“Grossly Material”: Catholic Things and the Jesuit Order in Villette

“Grossly material” is the description Lucy Snowe, heroine of Charlotte Bronte’s 1853 novel, Villette, ascribes to a Catholic mass. Yet her Christian name belongs to the martyr whose story epitomizes the lurid tales of saints Bronte’s heroine abhors. In some versions of the Saint Lucy narrative, her eyes were gouged out, and representations have portrayed Lucy holding a dish upon which rests her eyes—“grossly material” indeed and an example of how Bronte’s Lucy is separate from, but also bound up in, Catholic material culture. This chapter shows how Villette implicates itself in Jesuit deployments of objects and images which mediate Lucy Snowe’s experience and underline the author’s concerns with relationships between the intangible and the tangible and the significance of material culture in religion.