A Girl Walks Into a Book

by Miranda K. Pennington

  I taught my first writing class of Columbia University undergraduates not long after reading Villette—having prepared myself by teaching high school creative-writing seminars and workshops for two summers, taking two pedagogy classes, and gaining an appreciation of the essay as a form, coming as it does from the French for “to try.” Exactly one minute before the start of class, I walked in, set down the briefcase I’d brought as a shield, wrote my name on the board, straightened my tailored armor, and turned to face fourteen nervous faces. Greeting a brand-new class is a unique terror. My Aunt Bobbie, a longtime elementary school teacher, only smiles once during the first two weeks so her students will take her seriously. My grandmother was perpetually sharp and short with her fourth graders, but allowed them to eventually earn her respect. Barb always began by posing open-ended questions and passing out articles for us to glance over. Alan Ziegler, my favorite pedagogy teacher, liked to start by pretending he’d forgotten his lesson plan and needed us to get things started. Lucy Snowe commenced her first day as a maîtresse by reading the most disruptive student’s English composition aloud before tearing it contemptuously in half, then speedily locking the class troublemaker in a broom closet.

  But other than that, much of our teaching experience is similar. Lucy Snowe and I both enjoy the feeling of “polishing [our] faculties and whetting them to a keen edge with constant use.” We are no strangers to lying awake trying to decide how best to capture the interest or overcome the resistance of our students. Where Lucy’s students needed to be given easy assignments and then mocked heartily, mine were very sensitive to sarcasm (which is unfortunate, as it is my primary love language) and excessively grade-conscious.

  Three years later, I finally feel confident enough to act like a human being on the first day, instead of a robot. I can admit to making mistakes, to being worried, to failing—and failing hard. I’ve taught Columbia’s overachievers, future medical professionals at a community college who just want to get through the class, high-achieving underprivileged teenagers applying to college, and most Villette-like of all, conservative religious students at an all-girls school. I brought them essays by Mindy Kaling and Jamaica Kincaid to supplement the staid, trite readings they were assigned by the department. I wanted to give them a writer’s toolbox, to give them a sense of agency, a growing understanding of their own process. Many wanted mechanical tricks that would get As instead. We found ways to compromise.

  COMPARED to The Professor, Charlotte’s first attempt to process her experiences in Brussels, we can tell we’re in the hands of a much more accomplished writer in Villette. Where The Professor was snide and spiteful, Villette is more seasoned and deliberate. The quirky, rude, and clever characters don’t seem merely the products of a resentful brain. The passage of time had rendered Charlotte much more judicious toward Constantin Heger’s wife, if the portrayal of Madame Beck as eccentric but powerful is any indication. We also get to know the characters of Villette much more slowly—in Jane Eyre, we grow up with Jane and know her nearly as well as we know ourselves; in Shirley, Narrator-Charlotte tells us exactly who everyone is and what they’re all about. But in Villette, we only see what Lucy sees (which sometimes she doesn’t even describe to us, because Charlotte Brontë is a dreadful tease who loves a plot twist), and we mostly learn about her through the reactions of others. It takes a few successive readings to realize that Lucy is as unreliable as any narrator can be.

  Though Lucy is a quiet sort of person, she is not without passion, which she works hard to subdue. I read Lucy’s determination to repress her more lively instincts as the latest evolution of Charlotte’s feelings about the position of unmarried working-class women in the world. If life is necessarily bound up in service to others, why get excited about anything unsustainable or unachievable? But at the same time, even Lucy’s faculties were not immune to the awakening of childhood excitement—during a thunderstorm, for example, or the annual school theatrical performance—and she wrestles with a longing for something to “lead [her] upwards and onwards.” It’s exactly the same sort of sentiment Jane expressed on the roof of Thornfield, before meeting Mr. Rochester. I cannot stop comparing Lucy and Jane—Lucy Snowe seems like Charlotte’s attempt to work out a more realistic life for Jane Eyre: one where there was no outlet for her feelings, no compassionate listener, where her passion wasn’t rewarded by a fairy-tale ending, only the continual daily struggle to master her nature, which probably much more closely mirrored Charlotte’s actual life experience.

  Lucy finds herself drawn into an intrigue—Madame Beck’s pet physician, Dr. John, is in love with a pensionnat student who is a profligate flirt. He enlists Lucy’s help to “protect” the delicate object of his affections, who turns out to be the unrepentant Ginevra Fanshawe. Life at the pensionnat is next enlivened by a fête for Madame Beck’s birthday featuring a celebration along with a play performed by the students, which is directed by M. Paul Emanuel.

  Let me just remind you of how Charlotte described Constantin Heger in a letter to Ellen Nussey:

  He is professor of Rhetoric a man of power but as to mind very choleric & irritable in temperament—a little, black, ugly being with a face that varies in expression, sometimes he borrows the lineaments of an insane Tom-cat—sometimes those of a delirious Hyena—occasionally—but very seldom he discards these perilous attractions and assumes an air not above a hundred degrees removed from what you would call mild & gentleman-like… 2

  And now, M. Paul Emanuel:

  A dark little man he certainly was; pungent and austere. Even to me he seemed a harsh apparition, with his close-shorn, black head, his broad, sallow brow, his thin cheek, his wide and quivering nostril, his thorough glance, and hurried bearing. Irritable he was; one heard that, as he apostrophized with vehemence the awkward squad under his orders.3

  Just try to tell me the Brontës didn’t write from life, after that. Finally, I thought, repulsed, a Brontë narrative that won’t make me fall in love.

  Charlotte wrote Villette at a time when she felt utterly alone in the world; she had achieved the literary success she’d dreamt of as a child, but I doubt she ever imagined she’d be enjoying fame by herself. After the deaths of her siblings, and the publication of Shirley, Charlotte began to cautiously enjoy her newfound access to London’s literary scene. She visited George Smith several times between 1851 and 1853, and was introduced to William Makepeace Thackeray, to Harriet Martineau, to Elizabeth Gaskell, to roomfuls of people, eager to know her. And though she found herself lonely and depressed whenever she landed back in quiet, isolated Haworth, she was never really able to navigate the London society world comfortably. She might be a spitfire on paper, but in person she wanted to be accepted as a lady. She was shy and easily exhausted; London’s constant pressure to see and be seen, speak and be spoken to, wore on her introverted disposition.

  While it’s tempting for me to wish she’d had a different response, if she’d spent more time in town her letters would all be of the terse, logistical variety. We’d have no record of her silliness with George Smith, her thoughtful literary exchanges with W. S. Williams, or her first meeting with Thackeray in 1850, of which she wrote to Ellen,

  He made a morning-call and sat above two hours—Mr Smith only was in the room the whole time. He described it afterwards as a queer scene, and I suppose it was. The giant sat before me—I was moved to speak to him of some of his short-comings (literary of course) one by one the faults came into my mind and one by one I brought them out and sought some explanation or defence—He did defend himself like a great Turk and heathen—that is to say, the excuses were often worse than the crime itself. The matter ended in decent amity—if all be well I am to dine at his house this evening.4

  For all her protestations of being shy and retiring, she voluntarily chastised one of the reigning great novelists and got invited to his house for dinner afterward. Thackeray’s daughter later wrote of seeing Miss Brontë there—she reported that Charlotte was retiring and
taken aback when asked a question in front of the whole party.

  Back home in Haworth, Charlotte continued to isolate herself, turning down invitations from old friends and new ones, berating herself for not producing new work. After George Henry Lewes gave Jane Eyre a strong review, Charlotte wrote to thank him, and they corresponded briefly. She wrote him,

  Let it suffice to answer that I am on the worst terms with myself—alternating between a lively indignation and a brooding contempt, and that if anybody would take out a patent for a new invention enabling distressed authors to command their mood and to compel to obedience their refractory faculties—I should regard that individual as the first benefactor of his race.5

  W. S. Williams had the best strategy for dealing with Charlotte in a recalcitrant, self-pitying mode—he would send her a box of books from Cornhill and then ask her opinion; it passed the time, engaged her mind, and, best of all, populated her letters with thoughtful, brusque literary criticism. She ruminated on the appeal of Honoré de Balzac and wrote of George Sand approvingly, and for a while writing seemed to come more easily afterward. What she needed most, though, was her sisters, restored to health, and her brother, restored to sanity. And there was no hope of regaining them. If Jane Eyre’s overriding theme is Love, and Shirley’s is Independence, Villette is driven by the Search for Family. Charlotte took her intelligent but isolated heroine, set her adrift, and went about making her a new family from scratch.

  Still, while I’m sympathetic to Charlotte, who clearly found intense social interactions as bewildering and exhausting as I do, I’m also a bit frustrated with her for not taking her life into her own hands once she had the freedom to do so. She could have set up her own house in London and only visited with people she felt like seeing, thus assuring herself “something like social cheerfulness” and also protecting her introverted sensibilities. But she wouldn’t leave her father behind—Patrick Brontë’s happiness and comfort were ultimately her highest priority, even though a consequence of keeping him company was that her own life became very small.

  As it would be with any friend, it’s hard to hear from Charlotte when she’s so depressed. And again, my frustration likely stems from the fact that the weighty feeling of not being able to get out of bed, put pen to paper (or fingers to keys), is a familiar one—I’ve dealt with chronic bouts of depression since I was a teenager. I dealt with it as I read Villette. The world had become a heavy and cheerless place, no matter what sunlit reality actually existed. When I’m depressed, my brain tells vicious lies that demoralize and discourage me, sapping value and vitality out of everything. Even though I was in grad school meeting exciting people and taking classes that lit little fires all over my imagination, the world was bleak. I was living in a city thousands dream of visiting, and I was wasting it, day after day, feeling like the walls were crumbling thanks to the confluence of brain chemistry and heartache.

  Meanwhile, in Villette, after all the students and professors depart for their summer vacations, Lucy is left alone at the pensionnat with only a handful of servants. She finds both the lack of occupation and the isolation painful, but at last begins to explore Villette and the surrounding countryside. One afternoon, in particularly low spirits, Lucy finds herself drawn inside a Catholic church. As she kneels with the congregation, something compels her to take confession (as Charlotte did at her lowest, loneliest point in Brussels).

  The simple act of pouring her heart out to the French priest relieves some of Lucy’s heaviness, but then she actually faints from the distress of the experience. When she comes to, she’s confused to find elements of her godmother’s home around her. Now the importance of the opening chapters becomes clear—Dr. John is John Graham Bretton, son of Lucy’s godmother, and it’s a small world after all. Now we learn that Lucy has known for several chapters who Dr. John really is—she just didn’t bother to remind him (or us!) that they’d met.

  The Brettons take Lucy to a concert; when Dr. John returns her to the pensionnat and promises to write, she is flooded with eagerness to hear from him—her childhood friendship has been transformed to tenderer feelings as she’s watched him around the pensionnat for the past few months. Fortunately, Reason is there to give her a talking-to:

  Reason still whispered me, laying on my shoulder a withered hand, and frostily touching my ear with the chill blue lips of eld.

  “If,” muttered she, “if he should write, what then? Do you meditate pleasure in replying? Ah, fool! I warn you! Brief be your answer. Hope no delight of heart—no indulgence of intellect: grant no expansion to feeling—give holiday to no single faculty: dally with no friendly exchange: foster no genial intercommunion…”

  “But I have talked to Graham and you did not chide,” I pleaded.

  “No,” said she, “I needed not. Talk for you is good discipline. You converse imperfectly. While you speak, there can be no oblivion of inferiority—no encouragement to delusion: pain, privation, penury stamp your language.”

  “But,” I again broke in, “where the bodily presence is weak and the speech contemptible, surely there cannot be error in making written language the medium of better utterance than faltering lips can achieve?”

  Reason only answered, “At your peril you cherish that idea, or suffer its influence to animate any writing of yours!”

  “But if I feel, may I never express?”

  “Never!” declared Reason.6

  Essentially, Lucy hoped to become more appealing to Dr. John by writing more eloquently than she speaks, much like I used text and email to conceal the depth of my unhappiness. Where was Reason with her tough love when I was making written language the medium for my faltering lips to better their utterance, hmm? Nowhere. If I’d had Reason making threats at my elbow, instead of a little voice saying, “This is a great idea!,” I wouldn’t have given in to the temptation of sending Eric the occasional faux work email, or worse, an “I miss you” text in response to his “Thinking of you.” I’d attempted to convince myself he had never really thought of me as relationship material—as a pleasant rebound, a quick fall fling—but never with the intensity I’d felt for him. Regardless of whether it was true, it was necessary for self-preservation.

  On another visit to the theater, Dr. John and Lucy are thrown back into the orbit of the Home family from the first chapter—little Polly (now seventeen and quite grown up) and her father—who are now known as the de Bassompierres, and, twist, are also Ginevra Fanshawe’s wealthy relations. Dr. John, freed from Ginevra’s ensnarement, finds himself falling in love with Polly. For a few chapters it seems like we’re supposed to get invested in their love story—Lucy shrugs off her feelings for Dr. John and positions herself as a sisterly adviser, knowing that he and Polly, both good-looking and young, are meant to be happy together.

  Still, something else is going on. Like Lucy herself, I had not thought much about M. Paul Emanuel at all after our first introduction. He’s depicted as a “bitter little despot,” and Ginevra calls him bearish, meddling, and repellent. But now he begins to come into focus. He’s been making enigmatical overtures of friendship to Lucy, addressing her as “little sister” and seeking her out in private moments. At first Lucy finds herself caught between the enjoyment of teasing him and being irritated by his “spiteful, acrid, savage” ways when provoked. During an evening in the common study area, he takes a seat near her, interrupting her reading:

  He asked, by-and-by, if I would not rather run to my companions than sit there? I said, no; I felt content to be where he was.… Again, he inquired whether, if he were to leave Villette, and go far away, I should be sorry…

  “Petite soeur,” said he; “how long could you remember me if we were separated?”

  “That, Monsieur, I can never tell, because I do not know how long it will be before I shall cease to remember everything earthly.”

  “If I were to go beyond seas for two—three—five years, should you welcome me on my return?”*

  “Monsieur, how could I
live in the interval?”7

  Would it shock you to learn M. Paul has a tragic backstory of thwarted love, and is secretly a good, charitable, and warmhearted man? M. Paul may be more a resident of Brussels than a descendent of Zamorna, but this scene is Jane’s and Rochester’s with the intensity dialed down. Charlotte chose the last name “Snowe” deliberately—she wanted a frosty, chilly protagonist, Jane’s opposite. But all it took to awaken her long-repressed inner fire was learning more about M. Paul; Lucy is suddenly all too aware of his virtues and his strength of character. He’s the type of man who provides for elderly family members and paupers, and the pensionnat’s little dog loves him best. She bemoans the fact to herself, “Forget him? Ah! they took a sage plan to make me forget him.… They showed me how good he was; they made of my dear little man a stainless little hero.”

  Charlotte, provoking woman that she is, also reveals to us that M. Emanuel has been in the habit of going through Lucy’s desk and leaving behind bonbons and books (occasionally defaced by the removal of particularly heretical pages). Unlike in Jane Eyre, where the burgeoning romance is signaled by everything short of a song-and-dance number, M. Paul’s passion for Lucy is nearly impossible to detect, even once you know the man better. Just as in Shirley, there has been a whole thing going on here right under our noses that another writer would have made the meat and potatoes of her story, but Miss Brontë didn’t even see fit to serve us outright. Lucy could not be a less reliable narrator if she went on vacation in the middle of the novel and neglected to show up for work the next day:

  M. Emanuel had been very kind to me of late days; he had been growing hourly better and kinder. It was now a month since we had settled the theological difference,* and in all that time there had been no quarrel.… [H]e had come oftener, he had talked with me more than before; he had spent hours with me, with temper soothed, with eye content, with manner home-like and mild. Kind subjects of conversation had grown between us; he had inquired into my plans of life, and I had communicated them.… [T]he mutual understanding was settling and fixing; feelings of union and hope made themselves profoundly felt in the heart; affection and deep esteem and dawning trust had each fastened its bond.8