Critics’ responses to Villette and to its odd heroine varied widely. George Eliot read the book three times and thought it a masterpiece. The Literary Gazette found the story “infinitely delightful” and a worthy addition to Brontë’s growing oeuvre, remarking, “This book would have made her famous, had she not been so already. It retrieves all the ground she lost in Shirley and will engage a wider circle of admirers than Jane Eyre” (quoted in Barker, The Brontës, p. 718). Yet several readers, including Brontë’s friend Harriet Martineau, found the story’s passionate content troubling and Lucy’s conflicting desires dangerous. The provocative content of the novel led to unsettling comparisons between the heroine and her author. Martineau wrote, “The book is almost intolerably painful ... so incessant is the writer’s tendency to describe the need of being loved, that the heroine, who tells her own story, leaves the reader at last under the uncomfortable impression of having either entertained a double love, or allowed one to supercede another without notification of the transition” (Barker, p. 719).
William Thackeray shared Martineau’s public opinion about the impropriety of the two romances in the novel. In his private remarks on Villette he made no distinction between Lucy Snowe’s experience and Bronte’s, deliberately blurring the boundaries between the author and her fictional creation and declaring, “it amuses me to read the author’s naive confession of being in love with two men at the same time.... The poor little woman of genius! The fiery little eager brave tremulous homely faced creature!” (Barker, p. 719).
Written between January 1850 and the end of 1852, Villette is riddled with allusions to Brontë’s past. The town of Villette and the school where Lucy teaches are thought to be based on Brontë’s own tenure at the Pensionnat Héger in Brussels, where she developed a passion for the brilliant and unpredictable Monsieur Héger, the school’s principal. Héger is the model for Paul Emmanuel, Lucy’s second and more successful suitor in the novel. Lucy’s other love interest in the book, Dr. John Graham Bretton, is a double for Brontë’s publisher, George Smith. The disappointment of the courtship between Lucy and Dr. John in the novel mirrors Brontë’s failed romance with Smith, who ended up marrying a younger and prettier woman.
While she was composing Villette, Brontë took several trips to London. With George Smith often by her side, she attended parties, lectures, and the theater, and visited art galleries and portrait studios. In 1850 he persuaded Brontë to have two portraits done. The first, a chalk drawing by George Richmond, captures Brontë’s large, lovely eyes, and re-imagines her broad features to create a flattering image that Brontë remarked looked more like her sister Anne. The other is a rare daguerreotype, an early photograph that displays Brontë’s strong, plain features, her dark hair gathered into a neat bun, her lips barely hinting at a smile.
The haunting sensibility of Villette is related to Brontë’s experience of loss, both in her romantic life and within her family. Her brother, Branwell, died in 1848; Emily and Anne were gone by the summer of 1849. In September 1850, while she was writing the first sections of Villette, Brontë composed a biographical notice to justify the lives and works of her beloved sisters. She offered a sobering conclusion: “I may sum up all by saying, that for strangers they were nothing, for superficial observers less than nothing; but for those who had known them all their lives in the intimacy of close relationship, they were genuinely good and truly great” (Brontë, “Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell”; the essay appears in many editions of novels by the Brontës, including Wuthering Heights, New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2004).
In her descriptions of the simple lives and tragic early deaths of Emily and Anne, “two unobtrusive women” whose “perfectly secluded life gave them retiring manners and habits,” she begins to outline some of the most salient characteristics of the complex and difficult heroine of Villette. Brontë described her sister Emily as a unique and untamed presence: Under Emily’s “unpretending outside, lay a secret power and fire that might have informed the brain and kindled the veins of a hero.” The more demure Anne was “long-suffering, self-denying, reflective, and intelligent, a constitutional reserve and taciturnity placed and kept her in the shade, and covered her mind, and especially her feelings, with a sort of nun-like veil, which was rarely lifted.”
Lucy’s combination of inner passion and outer reserve, repressive self-denial and deliberate strength, bitter resentment and outward goodness echoes qualities of both sisters. Lucy’s greatest attraction is her lively, intense, and unpredictable imagination; yet she is always checked by her “constitutional reserve,” the nun-like veil that hides her feelings, and her stringent sense of rationality. (The phantom-nun character that seems to appear in the novel at moments when Lucy is the most vulnerable is perhaps an ironic commentary on Lucy’s desire to bury her true desires.) Brontë’s acknowledgment that Emily and Anne were nothing to strangers, to superficial observers “less than nothing,” articulates a central paradox of the novel and of her unique position at the time the book was being conceived: How can a nineteenth-century woman be visible and invisible at the same time? Is the price of being somebody worth losing the safety of remaining a nobody?
Unlike the straightforward narratives of Brontë’s earlier novels, particularly Jane Eyre, Villette is at times deliberately difficult to follow. With its mix of literary genres, the dizzying array of characters who appear, disappear, and appear again with different names, and a narrator who resists disclosure at the same moment that she is telling the story, the novel is a hall of mirrors, a descent into an uncanny world of deceptions and ambiguities. Throughout the book Brontë suggests that what you see is not always real, and that what you believe is imagined has its own haunting reality.
Lucy is narrating the story from her recollections of a distant past; she is the central actress in the novel, but also the novel’s principal ghost. As she tells us, “I speak of a time gone by: my hair which till a late period withstood the frosts of time, lies now, at last white, under a white cap, like snow beneath snow” (p. 50). This is one of the few moments in the novel when Lucy refers to her present self. What we see is her past persona, the young Lucy coming of age, falling in love, bitterly disappointed and then finding romance again with a more appropriate and less conventional suitor. The narrative is an extended memory, and like all memories it is told through a series of emotions that have already occurred. Brontë captures this sense of doubleness, of existing in both the present and the past, through Lucy’s embodied and spectral personas. In imagining a heroine who remains ghostly and inaccessible, Brontë thwarts a strategy of reading that assumes complete knowledge and mastery. We cannot fully see and understand Lucy Snowe, in the same way that we will never be able to gain access to the real Charlotte Brontë.
The first scenes of Villette take place at Lucy’s godmother’s house, where she is a frequent guest. There is no quick summary of her background or childhood; instead we are introduced to Polly Home, the small, doll-like child who will be the focus of the beginning of the novel and will later return to become one of the central female characters in the book. Lucy’s role as narrator/spectator, the ambiguous figure in the room with no established place or remarkable qualities, contrasts sharply with the theatrical presence of the young Polly, who demands constant attention. Unlike the opening of Jane Eyre, when Jane is forced to endure the cruelty of her ruthless relatives, Lucy is an accepted figure in the Bretton household. Lucy’s motivations and passions are less clearly defined than Jane’s enraged outbursts and steely silences. We hear very little about how Lucy feels in this domestic situation where she is both wanted and ignored. She becomes a kind of mothering figure for Polly, whose own mother, “a very pretty, but a giddy, careless woman” (p. 9), had abandoned her. Polly is dealing with her father’s absence and her newfound love, Mrs. Bretton’s son Graham.
Lucy watches as Polly transfers her attachment from her father to an obsession with the young Bretton:
With curious re
adiness did she adapt herself to such themes as interested him. One would have thought the child had no mind or life of her own, but must necessarily live, move, and have her being in another: now that her father was taken from her, she nestled to Graham, and seemed to feel by his feelings: to exist in his existence. She learned the names of all his schoolfellows in a trice; she got by heart their characters as given from his lips: a single description of an individual seemed to suffice. She never forgot or confused identities: she would talk with him the whole evening about people she had never seen, and appear completely to realize their aspect, manners, and dispositions (pp. 28-29).
Brontë seems to be juxtaposing Polly’s visible development with Lucy’s invisible adolescence. Throughout these early chapters she hints that there is something haunting and perverse about Polly’s unquestioning faith in the passive, debilitating sacrifices of being female. Polly is described as an object, “a mere doll; her neck, delicate as wax” (p. 11), and as a spirit, “a small ghost gliding over the carpet” (p. 38), and as “some precocious fanatic or untimely saint” (p. 15). Polly’s function as a doll, a picture, and a wax figure suggests that she is a fixed and static representation of femininity. Her saintly, ghost-like qualities are manifestations of her manic, almost religious dedication to the process of becoming a woman. When she sits embroidering with her needle, a “perverse weapon,” she remains “silent, diligent, absorbed, womanly” (p. 19). Polly’s devotion to Graham, which involves memorization, mimicry, undivided focus, and a complete immersion of her identity with his, is a kind of primer for the expectations of a good wife. Polly is in the process of materializing—the reader has the sense of who she will become even at six years old—but, we seem to be led to ask, what will become of Lucy?
Polly’s attentions delight Graham, who admits to his mother, “she amuses me a great deal more than you or Lucy Snowe” (p. 31). When he neglects her and she turns to Lucy for comfort, Lucy worries about Polly’s ability to bear such disappointments: “How will she get through this world, or battle with this life? How will she bear the shocks and repulses, the humiliations and desolations, which books, and my own reason tell me are prepared for all flesh?” (p. 38). This is the question that will also haunt Lucy, but in comparison to Polly it seems clear that Lucy will have a different fate because of the invisibility she so closely covets and safeguards. No one seems to notice her, but she also appears not to care.
The early section of the novel sets up a series of images and scenes for the reader, a framework of clues that will be crucially important to understanding events later in the narrative. Polly and Graham will reappear in adult guises, but their childhood selves will be present in their interactions and desires. Because we know so little about Lucy’s feelings at this point in the novel, we do not have the same kind of material to use in mapping her development. Her past remains ambiguous, and we are forced to rely on the narrative of the present as it unfolds to follow Lucy’s interior journey. Here Brontë juxtaposes two models of reading: One echoes the conventions of the nineteenth-century bildungsroman (the novel of education), in which the reader can chart the character’s journey from childhood to adulthood; the other foreshadows a modernist sensibility, one that portrays the heroine’s developing consciousness with all the fragmentary ambiguities of memory itself.
After a brief stint as a companion to the dying Mrs. Marchmont, who prophetically declares, “While I loved, and while I was loved, what an existence I enjoyed!” (p. 44), Lucy goes to London where she must take stock of her life thus far:
All at once my position rose on me like a ghost. Anomalous; desolate, almost blank of hope, it stood. What was I doing here alone in great London? What should I do on the morrow? What prospects had I in life? What friends had I on earth? Whence did I come? Whither should I go? What should I do? (pp. 51-52).
These questions seem appropriate to both the heroine and the author of the novel. Lucy has no idea where fate will take her and no prescribed path or journey. The author similarly must answer these questions in order to invent the trajectory of the novel. Lucy embarks on a journey to France, where the rest of the story will unfold. The sea voyage on a ship, aptly named The Vivid, continues the series of displacements that have characterized Lucy’s experiences from the beginning of the book. On the boat Lucy describes the beauty of the landscape in romantic natural imagery: “Deep was the pleasure I drank in with the sea-breeze; divine the delight I drew from the heaving channel-waves, from the sea-birds on their ridges, from the white sails on their dark distance, from the quiet, yet beclouded sky, overhanging all” (pp. 62-63). A few moments later she corrects her reverie, “Cancel the whole of that, if you please, reader—or rather let it stand, and draw thence a moral—an alliterative, text-hand copy—day-dreams are delusions of the demon. Becoming excessively sick, I faltered down into the cabin” (p. 63). These quirky moments are ways we learn about Lucy’s inner life and her battle between the seductive power of her imagination and the concrete realities of experience.
The tension between imagination and reason manifests itself in Lucy’s observations of Villette. From the mystic sensuality of Catholicism to the frivolity of young French women to the ancient mythic quality of the cobblestone streets, Lucy finds herself in an unknown world without a guide. Miraculously, a kind stranger (who will later be identified as none other than Graham, now Dr. John) directs her toward Madame Beck’s school for girls, where she eventually becomes a teacher. Madame Beck, first described as “a motherly, dumpy little woman, in a large shawl, a wrapping-gown, and a clean, trim night-cap” (p. 72), is a formidable woman who finds it difficult to trust the newly arrived anglaise. The school itself is a labyrinthine structure. The building comprises a series of public and private spaces, including secret passageways, a spooky attic, and a garden connected to a legendary story of a tragic nun. Both the interior and exterior of the school function as an elaborate gothic stage set.
We see Lucy on display, in classrooms, study halls, and dormitories, and off stage, hiding from the watchful eye of Madame Beck, in the alleyway attached to the garden, in the attic amid boxes and rats, and on the rooftop in the rain. Lucy’s determination to control when she is seen and how she is seen is made easier and more difficult by her position as a single woman in a foreign country. On the one hand, she stands out because of her nationality; on the other hand, she is able to avoid the strict mores and standards of scrupulous British femininity, a gift she regards as a kind of license to be peculiar. Explaining her propensity to sneak away to a particularly gloomy walkway, Lucy reveals:
For a long time the fear of seeming singular scared me away; but by degrees, as people became accustomed to me and my habits, and to such shades of peculiarity as were ingrained in my nature—shades, certainly not striking enough to interest, and perhaps not prominent enough to offend, but born in and with me, and no more to be parted with than my identity (p. 121).
Like most Brontë heroines it is Lucy’s singularity that causes others to notice her. These admirers include: Ginevra Fanshawe, a fashionable English pupil who “lived her full life in a ballroom; elsewhere she drooped dispirited” (p. 160); the suave and charming Graham Bretton, who reappears in France as Dr. John; and the brilliant, tempestuous Paul Emmanuel, a fellow teacher. All of them bring Lucy into the spotlight seemingly against her will. The lovely Ginevra, whom Lucy first meets on the boat to France, is a spoiled, determined girl out to catch a suitable husband. Ginevra’s antagonistic and playful relationship with Lucy is a contrast to the quieter, more subdued interactions between Lucy and Polly. Unlike Polly, who wishes to be good, Ginevra revels in her selfishness and ability to spark desire in others.
In a strange series of events, Lucy’s identity becomes intertwined with Ginevra’s. First, in the darkness of the garden, a letter intended for Ginevra is dropped in her lap. In a subsequent scene, Lucy is persuaded by Paul Emmanuel to act as Ginevra’s suitor in a school play, a part she insists on playing in her own dress with
the ornament of a tie to signify her masculinity. She then discovers that Ginevra is her rival for Dr. John’s affections, and she finally comes face to face with Ginevra in a telling scene in which they are looking at one another in a mirror. Lucy narrates: “She turned me and herself round; she viewed us both on all sides; she smiled, she waved her curls, she retouched her sash, she spread her dress, and finally, letting go my arm, and curtseying with mock respect, she said: ‘I would not be you for a kingdom’ ” (p. 164). Cruelly, Ginevra continues, “I believe you never were in love and never will be; you don’t know the feeling: and so much the better, for though you might have your own heart broken, no living heart will you ever break” (pp. 164—165).
Ginevra’s mistaken assumptions that Lucy will never be in love and that she will never break someone else’s heart are challenges Lucy will win by the end of the story. In the domain of bourgeois social conventions, Ginevra cannot see herself as powerful until she crowns Lucy as powerless. Yet Lucy is not devastated by Ginevra’s remarks, nor does she see her as completely ridiculous. Brontë’s narrative juxtaposition of the two characters, particularly Lucy’s role as Ginevra’s scolding conscience and as her suitor in the school play, suggests that Lucy must contend somehow with the visible possibilities of her identity.
Villette (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Page 2