Villette by Charlotte Brontë
Aug. 23rd, 2022 05:26 pmI'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 with![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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:
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.
( I had mixed feelings about the ending. )
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.
( I had mixed feelings about the ending. )
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.
