Conclusion

Abstract

I began this study by invoking the mighty blasts of wind which Charlotte Brontë recorded in her journal before she began a career as a novelist. That storm aroused what she called a ‘craving vacancy’, a desire and an awareness of absence which could then only be ‘filled a little’ by her waking dreams. The image of the wild storm reappears at the conclusion of her final work, Villette, rising, swelling, ‘shriek[ing] out long’ (p. 450). This time, however, that blast cannot be lulled’ — only ignored by a ‘sunny imagination’. The ‘dream’ of her adolescent journal had become a novel which gives a voice to desire in its multiple forms, but particularly that desire which emerges as a dream of sexual love.