Villette summons up the uncanny in its very first sentences. Whereas in Jane Eyre we readers get background information on how Jane became a dependent orphan, Villette volunteers no such biographical detail on Lucy Snowe. Like Kaspar Hauser, she’s just there—a child who’s profoundly alone because she seems self-created. This tale of extreme emotional deprivation proceeds with the inevitability of a nightmare. As I mentioned earlier, the teenaged Lucy takes a job as a companion to an elderly woman. After Miss Marchmont dies, Lucy is forced again to shift for herself and winds up as an English teacher/governess at a girl’s boarding school in the mythical city of Villette. The school is run by the autocratic and sinister Madame Beck, who spies on her charges and her staff. Such is the “intimacy” the world of Villette offers Lucy.
The section of the novel that I want to anoint as the ultimate, the Olympian, the sine qua non of women’s rough expeditions into the dark interior realms of the self occurs in the very last chapter of Volume 1, when Lucy is left behind at the school while everyone else, students and teachers, takes off for “The Long Vacation.” Well, not completely alone. A servant is in shadowy residence, and Lucy has the care of “a poor deformed and imbecile pupil, a sort of crétin whom her stepmother in a distant province would not allow to return home.”19 The cretin is mute and her bodily needs nauseate Lucy (“there were personal attentions to be rendered which required the nerve of a hospital nurse; my resolution was so tried, it sometimes fell dead-sick”20). But even this poor soul turns out to have an aunt, a “kind old woman” 21 who shows up and takes her away for the remainder of the vacation. Critics have discussed the cretin as a kind of horrific double for Lucy, much as the apparition of a nun who roams the school also represents a mirror image of her aloneness. Lucy regards her as barely human, but once she’s gone, Lucy is entirely cast out of proximity to other breathing bodies.
That’s when she has a breakdown the depths of which twentieth-century literary “madwomen” like Sylvia Plath’s Esther Greenwood in The Bell Jar and Elizabeth Wurtzel in Prozac Nation only prosaically skim. While wandering restlessly around the city of Villette, Lucy tortures herself by imagining the vacation gaiety her colleagues and students are enjoying. Inevitably, her health breaks down: “a day and night of peculiarly agonizing depression were succeeded by physical illness. ”22 Sleep eludes Lucy as she’s marooned in her single bed in a long dormitory room, whose white-sheeted cots look like “specters.”23 When sleep finally does come, it comes “in anger”24—with gruesome dreams that wring “my whole frame with unknown anguish; to confer a nameless experience that had the hue, the mien, the terror, the very tone of a visitation from eternity.”25 The descriptions in this section are as superheated as if Brontë were describing a military battle—a psychic “Charge of the Light Brigade” in which Lucy’s sanity struggles to withstand an onslaught of self-generated horrors:
Quite unendurable was the pitiless and haughty voice in which Death challenged me to engage his unknown terrors. When I tried to pray I could only utter these words:—
“From my youth up Thy terrors have I suffered with a troubled mind.”
Most true was it.26
The turning point of this terrible contest with solitude comes when Lucy, “weak and shaking,”27 dresses herself and desperately staggers out of the school, which she now thinks of as a prehistoric cairn, crushing her flailing body beneath it. She deliriously reasons that she can escape the “insufferable thought of being no more loved, no more owned” 28 if she can walk outside the city and reach one of the surrounding hill-tops where she can breathe more freely. Along the way, she stops in a Roman Catholic church, where she seeks the comfort of human communication by entering a confessional and blurting out her torments to a priest. In her paranoid state, Lucy interprets the priest’s sympathetic interest in her as a Romanist ploy to capture her Protestant soul, and she inwardly shudders as he makes an appointment to meet at his rectory the following morning. (“As soon should I have thought of walking into a Babylonish furnace.”) 29 Then Lucy strays into an old, unfamiliar part of the city, gets lost within its “network of turns unknown,”30 and lacks the nerve to ask directions of the strangers she passes. A furious storm breaks, bringing with it torrents of rain like sea spray. “The Long Vacation” concludes with a description of that storm, in which Lucy loses her struggle to, in the famous words of E. M. Forster, “only connect”: “I suddenly felt colder where before I was cold, and more powerless where before I was weak. I tried to reach the porch of a great building near, but the mass of frontage and the giant-spire turned black and vanished from my eyes. Instead of sinking on the steps as I intended, I seemed to pitch headlong down an abyss. I remember no more.” 31
This is the first of the two “perfect storms” in the novel; the second occurs on its very last, cryptic pages, when the ship carrying Lucy’s intended, Paul Emanuel, is lost in a storm of biblical dimensions that “roared frenzied for seven days.”32 In this first tempest, it’s Lucy herself who goes overboard—as does the language of this entire “Long Vacation” chapter. We’re told, in the first paragraphs of Volume 2, that Lucy, through a supreme effort, returns to life, although, like Jane Eyre in her earlier “outward bound” adventure, Lucy is typically ladylike in her reluctance to go into boastful detail about her struggle. (“Where my soul went during that swoon I cannot tell.” 33) The intense physical and mental pain generated by Lucy’s reentrance into the material world is curtly but vividly described in a few short sentences: “The returning sense of sight came upon me, red, as if it swam in blood; suspended hearing rushed back loud, like thunder; consciousness revived in fear: I sat up appalled, wondering into what region, amongst what strange beings I was waking.”34
Many critics have commented on the eerie “proleptic” voice of Villette’s narrator—the voice (also heard in some of Emily Dickinson’s sepulchral poems such as “Because I Could Not Stop for Death”) of someone speaking from beyond the grave. The loss of Paul Emanuel in the second storm finishes Lucy off, so that by the time she begins her retrospective tale, she is a dead woman talking. To fight her way back once from the underworld of the unloved, the solitary, the inconsequential, demanded a superhuman effort. The novel ends where it does because Lucy simply can’t summon the will or the strength to fight her way back twice. I said earlier that Charlotte Brontë’s serious and intelligent heroines almost seem to have no skin—so sensitive is their acuity, so raw and vulnerable are they in a fictional world populated by the self-interested and the cold-blooded. But thinking of skin metaphors makes me think of the incredible phrase Toni Morrison used to describe the existential solitude of her ghostly heroine in Beloved. On the penultimate page of that magnificent historical novel/female extreme-adventure story (which, like Jane Eyre, is distinguished by the fact that it subjects its heroine to both physical and emotional ordeals), Morrison says of Beloved that her “loneliness [was] wrapped tight like skin.”35 Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe also endure a loneliness “wrapped tight like skin”; in Lucy’s case, those bindings constrict her to the point of strangulation.
We read literature for a lot of reasons, but two of the most compelling ones are to get out of ourselves and our own life stories and—equally important—to find ourselves by understanding our own life stories more clearly in the context of others’. Thinking about this “shadow genre” of female extreme-adventure tales made me realize that for roughly five years, from the time I turned thirty-nine to the age of forty-three, I had been living what constituted a classic prefeminist extreme-adventure narrative. Call Part 1 of it “The Infertility Saga.” When my husband, Rich, and I decided that some high-tech medical intervention might be needed in order to help us attain our much desired goal of being parents, we entered the anxious and costly world of the clinically infertile. For the next few years we both went through painful surgical procedures and, subsequently, endured the monthly roller-coaster ride of Metrodin shots—a drug that promotes hyperovulation and that, as one forthrigh
t article I’d read about the treatment warned, makes your ovaries feel like bowling balls. Once a month I willed myself to be in a serene state of mind as the artificial-insemination ritual took place in my doctor’s office. Then Rich and I waited. We waited much as Elizabeth Bennet waits in that drawing room for Darcy to choose her. We waited to know our fate—would this be the month we’d have a chance to become parents, or not? Three times I became pregnant, and three times I had early miscarriages. Each time, after a lull, the whole tense drama would start up again.
The isolation of an infertility ordeal is not anywhere near as awful as the ordeals of many women who’ve lost children after birth or after adoptions have fallen through. (Ruth Reichl’s Comfort Me with Apples, the sequel to her first, wonderful memoir, Tender at the Bone, contains just such a horror story.) Nor did I go through anything close to the different kinds of extreme-adventure ordeals endured by Lucy Snowe or Jane Eyre. After all, I had a loving partner to hold on to during the bleakest days, and friends, and even a compassionate, talkative doctor. I also had work that I loved and that gave me a sense of control—I often “put myself back together” after setbacks during this time by writing reviews or teaching classes. But the fact that the drama of infertility—as well as pregnancy and miscarriage—was played out within the darkness of my own body gave an isolated quality to the whole experience. Every week I lectured to classes and recorded reviews, and nobody, outside of a few intimates and medical professionals, knew what was happening. It’s not the kind of extreme adventure you share with people.
I’d call Part 2 of my traditional female extreme adventure “The Adoption Saga.” More sad and anxious waiting, more feelings of powerlessness and confusion as both Rich and I felt that forces outside our control held our lives in the balance. But this time there was an unimaginably happy ending. Sometime in the winter of 1998, we decided that we would try to adopt a baby from China. My dad had passed away by then; my mother’s response when we told her of our decision was a howl of disbelief: “China! And what is that baby going to think when she grows up!” (“Well, she’ll probably be as embarrassed by us as most kids are, at least temporarily, of their parents,” I thought to myself. Admittedly, as parent material, Rich and I are on the oldish, oddish side but not as grotesque as some parents we’ve met.) To her credit, my mother later gave us money toward the adoption. All the while worrying. After all, I was, once again, doing such a strange thing by the standards of the world I’d grown up in.
By the time I’d committed to the adoption idea, I was used to worrying, disapproval, and sadness. Rich and I had gone through all those years of infertility treatments. After my third miscarriage, I proposed adoption. Rich hesitated. Then he proposed adoption from China. I hesitated. I’d read Pearl Buck, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Amy Tan. For some reason I now forget (probably to sneer at godless communism), I’d also read Mao’s Little Red Book in the world-history class I’d taken in Catholic high school. I knew how to ask for “hot water” in Mandarin because the father of my lifelong friend Mary Ellen Maher had served in the Air Force in China during World War II and he’d taught us neighborhood kids some phrases. Growing up in Queens, I’d never heard of anyone venturing into New York’s Chinatown for dinner; we all stayed close to home with the Sun Luck Sunnyside on Queens Boulevard, where chicken chow mein and pepper steak were the standard fare. As an adult, I thought myself something of a minor gourmand for ordering mu shu chicken and hot-and-sour soup at Chinese restaurants. That’s it. I had just one Chinese American friend, and I knew embarrassingly little (beyond the big names like Sun Yatsen and Mao, of course) about Chinese politics and culture. What a perfect candidate to be the mother of a Chinese baby! But throughout the years I’d been teaching, I had loved and disliked students of all races, ethnic backgrounds, and income brackets. That experience, together with the wider experience that reading had given me—of feeling at ease in other worlds, other lives—gave me the necessary psychic shove to say yes to adopting a baby from China.
Rich and I arrived at the mutual decision to adopt after going to countless information sessions held by adoption organizations and local agencies. Since neither of us are joiners, these meetings were usually an ordeal. Many nights we would rush home from work, drive out to some chilly church basement in Virginia, affix our name tags, and introduce ourselves. “I’m Fred Jones, and this is my wife, Patty.” Adoptionville, as we first found it, seemed to be a suburb of Normative World: everyone was married, with the wife absorbed under the husband’s last name; almost everyone was white; and they all “appeared” to be Republican and Christian—the way Rich “appeared” to be a Jewish leftist. “What agency do the lesbian Zoroastrian socialists use?” I remember Rich asking one night as we got lost driving home from yet another bleak Virginia suburb. Whichever one it is, we never found it. We listened to social workers and parents talk about the process in speeches heavy on extraneous detail. Most people don’t know how to talk in front of other people (keep it short and entertaining; don’t proselytize). We were a captive audience for those folks who preached against abortion rights as they framed the adoption of their children in conservative religious terms. One night we listened (for hours?) to a friendly guy in a Promise Keepers T-shirt give us an endless blow-by-blow account of adopting his son from Russia. The whole time he spoke, his wife sat by his side; she didn’t open her mouth once. At an “open house” held by one adoption agency we considered, the director, who was dressed in a Teddy bear sweater, promised us yearning parents-to-be that she would find for us all “the children we should have had.” She described how she searched for—and found!—a musically inclined toddler in a Russian orphanage who was “the perfect fit” for his guitar-playing adoptive father. Ordinarily, Rich and I tried to be on good behavior at these meetings; we were, after all, attempting to present ourselves as sturdy parent material. But at this particularly daffy meeting I couldn’t restrain myself. “A biological child doesn’t necessarily have the same looks or tastes or talents as her parents,” I commented, thinking of my own mother’s aversion to reading. “YES it does!” declared the director, who then pinned me down with her eyes for the next ten minutes as she described in disturbing detail the other “perfect fits” she had engineered. Rich and I snuck out at the bathroom break.
We chose the adoption agency we did because it was the only one that didn’t present a Hallmark-card image of parenthood by adoption. The social worker who spoke at that open house mentioned that a baby recently brought home from China was diagnosed with hepatitis B. Ironically, that confession of “imperfection” reassured us. After all, parenthood is a crapshoot. Why should adopted kids have to be perfect or any more immune from disease, learning disabilities, or personality problems than biological kids? Even at that relatively sensible meeting, though, the treacle seeped in. Wrapping up the (always endlessly meandering) question-and-answer period, the social worker wheeled out a VCR and said: “I want to show you a video and play you a song one of our adoptive fathers wrote.” What followed was a four-hundred-hour film of Happy Adoptive Families cavorting under Christmas trees accompanied by a soundtrack of this well-meaning Kenny Loggins imitator warbling a ballad. “I had no one, then I found you, son . . .” Film and song finally ended and the lights went up. People in the audience were audibly sniffling—which I understood, because everyone in that room had, like us, been through the wringer of infertility. Then Rich— who, like Jane Austen, handles fear and anxiety through comedy— piped up: “I guess being a terrible musician doesn’t preclude you from being an adoptive father.” Nobody but me laughed; the social worker looked confused. We called and signed on with that agency the next day, hoping the social worker hadn’t been able to read our name tags.
I sound cynical, but you try sitting, hungry and tired, for hours on a folding chair as some stranger—uninvited—makes you listen to his songs or imparts to you her Philosophy of Life, or gives you a detailed travelogue of his trip to Vladivostock. And all the while you’r
e stuck there, an anxious voice—your own—is whispering in your head: “It will never happen. I’ll never be anybody’s mother. This effort will end as the fallopian-tube test, the laparoscopy, the shots, and the sonograms did. With no baby.” Later, talking with the women in our adoption travel group, I sensed that few of them had really believed in their heart of hearts that the longed-for baby would ever materialize. One of those women had had five miscarriages; another, who mysteriously dropped out of the group before we left for China, had lost a baby shortly after birth. All the time Rich and I were in China, I continued to worry, in a low-level way, that someone would take my new daughter away from me. When you’ve been through all the loss that most people suffer in order to reach the decision to adopt, you armor yourself in doubt.
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