In The Professor, Charlotte Brontë dramatizes the problem of cultivating cosmopolitan sympathies within daily life in a memorable dinner scene set in Brussels involving the novel's protagonist, William Crimsworth, his fiancée, Frances Henri, and his aristocratic friend, Yorke Hunsden. Envious of the worldliness of Frances's Anglo-Swiss parentage, Hunsden tries to establish his own cultural authority as a well-traveled Englishman by boasting of his experiences as a “universal patriot” whose “country is the world” (264). Frances challenges Hunsden's self-ascribed role as a cosmopolite by claiming that “[s]ympathies so widely diffused must be very shallow,” and pits her own “double power of patriotism” against his thin cosmopolitan universalism (264). Frances ultimately dishes Hunsden in the debate by quite literally serving up supper. The novelist drives this point home in the narration by interpolating a description of Frances's dinner preparation into her refutation of Hunsden: “‘You are much mistaken if you think so. Just be so good as to let me get to the fire, Mr. Hunsden; I have something to cook.’ (An interval occupied in settling a casserole on the fire; then, while she stirred its contents:) ‘Right! as if it were right to crush any pleasurable sentiment that God has given to man, especially any sentiment that, like patriotism, spreads man's selfishness in wider circles’ (fire stirred, dish put down before it)” (264). Brontë's narration of the dinner scene performs on the descriptive level, through the imbrication of voice and reported action, a broader philosophical privileging of proximity over transcendence, demystifying Hunsden's abstract cosmopolitanism by highlighting the slippage between his utopian rhetoric and the duties and desires of quotidian experience: one's interests cannot be entirely detached from basic human needs such as supper and worldly sympathies cannot simply replace an individual's inherent “selfishness.” In contrast, the novel situates Frances's “double power of patriotism” both as a natural extension of her domestic duties and as a form of layered cosmopolitanism capable of spreading “man's selfishness in wider circles.” The novel's domestic tropes function simultaneously to critique Hunsden's boasts of cosmopolitan transcendence as an unnarratable abstraction that denies its own materiality – taunting the “detached” cosmopolite that his mother must be “from the moon or from Utopia” (264) – and to imagine the Victorian home as an affective vehicle for extending English interests and sympathies beyond the nation, displacing a recognizable English domestic scene to a foreign yet familiar Belgian setting.

This essay examines the notion of portable domesticity in Charlotte Brontë's Belgian novels, The Professor and Villette, analyzing her use of foreign settings to explore the relationship between liberal self-cultivation and narrative form in shaping cosmopolitan sympathies in the mid-Victorian period. I argue that Brontë cultivates a portable sense of domesticity by adapting both the content and form of the realist novel to its foreign Belgian atmosphere and by creating a hybrid Anglo-French Bildungsroman to imagine forms of socialization across the “Channel zone” (See Cohen and Dever). This article responds in part to Tanya Agathocleous and Jason Rudy's recent admonition of Victorianists to envision cosmopolitanism as a “methodology as well as a set of ideas” and to “close-read the aesthetic qualities of literary texts within an increasingly complex and far-reaching historical and geographical frame” (Agathocleous and Rudy, “Victorian Cosmopolitanism: Introduction” 392–93). Brontë's Belgian novels lend themselves to formal close reading for their cultural and narrative “collisions” that demonstrate the mutual influence and destabilization which, according to Caroline Levine, literary forms and social hierarchies exert upon one another (Levine 626). The novels employ strategic collisions in particular narrative moments – for instance, Frances’ domestic-oriented cosmopolitanism – both to problematize conventional Victorian notions of home and cosmopolitanism, but, also, as Agathocleous argues more generally about Victorian cosmopolitan texts, in order to “qualify the universalisms that they espouse and ground themselves in the textures of difference” (Agathocleous, “Cosmopolitanism and Literary Form” 452; see also Anderson's notion of “layered cosmopolitanism,” 30–32, 110). In Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination in the Nineteenth Century, Agathocleous insightfully analyzes localities of Victorian universalisms in the figure of London as the “world in miniature” and the global network's “central node” (Agathocleous 15, 23). This essay suggests key limitations in viewing London as the central trope of Victorian cosmopolitanism and argues that the portable home proves a more apt figure for examining the development of cosmopolitan realism in Brontë's fiction.

By shifting the chronotope from the metropolis of London to the “minor” European capital of Brussels (suggested in the diminutive title Villette), the Belgian novels estrange the very genre of the English realist novel through their cultural displacement. Through the production of these cultural and narrative estrangements Brontë's Belgian novels engage in a type of ethics of alterity recently explored by Dorothy Hale. Hale locates the ethics of the novel in the “effect of defamiliarizing for the reader the normative conditions of ethical behavior that the novel itself has produced” (197). According to Hale, readerly “self-binding” to the “novel's mimetic story world . . . transforms the activity of ethical judgment into the production of alterity” (195). Brontë's Belgian novels complicate and productively explore the ethics of alterity by performing their novelistic translations of experience as cross-cultural narrative exercises. The novels develop an experience of cosmopolitan realism by presenting narratives of self-development as a progressive form of international socialization, encouraging readers to bind themselves to this expanding world, and then destabilizing these mimetic representations, forcing the reader to confront a double alterity on the level of plot and form.

Brontë introduces the trope of the portable home into her fiction in order to mediate between these various levels of narrative and cultural alterity. John Hughes refers to such alterity as Brontë's “aesthetic of dislocation” in which the novel dislocates the reader's hopes and expectations through the plot, syntax, social world, and minds of the characters (Hughes 718). I argue that the portable home functions as a central trope in the novels to facilitate readerly confrontation with formal ambivalence by housing plots which actively resist narration. In The Professor, for instance, Brontë presents what appears to be a conventional marriage plot between William Crimsworth and Frances Henri but deliberately introduces a series of narrative ruptures: Crimsworth's “hypochondria” (253–54), Henri's sobbing on her wedding day (269), and the eroticized formality of their married life (276–77). The narrative ruptures do not derail the marriage plot but cause the reader to question the motives, desirability, and capacity for mutual understanding within the cross-cultural marriage organizing and driving the narrative. In The Professor and Villette, the portable home institutionalizes these narrative ruptures as ethical collisions integral to Crimsworth and Frances's Anglo-Swiss-Belgian seat of retirement and Lucy Snowe's Anglo-French-Spanish(?)-Belgian Faubourg Clotilde residence, both of which encourage active confrontation with, rather than synthesis of, cultural differences. The plasticity of the domestic trope in both novels allows Brontë to mold the homely spaces to the affective needs of their culturally destabilized protagonists. The trope of the portable home both serves to give shape to the culturally deracinated protagonists who threaten to dissolve ethically and affectively into their foreign surroundings and to facilitate readerly attachment to the mimetic worlds of the novels, exposing both character and reader to narrative and cultural alterity through the very process of their “self-binding.”

Brontë provides a particularly insightful case study of the complex and problematic emergence of Victorian forms of cosmopolitanism both as part of her incorporation of foreign cultures and languages into her fiction and for her harsh critiques of worldly detachment in her novels. She encourages her English readers to think beyond the nation but warns them against abstract forms of worldly knowledge separated from everyday domesticity. The first half of this essay explores the cultural and historical significance of the novels’ “homely” Belgian settings for the novelist's domestically oriented cosmopolitanism and critique of detached liberal individualism. The second half of the essay analyzes the ethical stakes of this domestic displacement, examining the manner in which The Professor and Villette literalize Lukács's definition of the novel as a “longing for home” (87). Brontë's Belgian fiction places the home at the center of the novel's twin realist functions of self-realization and socialization and shifts the scope of this narrative process of “becoming” from a national to a cosmopolitan register. If, as Franco Moretti memorably argues, the realist novel actively envisions “the way of the world” (The Way of the World 4–6), then Brontë's novels epitomize this aspiration by extending narrative realism beyond the nation to imagine what it might be like to feel at home in the broader world.

I. Portable Domesticity

The increasing portability of Victorian domesticity has been explored in interesting ways in recent work on the British Empire. In Portable Property, John Plotz analyzes the ways in which English families were able to cultivate a sense of English domesticity even while living abroad in India, arguing that “abstract concepts like Englishness, race, or familial heritage can become metaphorically portable by being incarnated in crucial objects” (46). In Antipodal England, Janet C. Myers examines the ways in which forms of English domesticity were exported to Australia in the nineteenth century and how many working-class and “redundant” women gained access to middle-class domestic ideals by employing “strategies of self-maintenance” and “strategic amnesia” both on ship and in the colonies (50, 57). I wish to distinguish my use of the term “portable domesticity” from these important studies in two key ways. Firstly, I suggest that the portability of the home in Brontë's Belgian novels emphasizes symmetrical cultural relations between England, France, and Belgium rather than the “cultural asymmetry” at the heart of Plotz's study of the British Empire (173). Secondly, the novels do not merely preserve a sense of English domesticity through portable objects and strategies but, rather, decouple the double meaning of the domestic by detaching the feeling of homeliness from the idea of Englishness. The home in Brontë's novels functions less as nationalist mnemonics than as a space for framing and focusing the experience of cultural differences, bringing English and various francophone cultures (Swiss, French, and Belgian) into contact and collision with one another.

The Belgian setting in both novels deliberately plays upon the double sense of homeliness, drawing both on the domestication of foreign experience and the perceived plainness of the country itself. The cultural accessibility that Brontë and other Victorians experienced in Belgium opened up a new historical possibility for assimilating elements of Frenchness into English national education through a more palatable cultural iteration (Longmuir 177). Brontë's representation of Brussels could not be replaced by another foreign setting (or metropolitan London) because of the crucial role the cosmopolitan capital plays in opening up a cultural conversation between England and France. Brontë transforms the muted homeliness of the cosmopolitan capital into a form of cultural proximity for rethinking the place of French culture and language in English national education by imagining a new sense of Anglo-French space.

The importance of Belgium in Brontë's novels reflects less the historical accident of the author's own experiences as a student in the country than her ability to transform these experiences into a more accessible gateway to francophone culture for the English traveler and reader. Brontë traveled to Belgium at a fascinating time in the country's history, only twelve years after the establishment of national sovereignty in 1830 and five years before the nation fully consolidated its independence in 1848 (Witte 17). Belgium represented both one of the most culturally diverse and most homely countries in Europe. Having been occupied by numerous European powers for centuries – one contemporary English travel writer describes it as having been “the Cock-pit of Europe” – Belgium still retained during the 1840s strong traces of the various cultural influences of its occupiers (Tenant 1: 8). Brontë alludes to such cultural diversity in her description of Villette’s male protagonist, M. Paul Emmanuel, a Belgian patriot who possesses a Spanish physiognomy, perhaps a trace of the Spanish Hapsburgs. Lucy Snowe calls Villette a “cosmopolitan city” and describes the classroom in which she teaches a microcosm of Europe full of “girls of almost every European nation” (90), also calling attention to the homeliness of Belgium. In one scene, she expresses an ambivalent surprise in seeing the Belgian royal family at a concert: “Looking out for a king and queen, and seeing only a middle-aged soldier and a rather young lady, I felt half cheated, half pleased” (237–38). Her companion at the concert, Dr. John, offers an even less flattering description of “the compact little minor European [court], whose very formalities are little more imposing than familiarities, and whose gala grandeur is but homeliness in Sunday array” (242). The cosmopolitan and homely aspects of Belgium offered Brontë a way of undermining a reductive Anglo-French binary opposition that placed French urbanity against English provincialism.

This representation of Belgium as simultaneously homely and cosmopolitan is reflected as well in the English travel narratives of the period. Travel writers imagined the new nation as a cultural iteration of France, a more homely version of England's cultural and political rival. Robert Bell describes Brussels as a “very small miniature of Paris”; Michael Quin calls it “an imperfect imitation of Paris”; and Thomas Roscoe finds Brussels to be a “small scale” version of Paris (Bell 371; Quin 185; Roscoe 207). Brontë draws upon contemporary stereotypes in renaming the city “Villette” – meaning “little town” in French – and the country “Labassecour” – French for “farmyard.” As a diminutive or provincial iteration of France, however, Belgium represented a more cosmopolitan nation than its small population or geography might have otherwise suggested. On the one hand, the bilingual nation complicated the basic premises of popular nineteenth-century nationalist movements that sought to redraw national boundaries based on common language and culture. While Italian nationalists fought to expel Austrian, French, and Spanish influences from the Italian peninsula, Belgian citizens attempted to knit the highly divisive Walloon and Flemish cultures into a single nation. On the other hand, the predominance of the French language within the Belgian government and middle classes lent the new nation a heightened sense of its own culture, borrowing from France to construct a national literature and incorporating French cultural hegemony into a rigid class structure. One contemporary travel writer explains the cultural and class hegemony of the French language: “modern French may be described as the predominating language of Belgium. Not only the literature, but all the communications taking place in respectable society and in commerce, are in French, so that the Flemish and Walloon tongues are only heard in particular districts, or among the very humblest classes” (Chambers 72). Brontë highlights this fact in Shirley by making Robert Gérard Moore, a native of the Flemish city Antwerp, a French-speaker, confirming his bourgeois roots in Belgium. Although Belgium possessed a relatively small national literature in the 1840s, Brussels became a publishing center for French texts. According to J. Emerson Tenant, the “most flourishing branch of trade in Brussels, is that of books; and more especially of reprints of French and foreign literature, with which it plentifully supplies almost every country of Europe” (2: 29). It is quite possible that many of the French books that Brontë borrowed from her friend Mary Taylor and that served as her introduction to the French language and culture were actually printed in Belgium.

For many English travelers of the 1840s, Belgium felt more culturally accessible than France and shared more similarities with England. Belgium emerged in the mid-nineteenth century as the first modern industrial nation on the Continent, and, as Robert Bell suggests, had “the ambition to become ‘a little England’” (Witte 14; Bell 381). Bell argues that there “is no government in Europe so purely representative” and that the Belgian king performs a merely “decorative” function, anticipating in some ways Walter Bagehot's description of the English Constitution's “efficient” and “dignified” parts (Bell 384; Bagehot 7). Tenant reports that “the Belgians have now far outstripped all the rest of Europe in the manufacture of machines of every description, and in all but the cost of construction, and that beauty of finish which matured skill can alone achieve, they at present bid fair to rival England herself in her peculiar and hitherto undisputed domain” (1: 99). Roscoe suggests that Belgium is “intimately” connected with England not just “in regard to her history, character, and position . . . progress of useful science, and the facilities of communication” but also through the Belgian king's “associations to the English people,” as Queen Victoria's uncle (iii). Whereas France often served as a historical rival to England, the nascent nation of Belgium represented an opportunity for English writers to mold the country in England's own image.

The placement of Belgium at the center of Brontë's reflections on English and French cultures resonates with and complicates the liberal cosmopolitanism of prominent Francophiles of the period such as J. S. Mill and Matthew Arnold. Although Brontë was by no means a Liberal in the same sense as Mill or Arnold, her experience with the political radicalism of the Taylor family caused Brontë to reevaluate her conservative political opinions in her fiction even if it did not convert her into a Radical herself. Like Brontë, Mill and Arnold drew upon their experiences abroad and knowledge of French to reflect upon English national education, and, according to Georgios Varouxakis, “to correct – through example and influence – some of the worst defects of England's narrow civilization” (Victorian Political Thought on France and the French 47). In their writings on French culture, Mill and Arnold imagined liberal self-cultivation and national education as a gradual widening or multiplying of views (Varouxakis, “Cosmopolitan Patriotism” 283–84). This vision of liberal multi-sidedness, however, raised questions about cultural horizons and the limits of individuality. How far could the process of cultural “correction” be extended? How much Frenchness does an English citizen need? Mill, in particular, sought in his early writings to develop an ideal of liberal self-cultivation that could transcend English national prejudices, but the centrality of France within his self-fashioning also registered important tensions within the development of his masculine identity. In his later writings, he registers his disillusionment with Continental politics and the pressures that the ideal of perpetual self-cultivation placed on his masculine self-fashioning.

Brontë introduces forms of portable domesticity in her novels as both an alternative to and a means of understanding the failure of masculine forms of cosmopolitan transcendence and detachment during the mid-Victorian period, as seen in her critique of the cosmopolitan figure of Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre and her inclusion of domesticated versions of cosmopolitanism in The Professor and Villette. Rochester, particularly through the eyes of Jane, strikes one as a real man of the world. His ten years of travel on the Continent in search of his “ideal of a woman among English ladies, French countesses, Italian signoras, and German Gräfinnen” evokes in the mind of the Victorian reader the image of an English gentleman on the Grand Tour, which from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century marked a rite of passage for young English aristocrats to complete their education by travel through Europe for several years (See Batten, Black, Chard, Hornsby). In a sense, Rochester represents an anachronistic survival of an earlier aristocratic age. His reductive typologies, equating the characteristics of his foreign mistresses with particular national qualities, have deep roots in eighteenth-century travel narratives, but these typologies strike the reader as particularly reductive in the context of the realist novel. Brontë pulls back the veil of Rochester's seductive Byronic worldliness and highlights his significant domestic flaws and failures. The novelist introduces at least one such flawed cosmopolitan figure in each of her novels – Mr. Yorke in Shirley, Colonel de Hamal and M. de Bassompierre in Villette, and Mr. Hunsden in The Professor – only to make them a target of moral, cultural, and social critique. Each novel audits their primarily domestic failures and highlights the provincial aspects of their self-fashioned cosmopolitan identities.

The changing attitudes towards the figure of the cosmopolite during the mid-nineteenth century helps explain why the resurgence in recent scholarship on cosmopolitanism has until quite recently largely neglected the Victorian period. Critiques of the cosmopolitan certainly existed prior to the Victorian period. The figure of the fop or macaroni was by no means uncommon during the eighteenth century, but such humorous images functioned in conjunction with positive cosmopolitan ideals such as the citizen of the world or the Grand Tour (Cohen, “Manliness, Effeminacy, and the French” 44–61). This balance between the positive and negative understandings of the term disappeared almost completely during the mid-nineteenth century as the idea of cosmopolitanism became an increasingly “tarnished term” (See Marcus; Malcomson; Varouxakis, “‘Patriotism,’ ‘Cosmopolitanism,’ and ‘Humanity’”). In a mid-Victorian society that generally associated the term “cosmopolitan” with various types of pejorative social coding – foreignness, Jewishness, effeminacy, homosexuality – forms of portable domesticity, like the portable domestic novel, gradually replaced the figure of the masculine cosmopolite as the primary ethical lens for evaluating the increasing worldliness of Victorian domestic life.

Brontë, however, mobilizes the trope of the Victorian home not as a bulwark against foreign contamination but as a means of ethically situating the increasingly deracinated modern liberal subject. This version of portable domesticity participates in a type of “ethics of care” which, in her reading of E. M. Forster's fiction, Lauren Goodlad describes as “situating morality in terms of concrete relationships” which emphasize the “embeddedness and embodiments of lived social relations” (310–11). Whereas Forster utilizes foreign spaces in his novels to flee the constraints of “feminine domestic authority” and realize an “openness to difference,” Brontë uses domestic constraints to bring cultural differences into focus in two important ways (Goodlad 316, 324).

In one sense, the portable home participates in an ethics of care by giving shape and stability to a liberal individualism incapable of embodying an actually lived cosmopolitanism. Mill illustrates the problem quite interestingly in his Autobiography in which he mourns his disillusionment with French politics through the compensatory figure of his wife Harriet Taylor. Mill married Taylor in 1851, the year of Napoleon III's coup and Mill's abrupt turn away from French politics. Devastated by her death in Avignon seven years later, Mill transformed their home abroad into a hallowed ground:

Expressing the heartfelt loss of his wife and intellectual collaborator, Mill demonstrates an effort to accept the limits of his own self-cultivation through the repetition of his deceased spouse's tastes and pursuits. He undercuts the very principles of individuality so powerfully proposed in his essay, On Liberty, through this ironic embrace of custom. The sacred Avignon cottage both drew Mill further away geographically from England in his later life as well as also acting as a check on his interest in French politics and culture. His detailed writings on Continental politics became increasingly tempered, and he spent the remainder of his career largely addressing the concerns of “Humanity” (See Varouxakis, “French Radicalism” 454–58). Similar to his turning to Wordsworth's poetry as a solution to his earlier mental crisis, the home in Avignon represents Mill's intuitive attempt to seek affective closure to the unbounded process of cultivating liberal multi-sidedness.

Whereas Mill fetishizes a sacred domestic space to short circuit a burdensome practice of liberal multi-sidedness, Brontë's novels imagine the home as a portable, liminal space capable of housing and reproducing the problematic of liberal cosmopolitanism within everyday life. The Belgian novels narrate what Iris Marion Young describes as the home's capacity to function as a “material anchor for a sense of agency and a shifting and fluid identity” (159). The home, according to Young, facilitates agency in two key ways: one, as an extension of bodily habits and support for one's routines, and, two, as a sedimentation of personal meaning and value onto material markers (150–51). In its crucial role of reproducing agency, the home “enacts a specific mode of subjectivity and historicity that is distinct from the creative-destructive idea of transcendence and from the ahistorical repetition of immanence” (149). Failing to reflect on the relationship between home and agency in his Autobiography, Mill oscillates between a transcending interest in “Humanity” in his later writings and a desire to concretize his wife's memory in their Avignon home. In contrast, the portable home in The Professor and Villette serves both to reflect on the relationship between subject-making and home-making and to prevent the cultivation of multi-sided individuality from gravitating towards either extreme of transcendence or immanence.

In a second key sense, the Brontëan home “institutionalizes” the liberal individual and renders domestic life, as Monica Cohen argues, into a form of “impersonal sociability” (55, 51). According to Cohen, the home in Villette functions as a “communitarian” rather than a “personal” institution which in many ways resembles eighteenth-century public civic ideals in its capacity to incorporate virtual strangers into the household (45, 47, 51). In Villette, Lucy Snowe establishes such impersonal sociability first in Madame Beck's pensionnat, and, later, in her own school and home established with the help of Paul Emmanuel. Likewise, in The Professor, even when William and Frances Crimsworth return to England to establish a home, they continue to perform their roles as master and pupil, maintaining an impersonal sociability with one another even after relinquishing all professional responsibilities. Rather than extending Burkean concentric circles of affection and loyalty from home to nation to the world (Burke 173), the domestic spaces in both novels place worldly strife and cultural difference at the center of home life, ethically situating external concerns as a centripetal force within the domestic sphere.

Brontë's Belgian novels echo in important ways recent debates about cosmopolitanism, materiality, and embodiment. On the one hand, Kwame Anthony Appiah suggests that we might recover the term cosmopolitanism by emphasizing its inevitable “partial” nature as lived experience (xvii). Appiah argues that one ought to cultivate a “universal concern” and recognize our “obligations to others,” but he suggests that “our cosmopolitanism should not make impossible psychological demands” and that “whatever our basic obligations, they must be . . . partial to those closest to us: to our families, our friends, our nations” (xv, 158, 165). On the other hand, Timothy Brennan argues that such “cosmo-theory” merely represents “a friendly discourse . . . that prevents intellectuals from contesting this fallacious account of materialities” (219). Brennan suggests that there lurks an “imperial cosmopolitanism lying behind well-intentioned, good-spirited writing” (221).

Brontë's effort to drive home cultural differences in The Professor and Villette registers intellectual, religious, and social tensions as local concerns and embodies such concerns through affective and physical violence. Localizing cosmopolitan concerns in domestic spaces, however, does not render them “partial” in Appiah's double sense of the term since the home in both novels becomes both portable and fungible, deliberately disrupting the notion of an original local attachment from which one's priorities might radiate outwards. At the same time, the novels critique forms of “cosmo-theory,” such as Hunsden's, which attempt to separate political, social, and cultural ideals from material circumstances. The trope of the home functions in the novels as a conduit for the violence lurking behind the rhetoric of liberal cosmopolitanism, and this domestication of worldly strife serves two diametrically opposed functions: (1) to destabilize and open up liberal subjectivity towards the world, introducing a psychological, social, and cultural cleavage necessary for individual growth, and (2) to displace the contours of individual identity onto a bounded domestic space, institutionalizing the destabilized liberal subject within the walls of the Victorian home. The home functions both as the primary instrument for disrupting the protagonist's division of self and world and as the container for housing and giving shape to the destabilized subject. The finale of Villette, for instance, leaves the reader with the feeling that Lucy Snowe is domesticated – or even “institutionalized” in the recent nineteenth-century meaning of “home” – in the Faubourg Clothilde yet also unsettled by her unconsummated engagement and unresolved religious conflicts with Paul Emmanuel (Monica Cohen 55–56).

The domestication of Lucy Snowe functions primarily as a response to her failed attempt at ascetic self-discipline which resembles in key ways forms of Victorian masculine self-fashioning (See Adams and Sussman). In the third volume of Villette, Lucy fantasizes about a future life in which she attains her “object in life,” opening a school, through “self-denial and economy” (400). Brontë disrupts this fantasy of professional independence in order to develop a sense of home which Lucy believes she will never possess – “nothing more for me in life – no true home – nothing to be dearer to me than myself” (400). Lucy's eventual home in the Faubourg Clothilde does not represent the “crescent phase” in which she originally intends to bury herself, but, rather, a home grounded in her cross-cultural conflicts with Paul (401). The irreconcilable religious differences on which Lucy and Paul build their home both disrupts the consolidation of a coherent individual identity while simultaneously containing and giving shape to the destabilized subject. The portable home plays a crucial role in Brontë's transnational Bildungsroman by holding the “bad infinity” of the novel – “the discrete, unlimited nature of the material of the novel” and its need to set “its own limits for itself and from within itself” – in indefinite suspension, enacting both a sense of closure as a geographical and narrative destination while also framing individual self-cultivation as an open-ended process (Lukács 71, 83).

II. Cosmopolitan Realism

The idea of realism developed in important ways during the mid-Victorian period in relation to new technologies that diminished the perception of geographic and temporal distance between England and the Continent and created a stronger sense of proximity between European capitals (See Menke). As the most “centralized” of all literary genres, and the genre most closely linked to new technologies, the novel offers a powerful insight into the increasingly fungible nature of mid-nineteenth century consumer culture (Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 165; Plotz 5). On the one hand, Brontë's novels extend her readers’ cultural imagination and sympathies by displacing their domestic settings to a distinctly Continental space, encouraging them to rethink the everyday through the experience of foreignness. On the other hand, her fiction, as Elaine Freedgood argues more generally about Victorian realism, demonstrates the capacity for “suppression or elision” and “ homogenize[s] the chaotic multiplicity of a given episteme, rendering it smooth, intelligible, consistent” (90). Brontë's Belgian novels simultaneously extend the imaginative setting of the realist novel to a foreign, francophone atmosphere yet primarily restrict the potentially overwhelming experience of foreignness to the legible space of the Victorian home.

Brontë develops a cosmopolitan subjectivity in the novels through the narration of physical embodiment, immediacy, and proximity. Her emphasis on physical immediacy in her cosmopolitan realism activates what William Cohen has recently identified as the Victorian novel's capacity to create the effect of “immaterial, psychological depth” through the “depiction of physical substance, interaction, and incorporation” (ii). Both Crimsworth and Snowe come to a new understanding of England through their time in Brussels, but both protagonists also realize the temporary “enchantment of distance” and “illusion of liberty” experienced in their travels (Brontë, Villette 83; The Professor 90). Brontë's realist narration constantly returns to domestic settings to evaluate embodied expressions of cultural difference rather than attempting to abstract or transcend national differences.

In his recent work on the nineteenth-century British novel, James Buzard offers an extensive reading of the international interests at the heart of Brontë's fiction and examines closely “the interplay of geographical identity categories . . . the repeated, interrelated, ambivalent evocations of locality, nationality, and internationality” (160). Buzard links his analysis of “geographical identity categories” to his broader study of the novel as a form of “metropolitan autoethnography” that, through its self-interrupting narration of British anticulture, anticipates in many ways modern anthropology's “general system of cultural representation” (7). According to Buzard, the novelist uses the sense of alienation in a foreign culture to delimit and to “decatholicize” the universalist tendencies – the logic of “anywhere's nowhere” – of British imperial culture (249). The goal of Brontë's fiction is to recognize and to appreciate Britain as having “a culture of [its] own” (249). Although the complex interplay of geographical identity categories in her fiction provides significant ballast to Buzard's larger historical argument about metropolitan autoethnography, the anachronistic projection of a modern anthropological terminology and teleology onto her novels deforms his reading of them in two significant ways. Firstly, the notion of Brontë as proto-ethnographer attributes twentieth-century forms of professional detachment to the Victorian novelist and obscures important ethical motivations influencing her decision to represent Belgium in her fiction. I suggest that the notion of portable domesticity offers a more nuanced understanding of gender difference and transnational interests in Brontë's fiction and that her Belgian novels are less invested in defining an English national culture than in cultivating an ethical orientation towards perceiving national differences on the level of the home. Secondly, Buzard's reading of self-interrupting narration as metropolitan autoethnography fails to address formal aspects of the novel to the detriment of his broader historical argument. How, for instance, does the ethnographic work of Villette differ from a self-interrupting contemporary travel narrative? This ambiguity in genre proves particularly problematic for a novel like Villette narrated entirely from the perspective of a highly reticent and manipulative first-person narrator whose rhetorical idiosyncrasies complicate significantly any notion of a detached proto-ethnographer. Buzard's argument focuses exclusively on the nineteenth-century British novel as a historical institution without properly delimiting it as a genre, obscuring the central role that the ideas of self-cultivation and socialization have played in recent efforts to define the Victorian realist novel.

In The Way of the World, Franco Moretti defines the Bildungsroman as a symbolic form of youth that analyzes the process of bourgeois socialization through which individuals explore the possibilities of individual liberty created by capitalist culture only to renounce such youthful liberty for a mature acceptance of duty. The Bildungsroman not only represents the development of the protagonist, but its representation of the reality in which the protagonist develops is just as much a process under construction. The individual does not develop an identity within an already fully formed world, but, rather, the world simultaneously comes into being through the process of narrating the individual's development. The Bildungsroman presents these two processes as directly proportional to one another: the individual's internalization of the logic and rules of society in effect maps the very contours of the world inhabited by the protagonist. In a sense, we know the world of the novel through the process of analyzing these dynamic effects on the protagonist and not through a static, mimetic recreation of every object or aspect of everyday life.

Moretti, however, offers a comparative account of the Bildungsroman in European literature without addressing the increasingly international interests of Victorian fiction (Cole 12). In The Literary Channel, Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever introduce the notion of the “Channel zone” between Britain and France as “the agglomeration of a range of formal and informal institutions that produce and distribute symbolic and economic capital” (2). Examining Brontë's Belgian novels through the concept of the Channel zone can help us revise Moretti's account of the Bildungsroman in two important ways. On the one hand, the Victorian realist novel represents the way of the world through a cross-cultural, rather than a national, perspective (Tucker 689). On the other, the Anglo-francophone cultural field of Brontë's novels can help us understand Moretti's earlier work on the Bildungsroman in relation to his more recent work on world literature. If the international nineteenth-century literary system functioned according to a core-periphery system in which the “core” Anglo-French novel served as a dominant model to shape the local materials of the “periphery,” then The Professor and Villette offer an interesting insight into this dual core relationship (Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature” 56, 58). The novels presents a view not only into the Anglo-French cultural field, but, just as importantly, into the very genre of the Anglo-French realist novel, synthesizing key aspects of the “classification” (“particularly marked ending”) and “transformation” (“open-ended process”) principles which Moretti's account separates respectively into the “fairy-tale” English Bildungsroman and the “mature” French Bildungsroman (Moretti, The Way of the World 7, 185). In this sense, the Belgian novels explore the idea of cosmopolitanism both in content (the cross-cultural journey) and form (the hybrid Anglo-French Bildungsroman).

The international scope of Brontë's portable realist novel complicates our understanding of the role of self-development in Victorian fiction by shifting the process of socialization from a national to a cosmopolitan register through the change in setting from England to Belgium and through the use of the cross-cultural marriage plot. The Belgian novels as Bildungsroman imagine the reconciliation of youthful liberty with social duty by allowing their protagonists to escape the strictures of English professional and gender expectations through voluntary exile to the Continent. Brontë's exploration of the “international theme,” however, does not itself constitute the cosmopolitan realism of the novels. Rather, the novels bind their readers to the cross-cultural verisimilitude imagined within the Channel zone only to force them to confront irreconcilable forms of cultural and narrative alterity. Brontë formalizes these confrontations with Otherness by deemphasizing the subject-formation of its protagonists as an end in itself and by framing the plot through the trope of the portable home. This shift in emphasis from protagonist to home allows the novelist to reflect on the structures of narration itself in a sophisticated manner, illuminating the dynamic and delimiting aspects of realist narration that theorists of the novel would later separate into a series of binary oppositions: “death instinct” vs. “pleasure principle” (Brooks 107); “classification principle” vs. “transformation principle” (Moretti, The Way of the World 7); “perfectionism” vs. “the optative” (Miller 199). The portable home functions in the novels simultaneously as an organizing restriction (death instinct/classification/perfectionism) and as a dynamic catalyst of character development (pleasure/transformation/optative), creating both a final resting space for the novels’ plots (Daisy Lane and Faubourg Clothilde) and a space of continued cosmopolitan conflict and character transformation.

The peculiar genetic history of the Belgian novels, particularly the way in which Brontë repeats many of the same plot events from contrasting masculine and feminine points of view, represents a unique insight into the realist novel as a vehicle for liberal self-fashioning. The type of cosmopolitan realism that emerges in Brontë's Belgian novels explores the burdens of liberal self-cultivation through Victorian domestic ideology by reversing the polarity of gender expectations: Crimsworth's “perfectionist” narrative of vocational ambition develops into a search for domestic independence while Snowe's “optative” reflections on women's domestic dependence lead to her future professional success (Miller 199). The repetition of key plot points deemphasizes the importance of self-realization through the fantasies of marriage and, instead, alienates and illuminates the very process of subject-making at the heart of realist narration. The plots of development unravel within and across the two novels. Brontë, for instance, stages the development of William Crimsworth's masculine subjectivity through his objectification and mastery of his wife, Frances, but then calls this process into question by substituting Lucy Snowe into the same narrative as a feminine subject. Viewed separately, the narratives of self-development also unravel through their overdetermined and underdetermined marriage plots. In The Professor, the triadic living arrangement of Crimsworth, Henri, and Hunsden calls into question the coherency and stability of the cross-cultural heterosexual marriage in mediating between epistemological concerns of self-perfection and the process of socialization (See Kim 28–41; Miller xii). In contrast, Lucy Snowe's monadic isolation at the end of Villette questions the very desirability of marriage as a culminating event in a narrative of self-development.

In The Professor, Brontë presents a masculine reading of this cultural problematic by framing the novel around a perfectionist narrative depicting William Crimsworth's search for a vocation and a wife. Crimsworth envisions this process of self-cultivation as a seemingly bounded process and mobilizes the perfectionist narrative to imagine his social reintegration into England, channeling individual epistemological questions into a conventional marriage plot, as his mastery of his wife, Frances, becomes a form of self-mastery. Brontë complicates the English narrative of liberal self-cultivation by imagining the process of Crimsworth's socialization in transnational terms and by ultimately redefining Victorian notions of masculinity in relation to the idea of domesticity rather than profession. Brontë entitles the book The Professor, but Crimsworth's perfectionist narrative performs a type of self-erasure rather than self-definition as the vocational title suggests. Crimsworth becomes something more than a professor by the time of his retirement at his home in Daisy Lane, but we are given few clues about the shadowy narrator Crimsworth has become or what sort of life he will follow (39; 47; 86; 270; 289). The novel concludes with a sense of the protagonist's domestication and a remapping of his character onto the domestic spaces from which he is writing these “private” reflections intended for the “public at large” (47).

The novel generates a portable sense of domesticity through a cross-cultural critique of Victorian domestic ideology. Crimsworth's modest provincial house, patterned after the “homely Belgian household,” represents a middle ground between his brother Edward's lavish suburban mansion and the Pelets's business-centered home (Brontë, The Professor 220). Brontë renders Crimsworth Hall a caricature of the English domestic ideal of separate spheres and presents the business-like marriage of the Pelets as a joke for its lack of “domestic harmony” (45–46; 290). The transnational scope of Crimsworth's portable domesticity also triangulates between two opposing forms of cosmopolitanism in the novel: Frances Henri's “double power of patriotism” grounded in her hybrid Anglo-Swiss identity and Yorke Hunsden's cosmopolitan republicanism cultivated by his aristocratic travels (264). The novel presents Crimsworth's own form of cosmopolitan dwelling as a middle ground between these two opposing forms of transnational identities, integrating the accident of Henri's hybrid parentage and Hunsden's aristocratic roots into the probable extension of the protagonist's middle-class sympathies.

Ultimately conflating Crimsworth's character with the novel's domestic setting, Brontë's experiment with a hybrid form of the Anglo-French Bildungsroman attempts to balance competing classification and transformation principles through the trope of the portable home. Crimsworth fashions a new sense of home in Brussels and then imports this Anglo-Swiss-Belgian home back to rural England, fixing him geographically and offering the narrative a sense of completion while simultaneously rendering his continued transformation as a character hidden, unbounded, and contingent upon domestic conflicts with Frances and Hunsden (Brontë, The Professor 282). The physical adjacency of Daisy Lane to Hunsden Wood represents the novelist's overdetermined effort to domesticate the idea of cosmopolitanism by uniting the cross-cultural marriage with the figure of the cosmopolite. The fantasy of this triadic domestic arrangement allows Crimsworth to encounter regularly at Hunsden Wood “foreign visitors” and “politicians” whose “conversation is exciting and strange” and “the absence of all local narrowness both in the host and his chosen society gives a metropolitan, almost a cosmopolitan freedom and largeness to the talk” (282–83). Daisy Lane's double domestic removal from both Hunsden Wood and European metropolitan centers allows the protagonist to dismiss the actual content of such conversations as mere “twaddle” (282). Crimsworth wants to have his cosmopolite and to shoot him (in name) too, consuming the energy and mobility of the cosmopolitan metropolis from the comfort of rural retirement without subjecting himself directly to the “taint” of cosmopolitan masculinity while also expressing symbolically a degree of repressed dissatisfaction with this cosmopolitan lifestyle by killing the family's rabid dog, Yorke, named after his aristocratic friend (286).

Villette offers a more radical model of portable domesticity narrated from a feminine perspective relying more heavily on optative reflection rather than a perfectionist narrative. Lucy Snowe achieves a sense of independence through a continuous process of renunciation and regret, drawing heavily upon the optative to realize her own singularity and not realizing individual or social stability through the institution of marriage. The novel's frustrating conclusion intimating the death of Lucy's fiancé represents Brontë's effort to resist the perfectionist narrative of marriage as a solution to the novel's epistemological concerns (Miller 72). Unlike The Professor, Villette refuses to solve the problem of self-development through the marriage plot, divorcing romance from the domestic ideal (Monica Cohen 45).

Brontë instead frames the novel around a series of domestic settings that help focus moments in Lucy's life without providing her a true life narrative. She structures the first three chapters of the novel around Lucy's childhood visit to her godmother's home in the “ancient town of Bretton” and focuses the remainder of the book on eighteen months spent in Brussels when Lucy is in her early twenties (7). Brontë concludes the novel with Lucy's social isolation within her neat, clean schoolhouse in the Faubourg Clotilde, echoing the atmosphere of her godmother's neat, clean home in chapter one. As Gilbert and Gubar argue, Brontë's protagonist represents a rewriting of Wordsworth's “Lucy” poems, putting Lucy in motion in place of the male poet (402). However, in the novel's conclusion, Lucy becomes like Miss Marchmont in chapter four, endlessly waiting at home for the fiancé who will never return. Villette offers a critique of transcendence by distinguishing Lucy Snowe's quiet retirement from the worldly sociability of two of the novel's male protagonists, Mr. Home and Dr. John. Lucy's travels help her to supersede the narrow domestic experience of other female characters such as Miss Marchmont and Mrs. Barrett, but she never achieves the freedom of movement or social standing of Dr. John or Mr. Home.

Lucy's retirement, however, allows her to engage in intimate forms of cultural conflict in a manner entirely foreign to Mr. Home or Dr. John who become comfortably settled as British men abroad. Brontë drives this point home by neatly sloughing off the Bretton plot five chapters before the novel's denouement, snugly placing Dr. John in Mr. Home's home and embracing Britain's “inbred sentiments” in the worst Burkean sense (Burke 75). The chiastic, incestuous relationships of the Homely family romance deliberately alienate readers from the ideal of the English home in order to render them sympathetic to the more ecumenical sense of home that Lucy establishes with Paul. The novel presents its Victorian readers with a double challenge: to detach a feeling of Englishness from the idea of domesticity and to imagine an alternative sense of home built on irreconcilable religious and cultural differences. The Professor also challenges its readers to confront cultural differences but stacks the deck in favor of Englishness by making Frances Henri a Swiss Protestant and giving her an English mother (and tea set). William and Frances feel a common solidarity against the perceived hypocrisies of Belgian and French Catholicism and their retirement in England feels like a planned escape from the Continent. In contrast, Villette raises the stakes of its international theme by unrelentingly emphasizing the irreconcilability of Lucy and Paul's religious and cultural conflicts while simultaneously seducing the reader into desiring their marriage.

Brontë structures the novel's marriage plot as a type of textually mediated culture war, invoking what Paul characterizes as “the old quarrel of France and England” (154). Although Lucy is tempted to renounce the Protestantism which Père Silas describes as “too dry, cold, prosaic” for her, her engagement rests upon the assumption that such a religious conversion will never occur (179; 545). Rather surprisingly for a marriage plot based on the controversial notion of an interfaith union, Villette introduces much stronger anti-Catholic rhetoric than the Protestant marriage plot of The Professor. Lucy criticizes the Catholic penchant for “flattery and fiction”; their “land of convents and confessionals”; the “dreadful viciousness, sickening tyranny and black impiety” of the “lecture pieuse”; the “large sensual indulgence” and “mental slavery” of Romanism; and the “Parisienne, externally refined – at heart, corrupt – without a creed, without a principle, without an affection” (Brontë, Villette 90; 110; 139–41). Paul openly declares his own prejudices towards Protestants and Englishwomen and attempts to woo Lucy by discreetly placing religious pamphlets in her desk (147; 457–58).

Unable to resolve their religious differences through discussion, the awkward couple displaces their erotic feelings onto classroom objects: “that hand of M. Emanuel's was on intimate terms with [Lucy's] desk . . . it raised and lowered the lid, ransacked and arranged the contents, almost as familiarly as [her] own” (380). Lucy Snowe claims that M. Paul's “mental wealth” became her “library, and whenever it was opened to [her], [she] entered bliss” (422). In the novel's conclusion, the protagonist fails to consummate her intended marriage, but she takes pleasure in cultivating her fiancé's library: “My school flourishes, my house is ready: I have made him a little library, filled its shelves with the books he left in my care. . . . I thought I loved him when he went away; I love him now in another degree; he is more my own” (545). Rather than consolidating her identity through marriage, Lucy internalizes the contradictory desires of self-development that she had projected onto her relationship with Paul and transforms the mastery of texts into a useful skill and successful profession (Kreilkamp 344). Leaving Lucy in a liminal state between a life with Paul she will never lead and a multiplicity of possible lives not yet realized, the novel narrates the problematic of liberal self-cultivation without foreclosing the possibility of future development for its protagonist. The trope of the portable home functions simultaneously as a delimiting and destabilizing force on the narrative of Lucy's formation, both offering a sense of completion to an identity and marriage left unrealized and suggesting an empowering iteration of future homes and possible lives still to be realized.

The plasticity and mobility of Brontë's sense of home ironically provides the consistent point of reference from which to alienate and render visible the central elements of realist narration. She, for instance, introduces the marriage plot as a form of self-alienation, first, imagining marriage as a painful embrace of irreconcilable religious differences envisioned in Paul's love for the “severe charm” of Lucy's Protestantism, and, later, isolating Lucy in her solipsistic delight in her lost lover's letters (Brontë, Villette 545). Beyond the alterity of the thwarted marriage plot, the novel goes even further to destabilize the cultural conflicts on which the romance is based. Lucy, for instance, unconsciously interpellates Paul into the “old quarrel of France and England,” calling him a “true Frenchman” only to correct herself that he is in fact “of strain neither French nor Labassecourien” (375). The deliberate slip in the narrative subtly challenges an essentialist understanding of cultural difference by emphasizing the performativity of Paul's role as Catholic Continental “Other.” Brontë even more radically unsettles the very setting of the chronotope, presenting Villette as a double cultural displacement: first, as a simulacrum of Brussels imagined as an “imperfect imitation of Paris,” and, second, as a substitute for London as “minor” metropolis in the English Bildungsroman (Quin 185; Brontë, Villette 242). Lucy's trauma in the novel's finale also destabilizes the temporality of the chronotope by introducing the trope of the “shipwreck” which anachronistically reverberates through earlier passages of the narrative (39; 202) and forces the reader to reread the narrative in reverse, calling into question the motivations and reliability of a potentially hysterical narrator. Brontë imagines a radical form of portable domesticity capable of bringing together various cultural conflicts into a sense of home without foreclosing the possibility of continued self-cultivation through a conventional marriage plot and without narrating the protagonist into a fixed national identity. The home, rather than the individual, emerges as the central point of contact between the fungibility of liberal self-cultivation and an expanding sense of the world. Lucy Snowe's home in the Faubourg Clotilde represents the real hero of the novel and the fullest realization of cosmopolitan realism in Brontë's fiction.

Villette represents one of many latent historical forms of Victorian cosmopolitanism that never conceived itself as such. The type of Anglo-French proximity that the novelist develops in her homely representation of Belgium's cosmopolitan capital represents both an attempt to cultivate English sympathies beyond the nation and a means of managing a new form of liberal self-cultivation created by the widening influence of emerging market and media forces. The novel explores the cosmopolitan possibilities of imagining lives unled while rejecting the popular masculine fiction of the rootless citizen of the world. The novel marks Brontë's effort to cultivate a proximate form of cosmopolitanism by redefining the notion of home as an institution capable of focusing the potential cacophony of international interests and managing the infinite possible iterations of liberal individuality.