Ability

IN Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853), our narrator Lucy Snowe, an English teacher in a Belgian boarding school, is forced to spend a twomonth vacation at her workplace caring for a student with severe disabilities: “the house was left quite empty, but for me, a servant, and a poor deformed and imbecile pupil, a sort of crétin, whom her stepmother in a distant province would not allow to return home.” This description is faintly compassionate, figuring the student as innocent victim within a fairy tale. Exiled byawicked stepmother, the student is, like Lucy, bereft of family and friends. Lucy continues calmly, “The crétin did not seem unhappy. I did my best to feed her well and keep her warm, and she only asked food and sunshine, or when that lacked, fire.” But, as Paul Marchbanks points out, Lucy’s tone abruptly shifts after Lucy describes a bout with psychic anguish. During this episode, an older female relative of the student appears: “It was some relief when an aunt of the crétin, a kind old woman, came one day, and took away my strange deformed companion.” Now that the student has beenenfolded in a kinship relation, she becomes the object of the narrator’s revulsion: “Thehapless creature had been at times a heavy charge . . . I could not leave her a minute alone: for her poor mind, like her body, was warped: its propensity was to evil. A vague bent to mischief, an aimless malevolence, made constant vigilance indispensable.” Lucy endows the student with an intent to harm, an intent that she interprets as random (because what would itmean to imagine that the student wants to harmher for a particular reason?). This shift is followed by yet another that deprives the student of even this immoral agency, rendering her animal: “As she very rarely spoke, andwould sit forhours togethermoping andmowing, anddistortingher features with indescribable grimaces, it wasmore like being prisoned with some strange tameless animal, than associating with a human being.” Lucy concludes by referring to the revolting bodily care she was inappropriately assigned: “These duties should not have fallen onme; a servant, now absent, had rendered them hitherto.” This passage brings up several tensions surrounding the term “ability.” Certainly, Lucy’s ability—economically, physically, intellectually, morally, and narratively—depends upon the positing of subjects with lesser ability around her. But are there other ways to think about ability