Lucy begins to emerge as an embodied character, a woman with passion and desire, in relation to both her opposition to Ginevra and her secret wish to possess Ginevra’s seductive qualities. When she discovers that Dr. John is Ginevra’s clandestine admirer “Isadore,” Lucy rages inwardly at Ginevra’s unfair treatment of him:
Is it possible that fine generous gentleman—handsome as a vision—offers you his honorable hand and gallant heart, and promises to protect your flimsy person and wretchless mind through the storms and struggles of life—and you hang back—you scorn, you sting, you torture him! Have you power to do this? Who gave you that power? Where is it? Does it lie all in your beauty? (pp. 167-168).
Against her will, Lucy yearns to be noticed and to be loved by Dr. John; she reveals this to her readers in her rant against Ginevra and in the next few chapters when she undergoes a nervous breakdown.
After a period of collapse and recovery at Mrs. Bretton’s home outside Villette, Lucy begins to try on the possibility of becoming a visible presence. As part of her developing courtship with Dr. John, she is taken outside of the confines of the school and the domestic space of the Bretton household to the theater and to an art gallery. In one scene Lucy critiques an overtly sexual painting of Cleopatra along with a chaste series of images depicting “La vie d’une femme.” A few chapters later, she has the opportunity to witness the great actress Vashti perform. (Vashti is modeled after the French diva Rachel, whom Brontë saw perform during the period when she was writing Villette.) These moments are meditations on the possibilities for representing the complexity of women using various artistic forms.
Both the spaces of the art gallery and the theater provide an opportunity for Lucy to look and to be looked at. There is something vaguely dangerous about her proximity to the revealing portrait of Cleopatra, which she finds to be “an enormous piece of claptrap” (p. 227). At the same time, the depictions of women in the more acceptable paintings are equally repulsive to her: “All these four ‘Anges’ were grim and gray as burglars, and cold and vapid as ghosts. What women to live with! insincere, ill-humoured, bloodless, brainless nonentitites! As bad in their way as the indolent gipsy-giantess, the Cleopatra, in hers” (pp. 229-230). While musing on these extreme portrayals of femininity, Lucy is startled by Paul Emmanuel, who scolds her for looking at the sensual image of Cleopatra. They exchange biting remarks on the museum bench while Dr. John emerges from the other room. Lucy watches, waits for him to look at the painting, and then leaves Paul to join her preferred suitor. Clearly, in the art gallery Lucy is caught between her two suitors, but she is also suspended in the liminal realm between having come of age and being too old for love, the past and the present, the excessive visibility of the sexual female and the depressing invisibility of the ghostly, grim, and proper woman.
Perhaps testing the limits of her own attractiveness, Lucy decides to wear a pink dress to the theater and personifies the costume as an alien alter ego: “A pink dress! I knew it not. It knew not me!” (p. 235). Catching a glimpse of herself in the mirror, she almost doesn’t recognize the person in the glass: “Thus for the first, and perhaps only time in my life, I enjoyed the ‘giftie’ of seeing myself as others see me. No need to dwell on the result. It brought a jar of discord, a pang of regret” (p. 238). Several chapters later, Lucy’s amazed response to the bold actress Vashti is another cautionary reaction to putting one’s body and one’s desires on stage. Lucy narrates, “I found upon her something neither of woman nor of man: in each of her eyes sat a devil.... Hate and Murder and Madness incarnate, she stood” (p. 291). At the same time, Vashti’s courageous performance is something that Lucy cannot help but admire. “The strong magnetism of genius drew my heart out of its wonted orbit.... I had seen acting before, but never anything like this: never anything which astonished Hope and hushed Desire; which outstripped Impulse and paled Conception” (p. 293). When Dr. John dismisses Vashti’s talents, Lucy laments, “For what belonged to storm, what was wild and intense, dangerous, sudden, and flaming, he had no sympathy, and held with it no communion” (p. 293). In other words, “He judged her as a woman, not an artist” (p. 294). It is the beginning of the end of their relationship.
Brontë’s ambivalence about being a female public celebrity is embedded in Lucy’s double responses to Vashti. While Lucy sees Vashti as a true artist, an immensely powerful and all-consuming presence, she still must distance herself from the actress’s unmitigated representation of emotion. The connection between Vashti’s art and her physical presence is something both monstrous and fantastical. When a fire breaks out in the theater after Vashti’s performance, Lucy and Dr. John are caught in the rush to get out of the building. Someone inquires if Dr. John is with anyone and he replies, “I have a lady ... but she will be neither hindrance nor incumbrance” (p. 296). These dismissive words effectively banish Lucy back to the invisible shadowy world of insignificance. Lucy’s hopes with Graham have gone up in flames.
In rejecting a representation of femininity through the theater and the arts—both embodied, visual genres—Brontë implies that what is left is writing. The fascinating essence of the provocative Vashti—what Lucy terms “wild,” “intense,” and “flaming”—can perhaps be expressed only through the expansive possibility of words. Lucy begins to imagine what such passion might look like in language. Suddenly there are two Lucys writing in the novel: one composing rational, cryptic letters to Graham, the other narrating the tortuous process of creating these vexed public documents while desperately waiting for a response. When Lucy vehemently revises and rewrites letters to Graham, actions dictated by the “hag reason,” the anguish of the prose in the novel is at its most heightened.
I suppose animals kept in cages, and so scantily fed as to be always upon the verge of famine, await their food as I awaited a letter. Oh!—to speak truth, and drop that tone of a false calm which long to sustain, outwears nature’s endurance—I underwent in those seven weeks bitter fears and pains, strange inward trials, miserable defections of hope, intolerable encroachments of despair. This last came so near me sometimes that her breath went right through me (p. 302).
Perhaps ironically, the death of Lucy’s romance with Graham—symbolized by her sealing his letters in a glass jar and burying them under a tree in the garden—is the birth of her connection to Monsieur Paul. The last third of the novel details their strange and vexed courtship, a relationship haunted by Lucy’s memories of Graham. Paul’s recognition of Lucy’s desire for Graham and her mourning his loss—at one point Paul exclaims, “You remind me, then, of a young she wild creature, new caught, untamed, viewing with a mixture of fire and fear the first entrance of the breaker-in” (p. 262)—enables him to see her as no one else does. Before Lucy can recognize and return Paul’s passion for her, she must relive witnessing the pairing of Graham and the newly arrived, now adult, Polly Home. Once again, Lucy becomes ghostly, while Polly takes center stage.
Lucy’s emotions are expressed through her particular attention to specific objects: Graham’s letters and a cigar case that Lucy received the evening they went to the theater. Lucy explains, “To this day I keep my cigar-case: it serves, when I look at it, to remind me of old times, and one happy evening” (p. 252). In this instance, Brontë reveals Lucy in the scene of writing, reminding her readers that they are in the theater of the novel—immersed in scenes from Lucy’s past. The effect is similar to drawing up the curtain at an unexpected moment. All of a sudden, we are forced to acknowledge that there is a world outside of the story, one that includes the old and mostly invisible Lucy Snowe. Our inability to see the “real” Lucy both physically and emotionally is an uncanny displacement that the reader must contend with in order to make sense of the story.
This positioning of distant author and present heroine (a version of the author’s past self) mirrors Brontë’s complex relationship to the semi-real events in the novel. Just as we can’t make one-to-one connections between Brontë’s life and Brontë’s fictio
n, we also have the same difficulty reconciling the authorial Lucy’s narrative with the story unfolding in the novel. For instance, although the reader wants to believe in Lucy’s romance with Paul, because it is a romance of equals, there is still the unsettling knowledge that after many years Lucy is still holding on to relics of Graham.
Since we are aware of Lucy’s fondness for objects, when she makes a special watchguard for Paul’s festival day we are clued in that she is beginning to see him as someone worthy of her attention. Perversely, she decides not to give him the present at the moment she is expected to, creating an odd and awkward spectacle. M. Paul responds to her neglect with a public diatribe on the horrors of English women. Lucy narrates:
Never have I heard English women handled as M. Paul that morning handled them: he spared nothing—neither their minds, morals, manners, nor personal appearance. I specially remember his abuse of their tall stature, their long necks, their thin arms, their slovenly dress, their pedantic education, their impious skepticism(!).... Oh! he was spiteful, acrid, savage; and, as a natural consequence, detestably ugly (pp. 385-386).
Imbedded in M. Paul’s rant is a kind of vituperative laundry list of their differences: He is French, she is English; he is Catholic, she is Protestant; he is classically educated, she is not; he is emotional, she is reserved. In short, neither one is what the other expects to be drawn toward. Their extended denial of affection eventually turns into love. Lucy forgives M. Paul for spying on her, yelling at her, and embarrassing her by pointing out her desire for Dr. John. Interestingly, Lucy can’t see Paul as a love object until there are obstacles: Madame Beck, whose own passion for M. Paul threatens to destroy their romance, and the tiny witch-like creature Madame Walravens, who holds the key to M. Paul’s mysterious past.
In one of the last segments of the novel, Lucy takes a walk around Villette under the influence of opium. The resolutions of the novel play out in front of her in a carnivalesque series of images. Lucy describes the events using theatrical imagery: “Somehow I felt, too, that the night’s drama was but begun, that the prologue was scarce spoken: throughout this woody and turfy theatre reigned a shadow of mystery; actors and incidents unlooked-for, waited behind the scenes” (p. 515). Lucy watches Polly, Graham, and Mrs. Bretton in a blissful moment of familial contentment. She looks at Graham but believes that he does not see her: “He might think, he might even believe that Lucy was contained within that shawl, and sheltered under that hat; he could never be certain for he did not see my face” (p. 515). She imagines that he keeps a small closet for her in his psyche called “Lucy’s room,” and she holds one for him, “All my life long I carried it folded in the hollow of my hand” (p. 515).
In her ghostly costume, Lucy floats on, witnessing several scenes that help to wrap up the plot of the novel. In one she discovers the schemings of Madame Beck, Père Silas, and Madame Walravens, who have plotted to send M. Paul to the West Indies to get him out of her way. In another, she spots Ginevra and her lover, who is the key to the mystery of the ubiquitous nun, eloping in a carriage.
Lucy’s deliberate invisibility in this scene seems parallel to the inexplicable and fantasy-driven tone of the end of the novel. After setting Lucy up with a lovely house and school of her own, M. Paul finally declares his feelings, “Lucy, take my love. One day share my life. Be my dearest, first on earth” (p. 551). He leaves for Antigua and the narrator tells her readers, “Let them picture union and a happy succeeding life” (p. 555). Yet, in the now famously ambiguous ending, it seems clear that M. Paul drowns at sea but not at all certain what becomes of Lucy Snowe. It is as if M. Paul sees what Lucy desires and constructs a life for her, and then she lives on as a projection of his imagination. Lucy, the bodiless narrator, who gives flesh and blood to the past, is stuck when the past meets the present. The young version of Lucy vanishes along with the realism of her narrative, and the older phantom Lucy emerges in her place.
In a rarely cited letter to W. S. Williams, Brontë offers some advice on being a female celebrity for one of his daughters, Fanny, who was considering becoming a singer. She writes, “An inferior artist, I am sure you would not wish your daughter to be, and if she is to stand in the foremost rank, only her own courage and resolve can place her there; so, at least, the case appears to me. Fanny probably looks on publicity as degrading, and I believe that for a woman it is degrading if it is not glorious” (Shorter, Charlotte Brontë and Her Circle, p. 416). For Brontë, it was not worth being famous unless she could be superior. Lucy’s constant desire to manipulate her self-presentation echoes Brontë’s own wish to carefully shape her image as a visible literary figure and a dignified woman.
In the public world of the novel, Lucy is fiercely protective of her private thoughts and feelings. Yet behind the scenes she reveals her secrets to her readers through an intensely personal narrative. In these moments Brontë creates for Lucy a descriptive language for the inexpressible. In doing so, she explores the uncanny realm of being—the material reality of the body that competes with the desire for immortality, the intensity of memory versus the awareness of what will always be lost, the starkness of fact against the sensuality of what can only be imagined. While Lucy may be remembered as Brontë’s most autobiographical creation, she is, ultimately, Brontë’s map for female literary genius, an intangible authorial presence that remains perplexing, dynamic, and vividly invisible.
Laura Engel received her B.A. from Bryn Mawr College and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University. She is an assistant professor in the English Department at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, where she specializes in eighteenth-century British literature and drama. Her previous publications include essays on the novelists A. S. Byatt and Edna O’Brien. She is currently working on a book that explores the connections between women and celebrity in eighteenth-century culture. Engel also wrote the Introduction and Notes for the Barnes & Noble Classics edition of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility.
Villette
By CURRER BELL
AUTHOR OF “JANE EYRE,” “SHIRLEY,” ETC.
IN THREE VOLUMES
VOLUME ONE
CHAPTER 1
Bretton
My godmother lived in a handsome house in the clean and ancient town of Bretton. Her husband’s family had been residents there for generations, and bore, indeed, the name of their birthplace—Bretton of Bretton: whether by coincidence, or because some remote ancestor had been a personage of sufficient importance to leave his name to his neighbourhood, I know not.
When I was a girl I went to Bretton about twice a year, and well I liked the visit. The house and its inmates specially suited me. The large peaceful rooms, the well-arranged furniture, the clear wide windows, the balcony outside, looking down on a fine antique street, where Sundays and holidays seemed always to abide—so quiet was its atmosphere, so clean its pavement—these things pleased me well.
One child in a household of grown people is usually made very much of, and in a quiet way I was a good deal taken notice of by Mrs. Bretton, who had been left a widow, with one son, before I knew her; her husband, a physician, having died while she was yet a young and handsome woman.
She was not young, as I remember her, but she was still handsome, tall, well-made, and though dark for an Englishwoman, yet wearing always the clearness of health in her brunette cheeks, and its vivacity in a pair of fine, cheerful black eyes. People esteemed it a grievous pity that she had not conferred her complexion on her son, whose eyes were blue—though, even in boyhood, very piercing—and the colour of his long hair such as friends did not venture to specify, except as the sun shone on it, when they called it golden. He inherited the lines of his mother’s features, however; also her good teeth, her stature (or the promise of her stature, for he was not yet full-grown), and, what was better, her health without flaw, and her spirits of that tone and equality which are better than a fortune to the possessor.
In the autumn of the year—I was staying at Bretton; my godmothe
r having come in person to claim me of the kinsfolk with whom was at that time fixed my permanent residence. I believe she then plainly saw events coming, whose very shadow I scarce guessed; yet of which the faint suspicion sufficed to impart unsettled sadness, and made me glad to change scene and society.
Time always flowed smoothly for me at my godmother’s side; not with tumultuous swiftness, but blandly, like the gliding of a full river through a plain. My visits to her resembled the sojourn of Christian and Hopeful1 beside a certain pleasant stream, with ‘green trees on each bank, and meadows beautified with lilies all the year round.’ The charm of variety there was not, nor the excitement of incident; but I liked peace so well, and sought stimulus so little, that when the latter came I almost felt it a disturbance, and wished rather it had still held aloof.
One day a letter was received of which the contents evidently caused Mrs. Bretton surprise and some concern. I thought at first it was from home, and trembled, expecting I know not what disastrous communication; to me, however, no reference was made, and the cloud seemed to pass.
The next day, on my return from a long walk, I found, as I entered my bed-room, an unexpected change. In addition to my own French beda in its shady recess, appeared in a corner a small crib, draped with white; and in addition to my mahogany chest of drawers, I saw a tiny rosewood chest. I stood still, gazed, and considered.
‘Of what are these things the signs and tokens?’ I asked. The answer was obvious. ‘A second guest is coming: Mrs. Bretton expects other visitors.’
Villette (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Page 3
