regshoe

God, I love Villette. I think it was Joanna Russ who describes it as 'a book about desperately waiting for a prison break, which never occurs'. I consider it one of the angriest feminist novels, up there with Nadal El Saadawi's Woman at Point Zero, because the thing is? I think that in a different society Lucy would be absolutely fine, but she can't imagine one-- there is literally no way for her to picture the place and way she could be happy, because they do not yet exist. I mean, I don't know if we'd have a space for her yet now. And the novel goes absolutely as far as it can in showing that Lucy has very real and human and understandable needs and desires, with which the reader can empathize deeply, and which need something, anything not this.

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.