Villette by Charlotte Brontë
Aug. 23rd, 2022 05:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
regshoeI'd been putting off reading Villette (1853) for quite a few years—Jane Eyre was one of the first 'grown-up classic' novels I ever read and an important stage in getting into Victorian fiction, and Shirley has been a firm favourite for some time, so I was reasonably certain I'd like it—and my feelings now are a mix of 'well, it was worth waiting for' and 'aargh, I should have got to it sooner!'. It's a very good book, and I find it difficult to put into words exactly what's so amazing about it, so let's see how writing a post goes.
After a bit of meandering around the significant backstory, similarly to the early chapters of Jane Eyre, the main plot of Villette follows our heroine and first-person narrator Lucy Snowe, who after some unspecified disaster in fortunes gets on a boat to the Continent to seek out some way of earning her living, and finds it as a teacher at a girls' school in Villette, a thinly-fictionalised Brussels. Here she meets various characters, and describes them with a great deal of colour and snarky judgementalness. There's Madame Beck, the headmistress and an extremely nosy autocratic ruler who's constantly spying on the teachers and pupils, going through their belongings, reading their letters, etc. There's Ginevra Fanshawe, a pupil whom Lucy makes sure to tell us she finds extremely annoying, always showing off her clothes and jewellery and boasting about breaking her suitors' hearts and teasing Lucy about being an unfeeling old woman, and yet somehow Lucy keeps seeking out her company and enjoying the creatively insulting back-and-forths they keep having. There's "Dr John", an English doctor who is endlessly nice, kind, considerate, gentlemanly and entirely oblivious to Lucy's growing feelings for him. There's M Paul Emanuel, who teaches literature at the school and makes a hobby of being bizarrely horrible to Lucy in particular. And there's—possibly—a terrifying ghostly nun who haunts the school.
Well, all this is very entertaining, but everything that makes this book memorable—far more than what you might expect from a 'plight of governesses' story—is Lucy's personality and her presence as narrator. I was talking about the book withedwardianspinsteraunt while reading, and she described Lucy's attitude as her not liking or trusting the audience and trying to push us away; the introduction to the edition I read describes her as 'mean, humorous and miserable', taking 'a perverse delight' in other people's misperceptions of her as the quiet, demure, colourless schoolteacher. As might be apparent from me talking about this by quoting other people, I find it difficult to describe myself! But Lucy is a fascinating character; as well as constantly judging everyone around her and taking pleasure in refusing the audience a simple or reliable narrative—there are a couple of places where she more or less tells us straight out that she's lying about what really happened—she's incredibly harsh on herself, crushing her own feelings and pushing away even the idea of herself having any happiness. She often does so in very general language that obscures her own feelings entirely:
Anyway, I found all this very meaningful indeed, and endlessly compelling to read about. I think what struck me more than anything was Lucy's iron-clad conviction that she's basically not like other people—that she's somehow set apart by Fortune to be miserable, and that she can't even entertain the idea of having the emotions, much less the concrete happiness, that other people take for granted. After her unrequited feelings for Dr John end in his happy marriage to the straightforwardly normal Paulina, Lucy spends a passage talking, without obvious spite, about how they are destined to be good and happy together always, and how in fact their future life was exactly what it should be—with implied comparison to her own future and her own basic nature. The attitude reminded me a little of The Longest Journey, one of my favourite books ever; but Lucy isn't bewilderedly miserable like Rickie Elliott, she's impotently, spikily angry, and takes out her anger on her readers in how she presents things and what she tells us. It's really fascinating stuff.
Apart from this, or partly apart from it, I really enjoyed Lucy's relationship with Ginevra. I'd osmosed that this book was very femslashy, and yep, that was right! It's interesting that, while Shirley is also very femslashy, it's in quite a different way—Shirley has a sweet and uncomplicatedly happy f/f ship between two best friends, while Lucy and Ginevra are a very entertaining kind of 'love to hate you', sparky, snarky enemy pairing. There's an amazing sequence where Ginevra is playing the female romantic lead in the school play, and Lucy is roped in to play the part of one of her male suitors; Brontë vividly describes the chemistry and tension between them on stage in a way that's about as close to being explicitly lesbian as you can get in 1853. (Afterwards, Lucy informs us that that was an interesting experience, but she's never going to let herself do that kind of thing ever again, no way!).
Then there's the 'main' romance between Lucy and M Paul, which I did not like. Basically, M Paul is continuously horrible to Lucy, but in the bizarre and would-be-entertaining way of Charlotte Brontë heroes (in that school play sequence, he's the one who persuades Lucy into taking the role at the last minute; he then locks her in the attic for hours without food and forces her to learn her lines; this is representative of his behaviour throughout the book). Brontë certainly knows what kind of thing her id likes, and it is not a kind of thing I like. I respect her, but I don't enjoy it.
At the end, Lucy finally discovers that her feelings for M Paul are returned, but M Paul has to go and manage some business for his relatives on the other side of the world, so he sets Lucy up with her own school and leaves her, promising to return. In the deeply, fittingly weird final paragraphs of the book, Lucy tells us how the month of his expected return was a time of storms; then, refusing to describe in any detail what actually happened, invites the reader to imagine M Paul's safe return and a happy reunion—while managing to imply very cuttingly that this is not what happened at all. I thought this ending undermined a lot of what I'd liked about the book up to that point; having M Paul return Lucy's feelings goes against the idea that she's set apart to be unlike other people—unlike, that is, normal women who have happy, successful relationships—and, while that ending does fit into her ideas about her misery in a way, having your fiancé die in a shipwreck is a random misfortune that could happen to anyone; it doesn't say anything philosophically profound about her nature as a person. On the other hand, the device of those last paragraphs... ooh, that's certainly a thing about an unreliable narrator, and I like it a lot. I don't know.
This one is going to stay with me for a while, I think.
Oh, also—a non-negligible proportion of the book's dialogue is written in French, to the point that if you can't read French you need to get an edition with footnote translations or you won't be able to follow what's going on. Actually this is why I took so long to get round to it—I couldn't just grab the ebook off Gutenberg or any random copy from the library. Presumably Brontë assumed that all her readers could deal with this, though to what extent this was actually true of the British novel-reading public in the 1850s I do not know.
After a bit of meandering around the significant backstory, similarly to the early chapters of Jane Eyre, the main plot of Villette follows our heroine and first-person narrator Lucy Snowe, who after some unspecified disaster in fortunes gets on a boat to the Continent to seek out some way of earning her living, and finds it as a teacher at a girls' school in Villette, a thinly-fictionalised Brussels. Here she meets various characters, and describes them with a great deal of colour and snarky judgementalness. There's Madame Beck, the headmistress and an extremely nosy autocratic ruler who's constantly spying on the teachers and pupils, going through their belongings, reading their letters, etc. There's Ginevra Fanshawe, a pupil whom Lucy makes sure to tell us she finds extremely annoying, always showing off her clothes and jewellery and boasting about breaking her suitors' hearts and teasing Lucy about being an unfeeling old woman, and yet somehow Lucy keeps seeking out her company and enjoying the creatively insulting back-and-forths they keep having. There's "Dr John", an English doctor who is endlessly nice, kind, considerate, gentlemanly and entirely oblivious to Lucy's growing feelings for him. There's M Paul Emanuel, who teaches literature at the school and makes a hobby of being bizarrely horrible to Lucy in particular. And there's—possibly—a terrifying ghostly nun who haunts the school.
Well, all this is very entertaining, but everything that makes this book memorable—far more than what you might expect from a 'plight of governesses' story—is Lucy's personality and her presence as narrator. I was talking about the book with
edwardianspinsteraunt while reading, and she described Lucy's attitude as her not liking or trusting the audience and trying to push us away; the introduction to the edition I read describes her as 'mean, humorous and miserable', taking 'a perverse delight' in other people's misperceptions of her as the quiet, demure, colourless schoolteacher. As might be apparent from me talking about this by quoting other people, I find it difficult to describe myself! But Lucy is a fascinating character; as well as constantly judging everyone around her and taking pleasure in refusing the audience a simple or reliable narrative—there are a couple of places where she more or less tells us straight out that she's lying about what really happened—she's incredibly harsh on herself, crushing her own feelings and pushing away even the idea of herself having any happiness. She often does so in very general language that obscures her own feelings entirely: (once, for all, in this parenthesis, I disclaim, with the utmost scorn, every sneaking suspicion of what are called “warmer feelings:” women do not entertain these “warmer feelings” where, from the commencement, through the whole progress of an acquaintance, they have never once been cheated of the conviction that, to do so would be to commit a mortal absurdity: nobody ever launches into Love unless he has seen or dreamed the rising of Hope’s star over Love’s troubled waters)...and using vivid imagery; that quote is from a passage where Lucy describes a physical battle between herself and the personifications of Feeling and Reason, full of specific and cutting detail about tearing up letters and throwing people out of doors.
Anyway, I found all this very meaningful indeed, and endlessly compelling to read about. I think what struck me more than anything was Lucy's iron-clad conviction that she's basically not like other people—that she's somehow set apart by Fortune to be miserable, and that she can't even entertain the idea of having the emotions, much less the concrete happiness, that other people take for granted. After her unrequited feelings for Dr John end in his happy marriage to the straightforwardly normal Paulina, Lucy spends a passage talking, without obvious spite, about how they are destined to be good and happy together always, and how in fact their future life was exactly what it should be—with implied comparison to her own future and her own basic nature. The attitude reminded me a little of The Longest Journey, one of my favourite books ever; but Lucy isn't bewilderedly miserable like Rickie Elliott, she's impotently, spikily angry, and takes out her anger on her readers in how she presents things and what she tells us. It's really fascinating stuff.
Apart from this, or partly apart from it, I really enjoyed Lucy's relationship with Ginevra. I'd osmosed that this book was very femslashy, and yep, that was right! It's interesting that, while Shirley is also very femslashy, it's in quite a different way—Shirley has a sweet and uncomplicatedly happy f/f ship between two best friends, while Lucy and Ginevra are a very entertaining kind of 'love to hate you', sparky, snarky enemy pairing. There's an amazing sequence where Ginevra is playing the female romantic lead in the school play, and Lucy is roped in to play the part of one of her male suitors; Brontë vividly describes the chemistry and tension between them on stage in a way that's about as close to being explicitly lesbian as you can get in 1853. (Afterwards, Lucy informs us that that was an interesting experience, but she's never going to let herself do that kind of thing ever again, no way!).
Then there's the 'main' romance between Lucy and M Paul, which I did not like. Basically, M Paul is continuously horrible to Lucy, but in the bizarre and would-be-entertaining way of Charlotte Brontë heroes (in that school play sequence, he's the one who persuades Lucy into taking the role at the last minute; he then locks her in the attic for hours without food and forces her to learn her lines; this is representative of his behaviour throughout the book). Brontë certainly knows what kind of thing her id likes, and it is not a kind of thing I like. I respect her, but I don't enjoy it.
At the end, Lucy finally discovers that her feelings for M Paul are returned, but M Paul has to go and manage some business for his relatives on the other side of the world, so he sets Lucy up with her own school and leaves her, promising to return. In the deeply, fittingly weird final paragraphs of the book, Lucy tells us how the month of his expected return was a time of storms; then, refusing to describe in any detail what actually happened, invites the reader to imagine M Paul's safe return and a happy reunion—while managing to imply very cuttingly that this is not what happened at all. I thought this ending undermined a lot of what I'd liked about the book up to that point; having M Paul return Lucy's feelings goes against the idea that she's set apart to be unlike other people—unlike, that is, normal women who have happy, successful relationships—and, while that ending does fit into her ideas about her misery in a way, having your fiancé die in a shipwreck is a random misfortune that could happen to anyone; it doesn't say anything philosophically profound about her nature as a person. On the other hand, the device of those last paragraphs... ooh, that's certainly a thing about an unreliable narrator, and I like it a lot. I don't know.
This one is going to stay with me for a while, I think.
Oh, also—a non-negligible proportion of the book's dialogue is written in French, to the point that if you can't read French you need to get an edition with footnote translations or you won't be able to follow what's going on. Actually this is why I took so long to get round to it—I couldn't just grab the ebook off Gutenberg or any random copy from the library. Presumably Brontë assumed that all her readers could deal with this, though to what extent this was actually true of the British novel-reading public in the 1850s I do not know.
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Date: Aug. 23rd, 2022 07:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Aug. 24th, 2022 04:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Aug. 23rd, 2022 11:38 pm (UTC)But back to Villette: YES, Lucy's voice is what really makes the book. She's so bitingly sarcastic and bitter and yet there's an aching vulnerability behind it? The passage you quoted about "warmer feelings" really captures it: on the surface she's so cutting and derisive, toward herself as much as the reader, and yet in the vehemence with which she rejects even the possibility you can feel a sense of longing. She wishes that she could connect with people but except for Ginevra (and later M. Paul), she always feels that she's at a sense of remove from them - that no one really sees her.
Ginevra doesn't always see Lucy clearly but at least she notices Lucy's presence, and is always thrusting herself on Lucy's notice. I love the snark between them - all Ginevra's sarcastic pet names for Lucy! ("Timon," my God.) Years ago I wrote a Ginevra/Lucy fic for Yuletide: it's such a fantastic, sharp-edged, spiky pairing.
Villette's ending is so brutal. In some ways I think the ambiguity makes it worse. If she said straightforwardly that M. Paul had drowned, it might not feel like she's lashing the reader across the face - you might feel that the experience of being loved, however briefly, had been tonic for her, you know? But she ends just as bitter as ever, just as convinced that she's set apart by Fortune to be miserable. Even the impersonal forces of nature are against her, drowning her love.
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Date: Aug. 24th, 2022 04:06 pm (UTC)I agree with all your thoughts on Lucy—and I especially like the idea that Ginevra is one of the few people who really sees Lucy and that that's what makes their relationship, antagonistic as it is, so significant.
Years ago I wrote a Ginevra/Lucy fic for Yuletide
Ooh! *opens in tab to read*
Even the impersonal forces of nature are against her, drowning her love.
Yeah, I think that's how I probably should interpret it. It is such a powerful bit of narratorial bitterness, isn't it—I was reading along, ambivalent about the ending up to here but curious about how things were going to wrap up, then I got to those last paragraphs and just went, OK, wow, whatever I expected it wasn't that.
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Date: Aug. 24th, 2022 01:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Aug. 24th, 2022 01:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Aug. 24th, 2022 04:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Aug. 25th, 2022 12:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Aug. 24th, 2022 02:48 am (UTC)I did not see the relationship between Lucy and M Paul coming when he was first introduced (though having read Jane Eyre before, I feel I should have. Charlotte Brontë certainly has a Type.)
I also somehow missed the subtle reference to the shipwreck (probably because I was listening to it at work.) Your post makes me want to go back and read it in paper format so I can hear Lucy's voice for myself rather than in the narrator's voice.
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Date: Aug. 24th, 2022 04:15 pm (UTC)What did you think happened at the end? Hmm, now I'm thinking about audiobook possibilities... it strikes me that an audiobook reader's choices about how to perform that section—and a lot of Lucy's narration, actually—could have a pretty big influence on how it comes across (and a good one who really got Lucy could make something very interesting of it; perhaps I should try an audiobook version?).
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Date: Aug. 25th, 2022 03:00 am (UTC)The audiobook I listened to was on Spotify, and was uploaded in 2019. It would be interesting to see if you thought the voice was accurate to how you imagined it when reading the physical book.
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Date: Aug. 25th, 2022 03:48 pm (UTC)I've just gone and listened to the last few minutes of that one, and I can see how you missed it—between the reader's attitude (I'm not good at tone, but it doesn't seem to me like there's much of Lucy's spitefulness there) and the continuous reading of an audiobook not giving you time to pause, glance back over the words you've just read and go, 'Wait, does she mean...?', the dark ambiguity of the ending as written doesn't come across at all well.
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Date: Aug. 24th, 2022 03:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Aug. 24th, 2022 04:16 pm (UTC)XD
The pink dress! Yes, that was a brilliant bit, and I sympathised with Lucy's feelings about it.
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Date: Aug. 24th, 2022 10:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Aug. 25th, 2022 03:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Aug. 26th, 2022 02:30 am (UTC)Because there's no outward reason for Lucy to be so at odds with her culture and society and self. There's nothing that makes her a social outcast; she's actually capable of having the kinds of relationships the people around her do. But there is something about her, purely because of who she is, which would be so dishonest if she wound up in a relationship with, say, Dr. John, that she recognizes that that fantasy would not make her happy.
The fact that Charlotte Brontë was capable of writing Villette renders her death in childbirth as unbearably ironic to me as the ending of the novel.
Though I think it was also Joanna Russ who says that it's possible to read the entire romance with M. Paul as fictitious, a fantasy romance sufficiently close to palatable that Lucy is willing to pretend to us that it actually happens for a while, until she decides that it's just too much, and so ends it with something as melodramatic as possible to indicate that such things do not, and cannot (for her) really happen. Not sure how much stock I put in that, but it's an interesting idea.
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Date: Aug. 26th, 2022 01:30 pm (UTC)I think of Villette as an expression of the rage of a woman of genius in a society that won't let women be geniuses, but that may be unfairly reading Charlotte back into Lucy.
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Date: Aug. 26th, 2022 04:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Aug. 26th, 2022 04:01 pm (UTC)I also like the idea that the reciprocated romance with M Paul is actually all fantasy—it certainly wouldn't be beyond Lucy's abilities as an unreliable narrator.
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Date: Aug. 29th, 2022 08:45 pm (UTC)Brontë certainly knows what kind of thing her id likes, and it is not a kind of thing I like.
Er, no, nor I!
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Date: Aug. 30th, 2022 05:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Oct. 24th, 2023 07:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Oct. 25th, 2023 03:33 pm (UTC)