The Sense of Unending: Reading Villette Backwards

Abstract: Contemporary readers have unprecedented opportunities to interact with, and even redirect, the narratives they consume, ranging from interactive novels, to choose-your-own-adventure tales, to immersive video games. But is a reader’s exercise of narrative agency confined to recent decades? As this article demonstrates, the answer is no. The set of texts wherein the reader fashions parts of the story—particularly the story’s ending—is not time-bound. By providing no ending, such “unended” texts authorize their readers to continue and complete the story. As an exemplar text, Charlotte Brontë’s Villette demonstrates how that novel’s structure—in particular its notorious refusal to end normatively and its baffling narrator/reader relationship—carries cultural significance. By leaving the fate of the heroine’s fiancé to the reader’s imagination, it is Villette ’s structure—not its story—that most strongly communicates the novel’s covert contestation of Victorians’ binary view of “woman” as either happy wife or unhappy spinster.