impulse to self-universalize, to identify, in Tom Nairn's words, “with Humanity or Progress tout court.”Footnote 26 At one point in the lecture, Cole depicts the “universal likeness” in the art of advanced European nations as, essentially, hybridized Englishness: it is a “general sentiment,” a universal quality that makes it “impossible to tell the country where [artworks] originated.” Footnote 27 Of course, the English, by staying “beyond” others in the process of erasing internal difference, qualify as the only people who can embody what is “common to the most advanced nations of Europe.”Footnote 28 The self-universalization thus helps Cole abstract Englishness into an ideology of sorts. He no sooner opens his lecture than he begins to divorce England from a specific geographic space. He names his nation for the first time in the quotation from The Times: the nation that consists of all “races” is “English.” The cosmopolitan, universal features are abstract: “moral affinities and mental powers.” Throughout the lecture, Cole will continue to speak of “England” and “English” when referring to what is unquantifiable and immaterial. Occasionally he uses “Britain” and the “United Kingdom” interchangeably with “England,” but even then the first two terms refer to a geographic region and to what is concrete, often palpable: it is “British industry,” “British goods,” and “British territories” we hear about; “the United Kingdom” is an entity geographically opposed to its external colonies. But “England” is the spirit, the values, the essence; as such, it can move and be moved anywhere. Thus abstracted, Englishness, not Britishness, represents the self-universalizing (and therefore implicitly imperial) force—a fact relevant for my reading of the debates about English laws and for my interpretation of Villette's most English marriage.Footnote 29

Nevertheless, the fluidity of the English/foreign binary, which cosmopolitanism as nationalism and self-universalization uphold, undermines England's superior civilizational position. If civilizational progress is a process of difference removal, that process, like English identity itself, depends on a presence of ethnic difference, of that which is to be continually removed. Yet the same vision of progress implies that the difference is not just necessary but also harmful to it: the difference is what is barbaric, what ought to be left behind. The paradox of ethnic difference as simultaneously detrimental to and necessary for progress becomes particularly apparent when cosmopolitanism as nationalism encounters Catholicism. Englishness, as depicted by Cole, should accommodate Catholicism in order to ensure England's hybrid universality and progressive superiority. Since the Reformation, however, the Roman Catholic Church and faith were perceived as antithetical to all things English. They were also seen as “detrimental to material progress,” which the Great Exhibition was meant to embody and propagate.Footnote 30 The need to distance Anglicanism from Catholicism—never an easy task—became especially pronounced in the aftermath of the so-called Papal Aggression, which took place a few months before the exhibition opened. The Papal Aggression amounted to nothing more than Pope Pius IX's attempt to reestablish a Catholic episcopal hierarchy in England. But the pope's edict, worded so as to imply the return of the English to the Catholic Church as well as undermine Queen Victoria's authority, led to many angry protests, to even angrier petitions to Parliament, and to the Ecclesiastical Titles Act of 1851, the last piece of anti-Catholic legislation.Footnote 31 Still, Pius IX's decision was a sensible administrative move in light of England's Catholic reality. The Anglican High Church–Low Church controversies and the conversions of distinguished Anglican clergymen to the Catholic faith had increased the prominence of Catholicism in the 1840s, and the actual number of Catholics in England grew significantly as Irish workers continued to flood the English labor market. “Romanism” thus came to represent the negative aspect of civilizational difference and, therefore, everything that was potentially backward within Englishness.

The desire to separate the Anglican from the Catholic tradition, as well as the need to keep them indistinguishable, marked the work of the legislators involved in the divorce law reform, the central domestic issue of the 1850s. The presence of marital indissolubility in the law books distanced England not only from Protestant nations on the Continent, which had legalized divorce by the end of the sixteenth century, but also from Scotland, where marriage had been dissoluble and divorce obtainable easily and equitably since the Reformation. The large number of Dissenters, who regarded marriage as a dissolvable civil contract, created more divisions within England itself.

The persistent influence of the Catholic teaching on the English tradition is visible in the report of the Royal Commission on the Law of Divorce, issued in 1853. Even though the commissioners often felt that their task was to complete the unfinished work of the early reformers, and although they set up other Protestant nations’ laws as most worthy of Parliament's attention, they ended by enclosing portions of the “Letter from his Holiness the Pope to the King of Sardinia, dated the 19th of September, 1852, as to the dogma of a Sacrament in Marriage.” In the letter, the same pope whose “aggression” was hotly debated in Parliament as the commissioners began their work objects to Sardinia's and Piedmont's legal provisions for civil marriage, on the grounds that a civil law “in supporting the marriage sacrament divisible for Roman Catholics by civil contract[,] … contradicts the doctrine of the Church.”Footnote 32 He also acknowledges that “the civil marriage law exists in other Catholic countries … but that [he] has never ceased to protest against it.”Footnote 33 The purport of the letter's inclusion is a mystery, for no explanation follows or precedes it. Is the document there as a warning that opposition to divorce smells of popery? Or does it, being the last enclosure, serve as the final word on marriage: it is indissoluble even in civil courts?

The silence and ambiguity that accompanied Pius IX's letter were in uncomfortable congruity with the legal status quo, since divorce was both legal and illegal in England. The contrary jurisdictions that had developed over centuries of English legal history had made marriage, in practice, indissoluble for women and dissoluble for men. While common law did not provide for divorce, its double standard on adultery and its concept of coverture—according to which the wife had no legal status outside the person of the husband—allowed a man whose wife had committed adultery to sue her lover for “criminal conversation.” A criminal conversation suit was a prerequisite for parliamentary divorce a vinculo (from the bonds of matrimony), which, unlike the second prerequisite, ecclesiastical divorce a mensa et thoro (from bed and board), fully dissolved marriages and ended the husband's right to the wife's property. Indeed, the parliamentary proceedings were developed by the end of the sixteenth century exactly because the Church of England only annulled marriages and separated the married partners but could not dissolve the bond of wedlock. It, too, regarded female adultery as the most egregious marital offense. Parliament did allow women to petition for private divorce acts, but since a husband's adultery had to be aggravated by bigamy, incest, or extreme cruelty before it could become grounds for divorce, few wives obtained divorces even if they could afford the high legal costs. The fact that only four divorces had been granted to women over the course of three centuries speaks volumes. Even the wealthy wives whose separate property was secured through equity were forced to remain married. The English version of indissolubility thus reinforced the gender divide within marriage. John Stuart Mill, writing in 1831 on gender equality as a measure of civilizational progress, described marital indissolubility as “the keystone of woman's present lot.”Footnote 34 With England's single women and widows legally resembling men, it was in the status of wifehood that a woman was most different from a man. Although the royal commission proposed some, mostly administrative, changes to the legal procedures, the commissioners remained of the “opinion that Divorces à vinculo should not be extended beyond cases of adultery” and that adultery of husbands and wives should continue to be treated differently.Footnote 35

Despite the fact that English divorces were legislative, the gender binary they established was seen as religious in nature. The indissolubility was a Catholic legacy, and married women its carriers. Caroline Sheridan Norton, the best-known victim of the nineteenth-century marital laws, spoke of English marriage as “a sacrament for the wife and a civil contract for the husband”; consequently, England had “one religion for women and one for men.”Footnote 36 In the pamphlets she wrote in 1854 and 1855, as early versions of the Divorce Bill began to make their way through Parliament, Norton drew public attention to the fact that the oppression that took place in English marriages was not unlike the oppression to which some Catholic nuns were subjected. Commenting angrily on Parliament's unwillingness to discuss the Divorce Bill and its eagerness to pass the so-called Nunneries Bill, which would have allowed officers of the law to search convents for maidens trapped there and abused, she notes how easy it is “to see that oppression in others which we deny to exist among ourselves” and even offers her assistance to Catholic governments interested in conducting “an inquiry into the treatment of women living under secular authority in their own homes in England.”Footnote 37

The English divorce laws thus perpetuated a gender binary by according wives “Catholic” status. This produced a vision of Englishness that rested on the inclusion/exclusion dialectic detectable in Cole's lecture: English divorce laws, however chaotic, accommodated both Protestant and Catholic traditions and, at the same time, remained different from the laws of the countries that followed only one of them. If we take into consideration that several nominally Catholic foreign states had some legal provisions for divorce, as Pius IX's letter confirms, and that those laws often treated spouses equally, the difference becomes even starker. After the Divorce Act of 1857 transferred jurisdiction over marriage from ecclesiastical courts to the newly formed Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes, these divisions became more national than religious: the civil court simply combined the procedures of the English Church and the English Parliament. The Divorce Act changed little else. In fact, it ensured that marriage would remain more dissolvable for men than for women, keeping the gender divide at the heart of English national difference.

The indissolubility, by guaranteeing England's simultaneous inclusion of and distance from other nations’ practices, became a trope for Englishness—the liberal version of Englishness I discussed in the first section. But even though reform was “central to the liberal agenda and mind-set,” the opponents of the divorce law reform were the ones who adopted this vision.Footnote 38 Even those who called for prohibition of divorce altogether embraced English cosmopolitanism as nationalism and the image of the civilizationally superior England it sustained. For the conservatives, English hybrid appropriation of the Catholic tradition guaranteed England's progressivist universality.Footnote 39 The “true” liberals—whom I will here call reformers, in order to avoid confusion—looked for their own vision of Englishness somewhere outside the liberal cosmopolitanism's inclusion/exclusion dynamic.Footnote 40

In the conservative lawmakers’ minds, marital indissolubility stood for England's hybrid universality by facilitating an equation of Englishness with generalized Christianity. Although peoples in pre-Christian Britain had provisions for divorce and the Roman Catholic Church had difficulties forcing indissolubility upon them, some lords and members of Parliament insisted that England became England only when Christianity was brought to its shores and, with it, indissolubility. Lord Redesdale, a staunch opponent of legal divorce, warned, “It should be remembered, that ever since the first introduction of Christianity into England the remedy of a divorce à vinculo had been unrecognized by our law.”Footnote 41 A year later, the future prime minister William Gladstone echoed the sentiment when he claimed—twice—that England had adhered to marital indissolubility ever “since England was England.”Footnote 42 Gladstone further insisted that “the indissolubility of English marriage [was] an idea which ha[d] never been shaken in the mind of England.”Footnote 43 By claiming that the roots of England's marriage laws went further into the Christian past, preceding the Reformation, and by insisting that the English were Christian, not Protestant or Anglican, the lawmakers could portray Englishness as accommodating of all Christian sects.

The emphasis on the moment of nation formation as the moment of defining the nature of the marital bond led some conservative legislators occasionally to liken their chosen kingdom to that of the Old Testament Jews. Henry Drummond argued that the dilemma over indissolubility could be resolved only by looking at Christianity's Judaic beginnings: “From the first chapter of Genesis to the last chapter of Malachi, marriage is assumed to be indissoluble. … The day of the choosing of Israel to be a separate people from the rest of mankind is called ‘the day of their espousals.'”Footnote 44 Although the old Jewish law—like the English one—recognized divorce for men, marital indissolubility was perceived as the essence of Jewish national identity and the Jews’ privileged status. With the indissolubility determining what England had been ever “since England was England,” England's own national formation and separation “from the rest of mankind” resembled those of the Israelites. If we bear in mind the universal significance of God's covenant with Israel, Drummond's analogy further solidifies England's role as the universal particular.

By insisting on England's pan- or arche-Christianity, the lawmakers who opposed divorce upheld not only the structure of the hybrid Englishness that Henry Cole had in mind but also the progressivist universality that the hybridity fostered. England was the most legally—and morally—advanced because other supposedly Christian nations had departed from the tenets of Christianity, which the indissolubility of marriage had preserved within nonsectarian England. Bishop Wilberforce, discoursing on revolutionary France's extremely liberal civil divorce code, presented the contemporary French government's struggle to return to the prerevolutionary state of things as an endeavor to imitate the English: “While Christian England was being called upon to render marriage dissoluble, France, with experience of the miseries entailed by such a course, was making marriage indissoluble as the only means of preserving its sacredness.”Footnote 45 By contrasting “Christian England” with revolutionary France, whose leaders he labels not as anti-Catholic (or as anti-Protestant, for that matter) but as “anti-Christian,” the bishop generalized England's Christianity as well as identified the historical moment at which France renounced the Christian path of progress.Footnote 46 The nation that had advanced furthest on that path—by, paradoxically, staying truest to the common past and thus precluding ethnic divisions of any kind—is, of course, his own. Indeed, the conservatives depicted the English as the coveted ideal and spiritual guides not only to Catholic France but also to those “Protestant States on the Continent” whose “facilities of divorce,” as John Bird Sumner, the archbishop of Canterbury, observed, “had ended in so gross a laxity of morals that it was notorious that there was a strong desire in those countries to remove them, and to return to a state of things more in accordance with the system which happily in this country had never been set aside.”Footnote 47 As in Cole's lecture, everyone was lagging behind England—and aspiring to become English-like.

The progress that English divorce laws were supposed to epitomize—and other nations to strive toward—was further enhanced by England's embodiment of a property similar to the “universal likeness” for which Englishness stood in Cole's discussion of European art. At one point in the debates, the bishop of Oxford insisted that English marriage laws were the closest to the law set by God himself: “We had received from God, in this respect, a great advantage—in laws purified from the abuses of the Middle Ages, and yet retaining the savour of ancient Christianity strong upon them. We had, under those laws, seen a population growing up the like of which could not be exhibited in Europe for domestic virtue and married purity.”Footnote 48 If “savour” is understood as “essential virtue or property,” then Englishness is what is best and genuinely Christian in other nations.Footnote 49 Consequently, Scotland—often evoked by the reform-minded as the nearest proof (both geographically and historically) that more relaxed divorce laws did not have to lead to social chaos—could enjoy its domestic peace and moral prosperity because its law had been, according to the bishop of Oxford, “modified in practice by [Scotland’s] relationship to England. The overshadowing effect of the union with England had prevented Scotland from running into the same extreme as the nations of the Continent, and passing from one degree of liberty to another in the matter of marriage.”Footnote 50 Englishness is, again, an abstract quality, the self-universalizing ideology, and a signifier of progress for all of Europe. In the case of Scotland, Englishness remains the imperialist force within Britishness.

While the conservatives championed marital indissolubility as the essence of everything that was truly moral, truly advanced, and truly English, the reformers derided it, to quote the Earl of Donoughmore, as “a remnant of old Roman Catholic times” that kept England in the Dark Ages.Footnote 51 Tapping into the paradox of ethnic difference as not only needed for but also detrimental to progress, they emphasized the detrimental and pointed to the gender divide as a sign of England's backwardness. Scottish divorce laws and their consideration of spouses as equals did not speak to England's beneficial influence; instead, those laws brought out its barbarity. Lord Lyndhurst, convinced that the English ecclesiastic law placed the adultery of husband and wife “on the same footing,” asked time and again, “Why should Scotland be just and generous to women in this respect, and England be cold, unfeeling, barbarous?”Footnote 52 Some, like the Marquess of Landsdowne, looked to the ancient Roman law as “a more refined, a more liberal, a more just, and a more enlightened policy” and concluded that in the England of the 1850s, “the legal position of woman has partaken of that situation which it would occupy in the least civilised and most barbarous States.”Footnote 53 Others, who (like the conservatives) equated Christianity with civilization, insisted that Christianity's role in uplifting women's social status, as well as its historical limitations, had been overlooked in the English legislature. According to the Earl of Donoughmore, “One of the great efforts of the Divine law was to raise the condition of women, and to place them upon a footing upon which they had never previously stood. … All that was intended to be bestowed upon man by that law was also intended to be conferred upon women.”Footnote 54 True progress required erasure of both the gender and the ethnic binaries—an obscure truth that Brontë helps unearth.

Villette's Lucy Snowe introduces the subtext of divorce as soon as she opens her narrative. When she learns, on the novel's second page, that the six-year-old Paulina Home has recently lost her mother, she also learns that Polly's parents had separated some time before Mrs. Home's death. Lucy hastens to explain the legal state of the matter by adding, between dashes, that the Homes’ was a “separation by mutual consent, not after any legal process” (6). Why a legal procedure was eschewed remains unexplained. Yet the description of Mrs. Home as a “giddy, careless woman, who had neglected her child, and disappointed and disheartened her husband” implies adultery (6), the central issue in the debate on divorce—and a threat to the eponymous institution of home.

Brontë returns to the Homes (now the de Bassompierres) in the “Vashti” chapter. Their Continental reunion with Lucy and Dr. Breton takes place in a theater, in the commotion that ensues after a stage curtain catches fire. The now seventeen-year-old Paulina is injured, and Dr. Bretton comes to her aid. Her father immediately directs the doctor and Lucy to the de Bassompierres' apartments in the Hotel Crécy.

The play the four characters watch on the night of the fire is about Queen Vashti, the unfortunate wife of King Ahasuerus, from the book of Esther. Although Brontë does not explain Vashti's story, the horrible agony that tears the biblical queen apart—and leaves a strong impression on Lucy—is caused by marital conflict. Vashti's husband, Ahasuerus, a ruler over a very large empire, prepares a feast for his subjects that lasts 180 days. The feast is a great exhibition of sorts, for the king displays his riches to the guests. One evening, the king sends for his queen in order to show her, a renowned beauty, to the visiting princes. Vashti refuses to come. The Bible reader never learns why she declines to pose as an exhibit. What we do know is that the king asks the wise men what he can do to the disobedient queen “according to law” (Esther 1:15). One of the men declares that Vashti has wronged not only the king but also the entire kingdom; her disobedience poses a national threat, “for this deed of the queen shall come abroad unto all women, so that they shall despise their husbands in their eyes, when it shall be reported” (Esther 1:17). The judges advise the king to issue a royal commandment that will become law: Vashti should no longer come before the king, and her royal estate should be given to another woman. After the king's decree is published “through all his empire[,] … all wives shall give to their husbands honor, both to great and small” (Esther 1:20). Vashti's story is, then, a story of legal divorce and of legal reform.

Most significantly, Brontë uses the same theater scene to link the issue of divorce with ethnic and gender distinctions, which she then proceeds to problematize in the Hotel Crécy scene. There, French and Scottish characters are labeled as English, and a young Englishwoman is figured as a Catholic nun. Brontë first provides, in the character of Dr. John Graham Bretton, an English judge. The narrator is surprised to discover that Vashti's “agony did not pain him, her wild moan—worse than a shriek—did not much move him; her fury revolted him somewhat, but not to the point of horror. Cool young Briton. The pale cliffs of his own England do not look down on the tides of the channel more calmly than he watched the Pythian inspiration” (259–60). Lucy's insistence on Dr. John's Englishness or Britishness in this particular passage situates English national difference in the legal treatment of wives. The unmoved man stands here for all the English or British observers of married women's agony in the snares of men's law. The “cool young Briton” is as distanced from the plight of the woman silenced and judged by men as his native country is distanced from the rest of the world, enveloped by the sea that is all too often seen as the natural cause of England's national singularity. That Dr. Bretton meets Paulina and helps convey her, his future wife, to the Rue Crécy minutes after this harsh judgment of Vashti adds, as I have already suggested, a Catholic component to this juridical national distance. What is more, the unnamed actress herself becomes Vashti in the audience's and the reader's imagination, and Dr. Bretton's “branding judgment” of her “as a woman, not an artist” shows that the “cool young Briton” insists on keeping the Vashti figure outside any gender-neutral categories (260). Brontë specifically identifies his refusal to look beyond the gender boundary as connected with his national identity—and with English cosmopolitanism as nationalism.

Although the young doctor is depicted as simultaneously English and British in this scene, the once decidedly Celtic John Graham Bretton represents a universally hybrid Englishness from the night of Lucy's arrival on the Continent. When Lucy first introduces him into the story, she remarks upon the “faithless-looking … Celtic (not Saxon) character of his good looks” (16). Eleven years later, in Labassecour, he has “an English complexion, eyes, and form” and a “fair English cheek” (96, 103). Whereas in the first three chapters of the novel he is referred to by his middle and last names, Graham Bretton, to everyone at the Pensionnat Beck he is almost always only “Dr. John.” The Bretton heir—the vague origins of whose name and eponymous birthplace could allude to Britain but also to Bretagne, Brittany, that Celtic land across the Channel—becomes, as his mother jokes, “an incipient John Bull” (186). His non-English origins are absorbed into Englishness; the internal ethnic difference disappears.

Religious differences are hybridized in a similar manner. At first glance, Dr. John's English identity is equated with Protestantism. There is nothing faithless-looking about the stranger with “the Fatherland accents” who helps Lucy find her way around the city of Villette: she trusts him as much as she would trust the Bible and would follow his “frank tread, through continual night, to the world's end” (62, 63). But Dr. John, as we gradually discover, either harbors or develops Catholic habits: Lucy likens his admiration of Ginevra Fanshawe, the only English student at the pensionnat, to that of “a worshipper ever ready with the votive offering” (193). In true gothic fashion, it is possible that Dr. John could have fallen under the Catholic spell while living in Labassecour, an imaginary Catholic country on the Continent. The predisposition toward Catholic worship, however, could lie within, in Dr. John's Highlander blood. When he offends the Count de Bassompierre by courting his daughter, the count ascribes the doctor's untrustworthiness to his Celtic lineage: “John Graham, you descended partly from a Highlander and a chief, and there is a trace of the Celt in all you look, speak, and think. You have his cunning and his charm” (433). Not only were the Scottish Highlands traditionally Catholic—and therefore a fertile ground for treason—but the count's description of the Highlander ancestry echoes contemporary descriptions of Jesuits in anti-Catholic literature.Footnote 55 The count's diatribe, nevertheless, elicits “a genuine English blush” from the part Highlander (433). Dr. John's English identity brings together the Catholic and the Protestant, the Celtic and the Saxon and thus allows for the slippage between “English” and “British” in the judgment-of-Vashti passage. It also explains why, later in the same chapter, the Count de Bassompierre and Dr. John introduce themselves as Englishmen.

Before I continue with the nature of Dr. Bretton's Englishness, I would like to discuss briefly the kingdom of Labassecour, traditionally read as the Belgium of Brontë's memories. In spite of Lucy Snowe's frequent insistence on its Catholic foreignness (and detestability), the imaginary nation captures the fluidity of the English/foreign binary discernible in Cole's lecture and in the conservative legislators’ speeches on the character of England. Several readers of Villette have commented on Labassecour's resemblance to Brontë's homeland. Heather Glen sees the material comforts of Labassecour as identical to those found in England in the mid-nineteenth century and celebrated at the Great Exhibition. For her, “the mores of Villette are … not as distant from those of England as might at first appear.”Footnote 56 Amanda Anderson notes Villette's “admission of a near equivalence of many of the English and continental practices.”Footnote 57 Similarly, James Buzard observes that “that which defines England” for Villette's narrator keeps reappearing in a foreign land, problematizing “the gothic's strict division of domestic and foreign realms.”Footnote 58 Labassecour, I would like to add, captures England's internal structure as well: it is a miniature cosmopolis peopled by characters of different nationalities. Many of the teachers and students at Madame Beck's school are French, German, Catalan. M. Paul is of Spanish decent. Furthermore, the world of Labassecour cannot be labeled as simply Catholic. Its capital, Villette, is filled with atheists, freethinkers, and Protestants of all denominations. In this regard, Labassecour resembles England in a double sense: it is a universal mix of many nations and a particular national entity within Europe. England's particularity becomes especially prominent in the moments in which Labassecour figures as Europe or the world. England is found in the de Bassompierres’ hearth, located right above the apartments of a Russian prince. It is also in La Terrasse, Dr. John's house, where Lucy wakes up in a familiar-looking room, wondering, “Am I in England? Am I at Bretton?” (162). Lucy's confusion further speaks to the unlocatability of Englishness, which reinforces its qualities as an ideology—another aspect it might share with the unlocatable Labassecour. With the financial collapse of the family that carries the town's name, Bretton/England becomes transportable, divorced from a geographic space.Footnote 59

But, back to the young Celt-turned-Englishman. The internal erasure of the ethnic and religious differences that Dr. John embodies, as well as the abstraction of England his character propels, enables Brontë to create a link both between Englishness and Christianity and between the English and ancient Israel. In other words, she intensifies the English inclusion—and exclusion—of different ethnicities and faiths by portraying her English hero as the sort of patriarch who would have appealed to the conservative lawmakers of her times. With the principal characters now gathered around the hearth in his house, Dr. John proposes, “Let us have a Christmas wassail-cup, and toast Old England here, on the hearth” (280). Lucy recognizes the cup as his own “christening-cup” (280). Whatever Old England is for Dr. John, it is defined by the moment of his baptism, his sacramental acceptance of the Christian faith. He stands for everything that England has been “since England was England.”

Dr. John's patriarchal “Judaism,” on the other hand, is determined by his choice of a bride. After he decides that Ginevra Fanshawe is no longer worthy of his worship, he announces that he will follow the example of God's chosen people and “go forth like Jacob or Esau, or any other patriarch, and take [him] a wife,” “perhaps of these which are the daughters of the land” (211). His mother protests and makes it clear that she would consider any girl of Labassecour a “foreign usurper” (211). The Brettons’ exchange echoes Jacob's mother's complaint in the book of Genesis. Rebekah tells Isaac that she is “weary of [her] life, because of the daughters of Heth”: “If Jacob take a wife of the daughters of Heth, such as these which are of the daughters of the land, what good shall my life do me?” (Gen. 27:46). Like the biblical Jacob, who heeds his father's advice and finds a wife (or, rather, wives) among the daughters of Rebekah's brother, Laban, the English Jacob finds his Rachel in Paulina, the part-Scottish, part-French, part-Saxon (for her mother was “Saxon”) daughter of the mixed, hybrid England. When referring to the “disappointments” and “difficulties” that sometimes clouded Polly's and Dr. John's marital bliss, the narrator likens Polly's grief over the loss of a child to that of her biblical counterpart: “Once even there rose a cry in their halls, of Rachel weeping for her children” (436–37). The paragraph immediately preceding the quotation signals that this Rachel, the choice of whom is made by the exclusion of “foreign usurpers,” is of the English kind. Paulina is described as an angel in the house, a “sweet wife,” and a healthy moral influence. Upon marrying, Dr. Bretton “prove[d]” to be “such an agent”: “he did not with time degenerate; his faults decayed, his virtues ripened”; because Paulina/Rachel “kept her husband's love, she aided in his progress—of his happiness she was the corner stone” (436). The couple's roles follow the typical Victorian separation of spheres and maintain the gender difference the separation was believed to reflect. Their married life, “blessed, like that of Jacob's favoured son” (437), continues both the inclusion/exclusion pattern of English cosmopolitanism as nationalism and the self-universalizing—and self-particularizing—English-as-Israel allegory.

A literary incarnation of English wifehood, Paulina strengthens the link between English homes and Catholic convents—the link that the reference to Crécy establishes at the moment of her reintroduction into the novel (and that Caroline Norton's tracts on marriage laws would underscore most forcefully a year or so after the publication of Villette). As Paulina's romantic attachment to Dr. John deepens, she begins to resemble Justine Marie, a young Labassecourienne who “died in her noviciate” a couple of decades earlier (392), after her family prevented her from marrying M. Paul, now the literature professor at Lucy's pensionnat. When the Count de Bassompierre objects to his daughter's marriage to the doctor, Paulina acknowledges that he has the same, Catholic kind of power Justine Marie's parents had: “You can do as you please; your power is despotic; you can shut me up in a convent, and break Graham's heart to-morrow; if you choose to be so cruel” (431). The narrator reinforces the parallel throughout the novel: like M. Paul's “angel-bride,” Paulina is marked with “a halo of loving delight,” as when she kisses her father (393, 280). The similarities become most striking in Lucy's last encounter with Dr. John's wife: on the night of the city's fete, Paulina's bridal clothes are “floating about her,” “white and light,” making her look like an angel with “the triple halo of her beauty, her youth, and her happiness” (452). But unlike the dead foreign nun, Polly is an angel-bride in Villette's most English marriage. The “lustre” “her aspect had caught” is no longer her own; it is a reflection of the light in her husband's eyes: “The light repeated in her eyes beamed first out of his” (452).

Paulina's assumption of the feminine position in the gender binary guarantees not only her husband's English identity but also his masculinity. As Graham Bretton transforms into an embodiment of Englishness in Labassecour, his looks gradually become less masculine. Soon after their chance meeting on the Continent, Lucy comments on how there was nothing womanly about Dr. John and immediately qualifies it with “or so I thought then” (149). He has an “almost feminine delicacy”: the gifts he selects for Ginevra are such “that only a woman could have imagined” (190, 193). And Paulina wonders that Graham is beautiful even though only women are called beautiful (see 424). Dr. John's gender position is particularly uncertain in terms of marriage, the institution that establishes the English gender divide in the first place. Long before Paulina Home reappears in the novel, rumors that Lucy's employer, Madame Beck, is romantically interested in Dr. John begin to circulate. Wondering about whether there is any truth to the rumors, Lucy writes,

With Madame Beck “adopting Dr. John as a husband, taking him to her well-furnished home, endowing him with her savings … and making him comfortable for the rest of his life,” Dr. John appears to be in a feminine position and devoid of the “agency” he will later exercise as Paulina's husband. His look is not “of” but “as of masculine vanity.” Fortuneless himself, Dr. John acts not unlike the dowry-less Ginevra Fanshawe: he treats Madame Beck the way Ginevra treats him, “roguishly encourag[ing] aims he never intended to be successful.” Also like Ginevra (and her sisters), he might have to marry for money. The English economic reality, which has driven the likes of Lucy Snowe and Graham Bretton to look for employment across the Channel, creates unstable gender positions in the marriage market. But the economic threat to the gender divide is here disguised as a Catholic threat, which, along with Dr. John's own internalization of “Romanism,” is not only external. Since Brontë's English hero incorporates both ethnic and gender ambiguities, we need Paulina, the nunlike angel in the house, to secure his masculinity, as well as his Judeo-Christian Englishness, both of which are endangered by Madame Beck, a female Jesuit who is also a “Minos in petticoats” and resembles Bonaparte (72).

In this manner, Brontë articulates in Villette what would remain implicit in the debates that began not too long after the publication of the novel: the conservative, nationalist model of Englishness demanded a firm gender binary. For as long as divorce laws maintained the inequality between spouses, they sustained England's unique status among Christian nations. Woven into the depiction of Dr. John's latent effeminacy is the nationalist (and patriarchal) fear of the disappearance of the gender divide. The same fear underlies Dr. John's reaction to Vashti's demonic sexuality. Even though he judges her as a woman, it is noteworthy that the ancient queen's divorce renders her gender indeterminate. Once the marriage bond is broken, the gender binary disappears: during the play, Lucy “[finds] upon [Vashti] something neither of woman nor of man” (256).

Lucy herself represents the unstable femininity of Vashti's kind and thus Villette's attempt to move away from the gendered arrangements that lay at the core of the conservative notions of Englishness and marriage. In spite of Lucy's severe criticism of Madame Beck's ways, she, too, crosses the gender boundary. Many critics have commented on this tendency in Brontë's heroine, often focusing on her role in the Pennsionat Beck's “vaudeville”: she plays a fop and wears a combination of male and female clothing. Anne Mozley, one of the novel's first reviewers, sensed the national threat underlying the narrator's questionable femininity and complained (anonymously) in the High Church Christian Remembrancer: “But in truth [Brontë] draws a character unfit for this home which she yearns for. We want a woman at our hearth; and her impersonations are without the feminine element.”Footnote 60 Mozley's angry call for a “woman” indicates that Lucy Snowe is not one and confirms that the conservative English “we” requires a clear distinction between genders. Moreover, the unfeminine Lucy does not deserve that ultimate symbol of Englishness, the “home which she yearns for,” here represented by the hearth, as in the scene with which I opened this essay.

Lucy's Englishness becomes even more problematic as she leaves behind her infatuation with Dr. John and begins to fall in love with M. Paul, a Labassecourien and a devout Catholic. At first, Lucy finds this fiery little man's ways and opinions insupportable. But the intolerance gradually gives way to friendship; the friendship, in time, leads to an engagement; and the engagement, peculiar in its marriagelike terms, serves, I argue, as an expression of a nonnationalist cosmopolitan call for different gender relations. Lucy and M. Paul's relationship stands in opposition to the conservative model of Englishness, captured in the ostensibly ideal union of Dr. John and Polly/Paulina.

In spite of his mock misogyny, M. Paul's gender identity is as unstable as Lucy’s: his step is quieter and his hand gentler than a woman’s; he crosses himself “as devoutly as a woman”; he even resembles Vashti when he favors Lucy “with a glance which he seemed to have borrowed from Vashti, the actress” (382, 294). His role as Justine Marie's eternal bridegroom associates him with a form of celibacy that further complicates his gender position and problematizes the relationship between the Catholic and the English marriage traditions. Having been denied his beloved's hand in his youth, M. Paul, now in his forties, dedicates his life to providing for her impoverished family. Père Silas, one of the objects of his generosity, explains his benefactor's situation to Lucy: “To our sustenance, and to other charities, I know he devotes three parts of his income, keeping only the fourth to provide himself with bread and the most modest accommodations. By this arrangement he has rendered it impossible to himself ever to marry: he has given himself to God and to his angel-bride as much as if he were a priest, like me” (393). By “giv[ing] himself to God and to his angel-bride,” the priestly Paul Emanuel combines celibacy with marital indissolubility. He can never divorce his beloved nun, upon whose saintly, almost godlike status the narrator insists throughout Villette. A perpetual widower, he is “tacitly vowed … to celibacy” (409). In Brontë's imagination, this resemblance between indissolubility and celibacy places M. Paul in a feminine position: the strange “marital” arrangement that Père Silas describes forces M. Paul to give his earnings away, like a(n English) wife. Indeed, his very name, Paul, aligns his character with that of Paulina Home de Bassompierre. However, M. Paul also appropriates the male prerogative of “divorce.” His marriage tie to Justine Marie can be broken because it is secured by property rather than consecrated by a religious rite: the “sustenance” M. Paul provides to his dead love's survivors is what stands in the way of another marriage. That is why Père Silas and the rest of the Catholic “junta” can plot to marry M. Paul to another Justine Marie, a young heiress named after the dead nun (460). As in England, the marriage is both a manly contract and a feminine sacrament, with M. Paul occupying both gender positions at once.

The quasi-marital union toward which Lucy and M. Paul move does not stabilize M. Paul's position—or Lucy’s, for that matter. Rather, it appropriates the fluidity of gender, ethnicity, and religion, but in ways different from the nationalist appropriation we see in the marriage of John Graham Bretton and Paulina Home de Bassompierre. As their friendship acquires romantic tones, M. Paul, a lay phrenologist, first draws Lucy's attention to the physical similarities between them and to the cosmic connection to which the similarities bear witness. Significantly, he invokes a mirror as his witness:

Physically M. Paul and Lucy appear as one person. This gesture beyond the gender divide comes through a recourse to phrenology, a pseudoscience, which, as Sally Shuttleworth points out, served “as a platform for the articulation of social dissent” and on which Brontë relied to pose “a radical challenge,” “particularly in the field of gender politics.”Footnote 61 The absence of the gender binary takes the two characters beyond nationalism; the mirror M. Paul uses as proof for his phrenological theories does not uphold religious or national distinctions either. The spiritual domain in which the entangling of their destinies originates is a cosmic region unclaimed by any institutionalized religion or nation.

As Villette moves toward its end, M. Paul's and Lucy's religious differences continue to disappear into a form of biblical cosmopolitanism, echoing Brontë's own universalist leanings.Footnote 62 Lucy's fervent Protestantism, occasionally endangered by her own flirtation with Catholicism, becomes ecumenical, as does M. Paul's formerly threatening Roman Catholicism. Lucy comes to view her own reliance on scripture as nonnational: her “own last appeal, the guide to which [she] looked, and the teacher which [she] owned, must always be the Bible itself, rather than any sect, of whatever name or nation” (419). The story of M. Paul's love for Justine Marie establishes him as Lucy's Christian knight: from the moment Lucy hears the story from Père Silas, she longs to see M. Paul and trace in his face “the imprint of that primitive devotedness, the signs of that half-knightly, half-saintly chivalry which the priest's narrative imputed to his nature. He had become [her] Christian Hero” (398). M. Paul's unusual widowhood speaks to a chivalry and a Christianity that are different from those of Dr. John. On the night of Lucy's arrival in Villette, Dr. John is introduced as “a true young English gentlemen,” the sound of whose voice “spoke a nature chivalric” (63). Dr. John is specifically English. M. Paul—often read as a secular St. Paul—is Christian. His “primitive” Christianity is generalized, but unlike Dr. John’s, it has no national markers.

M. Paul gestures further toward true cosmopolitan inclusivity and universality by debunking the very premises on which the notion of linear progress depends. Having realized the futility of attempting to convert Lucy to Catholicism, he acknowledges that she should believe “what [she] can” and asks, “How seem in the eyes of that God who made all firmaments, from whose nostrils issued whatever of life is here, or in the stars shining yonder—how seem the differences of man? But as Time is not for God, nor Space so neither is Measure, nor Comparison. … God guide us all! God bless you, Lucy!” (422). As M. Paul acknowledges the mystery of God's ways, he denounces the “differences of men” as ungodly. His words also denounce “Measure” and “Comparison,” which, instead of eliminating differences between men and societies, merely place them along the temporal grid of progress. Focusing on the oneness of all under one God, he espouses inclusivity that does not exclude and universalism that is devoid of linear progressivist preconceptions. According to M. Paul, God accords to no nation a status of privilege or superiority.

The same nonnationalist departure from the conservative model of Englishness gains special prominence in a scene that acts as a radical rewriting of the mirror-and-hearth scene from the Hotel Crécy. As M. Paul takes Lucy through the house he has rented and furnished for her, he leads her into a parlor or salon, whose

The scene recreates, partially and in miniature, the world of the Crystal Palace.Footnote 63 By contrast, however, the Crystal Palace no longer serves as a temple to its economic and social deities, Measure and Comparison.Footnote 64 The household objects are not placed in competitive opposition. Their origins are inconsequential and noted only in the very names of the French clock and the biscuit china. Unlike the domestic scene in the “Vashti” chapter, the mirrorlike table is not “foreign,” and the hearth cannot be “English,” because both concepts are elusive in Lucy's new home.

The sense of Englishness that a marriage helps to define remains elusive as well. M. Paul's proposal, which follows this visit to the house in Faubourg Clotilde, takes the two characters back to the beginning of human history, to the time before ethnic and religious divides. M. Paul tells Lucy, “Lucy, take my love. One day share my life. Be my dearest, first on earth.” She follows these words by likening their walk through the moonlit Rue Fossette to a journey “back to [the] first fresh days of our great Sire and Mother” when “such moonlight … fell on Eden”—making the “first on earth” phrase suggest formation of a new mankind (491). And although “Sire and Mother” designate the biological division of the sexes and their reproductive roles, the vision of the future the novel offers at this point embraces the hope that the new, undivided humanity's gender identities would not perpetuate the biological duality.

Brontë's reliance on nonnationalist cosmopolitanism, however, can take her vision of humanity's rebirth only so far. The truly cosmopolitan ideal is the stuff of romance. It belongs to the kind of future for which “sunny imaginations” hope when they “picture union and a happy succeeding life” (496). Villette's alternative ending, in which M. Paul drowns on his way back from Guadeloupe, is more in accordance with the world of mid-Victorian England, the world in which national, religious, and gender divisions continue to exist. Regardless of how radical Brontë's gesture toward a (happy) marriage between a Protestant and a “good Romanist” might be (396), M. Paul remains a figure of difference. As James Buzard suggests, if M. Paul returned to Labassecour, either he or Lucy would eventually have to convert in order to marry.Footnote 65 If the laws of the imaginary nation resemble England’s, her earnings would become his. It is only by banishing him from Labassecour and keeping Lucy there alone that Brontë can create for her quirky heroine a space beyond all marital—and, hence, all gender and national—distinctions. For as long as M. Paul stays away, Lucy is, at the same time, a spinster, a fiancée, a wife, a widow, even a husband (because she keeps all of his property). She inhabits all of these categories and remains outside all of them. Lucy's womanhood is thus formed on principles not unlike those of English cosmopolitanism as nationalism: she appropriates the positions other characters inhabit in order to escape those positions. But by staying in Labassecour, she keeps the critical, nonnationalist distance, which preserves the illusion of a world without differences—and, paradoxically, frees her from English ways.