For Lucy, part of the terror of such an examination seems to lie not only with how the information the gentlemen test her on is, self-admittedly, “knowledge [that] was not there in my head, ready and mellow,” but also the forced publicity of such a test of erudition (Brontë 444). In fact, Lucy goes so far as to characterize an examination with legalistic language, characterizing as a kind of voyeuristic “show-trial” (442) with a masculine jury clearly biased against her from the start: Messieurs Boissec and Rochemorte are “sneering personages … a pair of cold-blooded fops and pedants, sceptics, and scoffers” prior to even when they begin subjecting Lucy to their line of questioning (Brontë 443). From Lucy’s perspective, the cruelty of such a masculine tribunal is not only from the strict line of questioning, but also the aspect of spectacle and public humiliation of which she is unwillingly the subject, as evident from Lucy’s anticipation of the “the torture of the examination” (Brontë 443). In fact, in the scene also emerges a sense of the complicity of those most beloved by Lucy in forcing her on display as a kind of object for public intellectual dissection. Though M. Paul places Lucy on trial due to an unyielding belief in Lucy’s scholastic abilities, he, too, unwittingly plays a role in the violation of Lucy’s integrity and contributing to a system of impudent voyeurism – without Lucy’s consent, “M. Paul had been rashly exhibiting something I [Lucy] had written – something he had never once praised, or even mentioned, in my hearing, and which I deemed forgotten” (Brontë 443). Through Lucy’s intense shame in response to this prying, torturous examination (as the usually stoic Lucy laments in her narration, “I suffered – suffered cruelly”), Brontë suggests the ways in which a masculinized, public system of justice that is often focused more on publicly humiliating a defendant whose guilty has been unfairly predetermined can penetrate into the comparatively more privatized space of the schoolroom to tyrannize and assert intellectual superiority over women, like Lucy, who are rendered literally voiceless before such a system of power – she describes how in response to the mens’ inquisition, “I either could not, or would not speak,” which is a statement that negates her first-person declaration of subjectivity, by pairing herself, the subject, “I” with the negating “not” twice in close proximity(Brontë 443).
Nonetheless, Lucy still manages to subtly and quietly resist this kind of masculine voyeurism cloaked under the seemingly noble intention of gaining “testimony to the truth” – in response to making her the powerless object of public dissection, Lucy turns inwards towards her own subjective relationship with knowledge (Brontë 443). Instead of playing into the dry and scientific terms of the professor’s examination of herself, Lucy reveals her relation to knowledge to be much more maternal and physically intimate. Rather than seeing knowledge as a simply a series of memorized facts to be recited before a disbelieving crowd for their perverse entertainment and sense of righteousness, Lucy enlivens the process of acquiring knowledge, characterizing it in her first-person narration as nurturing and creative process rather than as an anatomical procedure: “But I got books, read up the facts, laboriously constructed a skeleton out of the dry bones of the real, and then clothed the, and tried to breathe into them life, and in this last aim I had pleasure” (Brontë 444). Unlike with her male interrogators, for Lucy, the acquisition is highly subjective and organically humane, requiring a large degree of personal involvement – in colorful and lively metaphor (which again contrasts the dry demands of her interrogators), she describes how “whatever [knowledge] I wanted, I must go out and gather fresh; glean of wild herbs my lap full, and shred them green into the pot” (Brontë 444).
Lucy’s humanistic perspective of knowledge culminates in what she writes on the theme of “‘Human Justice’” as dictated by Professor Rochemorte (Brontë 445). Rather than responding with a purely objective, philosophically obscure essay that reads dry as sandpaper, Lucy puts her own ironized and personified spin on “‘Human Justice.’” Lucy does not present, in her writing, the Platonic ideal, the completely purified form, of “‘Human Justice’” and chooses, instead to put her own juvenalian, embodied, and subject twist on what is ultimately an abstract concept – “‘Human Justice’ rushed before me in novel guise, a red, random beldame with arms akimbo … a swarm of children, sick and quarrelsome, crawled round her feet and yelled in her ears appeals for notice, sympathy, cure, redress. The honest woman cared for none of these things” (Brontë 445). Through having Lucy note the “‘[novelness]’” of her writing, Brontë perhaps even hints at one of the repressed aims of her own creation of her novel, Villette – like her protagonist Lucy, she issues a “novel” prose outpouring of her scathing innermost thoughts towards the various obstacles in her life, often constructed by men, the shared sense that “”If ‘Human Justice’ were what she ought to be, you two [Messieurs Boissec and Rochemorte] would scarce hold your present post, of enjoy your present credit’” (Brontë 445).
Also worth noting is that Lucy’s ironized, personified “‘Human Justice,’”which essentially she throws back in the faces of the Messiers, is feminized, a “beldame with arms akimbo,” an “honest woman,” though her voyeuristic inquisitors are men. Once again, this feminized, domestically abusive image of “‘Human Justice’” perhaps emphasizes the way in which the injustices of public systems of court and legal systems can trickle down into spaces that are traditionally characterized as private, nurturing, and unconditionally compassionate. This trickle down only highlights how a hypocritical form of “‘Human Justice’” has gone so far as to invade, what in the Victorian imagination, is the sacred, domesticized relationship between mother-and-child – this idealized caregiver instead becomes a monstrous punisher and inflicter of undue violence: “whenever a cry of the suffering souls about her pierced her ears too keenly – my jolly dame seized the poker or the hearth-brush” (Brontë 445-446). While Lucy’s subtext decrying cruelty seems to mostly be addressed towards her condescending male examiners, she also notes the complicity of women, like herself, in passing down these cycles of injustice onto fellow women, girls, and children. As such, Lucy’s writing on “‘Human Justice’” despite its particularity in focusing on Lucy’s subjective, personified view of the concept, also hints at a kind of totality, the way in which injustice permeates all levels of human communications and relations within her social milieu.
Works Cited
Brontë, Charlotte. Villette, Penguin, 2004.
Isabella Zhou 
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