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adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
Everything that I loved about Jane Eyre is even better in Villette, and everything I didn't like is worse. Lots of Gothic scene setting and beautiful long emotional passages and internal conversations such as a heated argument with "Reason", but also quite a lot of Protestant stuff (made more extreme by the anti-Catholic overtone of this book), and I agree here with A.S. Byatt in the introduction to my edition, who says, 'sometimes you get the very high-flown passages at that point, which strike one as false because you feel she's working herself up' (p.liv). It started very well, then became a bit dull and slow, but then really satisfyingly picked up towards the end. Definitely worth pulling through.
Probably my favourite aspect of Villette was the dodgy narration. Lucy Snowe can definitely be described as an unreliable narrator, and she strikes an unsettling balance between latching onto her reader and referring to us directly (even more so than in Jane Eyre, perhaps due to her more established readership by the 1850s?) but also not trusting us and manipulatively withholding information. This on the one hand makes for dramatic twists, but then there is something uncomfortable and terrible about the twists as you feel you can't know anything. Particularly about Lucy herself! Her character is like a cold blank slate (hence the name I presume) and full of so much emotion and yet we never properly meet her; all the characters surrounding her are more developed than she is. She seems to know things and have hindsight – at only one point, quite early on, does Lucy imply in parenthesis that she is very elderly as she narrates the story: '(for 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 cap, like snow beneath snow)' and somehow her aged self is even more blank and "Snowe"-like than her younger self participating in the story.
There was a very interesting cross-dressing scene where Lucy refuses to fully dress as a man and maintains her skirt underneath – she says to the reader, 'To be dressed like a man did not please, and would not suit me [...] No. I would keep my own dress; come what might. M. Paul might storm, might rage: I would keep my own dress.' (pp.158-9) – which is complicated and could either suggest she is strong in claiming her feminine identity, or maybe that she is threatened by the idea of embodying a masculine role. And THEN in the fiction of the play she woos Ginevra (and in real life they have quite an intense intimate relationship, maybe even erotic from Ginevra's side)! So this scene has lots of juicy queer possibilities in it.
Villette was the perfect book to read on a winter holiday; it is simultaneously stormy and bitter and cold and warm and cosy and emotionally compelling. There is an incredible middle section of Lucy's depression –'The mid-blank is always a beclouded point for the solitary: [the hermit's] nerves ache with the strain of long expectancy; the doubts hitherto repelled gather now to a mass and – strong in accumulation – roll back upon him with a force which savours of vindictiveness.' (p.309) – which is then expanded to reach a vast natural landscape: so powerful and modern in the way mental health is conceptualised. Beyond this depressive passage, there is a tension throughout the whole novel of Lucy being trapped with herself and her thoughts, 'a suffocating burial in her own non-existence' (The Madwoman in the Attic p.416) which was very well done.
I really wanted to be invested in the romance[s] but just did not fid myself caring that much. However this is not primarily about romance, the scope is much wider, and in this aspect it is better than Jane Eyre. Without spoiling anything, the ending is much more satisfying to me, as it is less neatly wrapped up. In fact, I had to read it a few times to figure out what was really going on. Also, I think this has more nuances: in the introduction, Sodre proposes 'there isn't a separate character who is the "mad woman in the attic": the madness is not split off from the central character, like in Jane Eyre [...] Part of the greatness of Villette comes from the integration of madness and sanity in the same character.' (p.lv) Although Lucy Snowe doesn't really exist as we are never fully let in to meet her, somehow we get so invested in that complicated angsty inner conflict and cool aloofness.
Sadly I think this might have been Charlotte's peak and there isn't much more of hers I want to read at the moment. Highly recommend Villette, especially if you liked Jane Eyre but wished it were more radical.
Probably my favourite aspect of Villette was the dodgy narration. Lucy Snowe can definitely be described as an unreliable narrator, and she strikes an unsettling balance between latching onto her reader and referring to us directly (even more so than in Jane Eyre, perhaps due to her more established readership by the 1850s?) but also not trusting us and manipulatively withholding information. This on the one hand makes for dramatic twists, but then there is something uncomfortable and terrible about the twists as you feel you can't know anything. Particularly about Lucy herself! Her character is like a cold blank slate (hence the name I presume) and full of so much emotion and yet we never properly meet her; all the characters surrounding her are more developed than she is. She seems to know things and have hindsight – at only one point, quite early on, does Lucy imply in parenthesis that she is very elderly as she narrates the story: '(for 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 cap, like snow beneath snow)' and somehow her aged self is even more blank and "Snowe"-like than her younger self participating in the story.
There was a very interesting cross-dressing scene where Lucy refuses to fully dress as a man and maintains her skirt underneath – she says to the reader, 'To be dressed like a man did not please, and would not suit me [...] No. I would keep my own dress; come what might. M. Paul might storm, might rage: I would keep my own dress.' (pp.158-9) – which is complicated and could either suggest she is strong in claiming her feminine identity, or maybe that she is threatened by the idea of embodying a masculine role. And THEN in the fiction of the play she woos Ginevra (and in real life they have quite an intense intimate relationship, maybe even erotic from Ginevra's side)! So this scene has lots of juicy queer possibilities in it.
Villette was the perfect book to read on a winter holiday; it is simultaneously stormy and bitter and cold and warm and cosy and emotionally compelling. There is an incredible middle section of Lucy's depression –'The mid-blank is always a beclouded point for the solitary: [the hermit's] nerves ache with the strain of long expectancy; the doubts hitherto repelled gather now to a mass and – strong in accumulation – roll back upon him with a force which savours of vindictiveness.' (p.309) – which is then expanded to reach a vast natural landscape: so powerful and modern in the way mental health is conceptualised. Beyond this depressive passage, there is a tension throughout the whole novel of Lucy being trapped with herself and her thoughts, 'a suffocating burial in her own non-existence' (The Madwoman in the Attic p.416) which was very well done.
I really wanted to be invested in the romance[s] but just did not fid myself caring that much. However this is not primarily about romance, the scope is much wider, and in this aspect it is better than Jane Eyre. Without spoiling anything, the ending is much more satisfying to me, as it is less neatly wrapped up. In fact, I had to read it a few times to figure out what was really going on. Also, I think this has more nuances: in the introduction, Sodre proposes 'there isn't a separate character who is the "mad woman in the attic": the madness is not split off from the central character, like in Jane Eyre [...] Part of the greatness of Villette comes from the integration of madness and sanity in the same character.' (p.lv) Although Lucy Snowe doesn't really exist as we are never fully let in to meet her, somehow we get so invested in that complicated angsty inner conflict and cool aloofness.
Sadly I think this might have been Charlotte's peak and there isn't much more of hers I want to read at the moment. Highly recommend Villette, especially if you liked Jane Eyre but wished it were more radical.