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Villette
by Charlotte Brontë
"I always, through my whole life, liked to penetrate to the real truth; I like seeking the goddess in her temple, and handling the veil, and daring the dread glance.”
Villette (1853) is Charlotte Brontë’s last novel and is a reworking of The Professor (her first novel, but published posthumously in 1857 after being rejected by most publishers). It was heavily influenced by her own experience as an English teacher at a boarding school where she also fell in love with a professor and wrote him long letters (which he tore up and threw away, but his wife recovered – I can feel the drama).
It is literature of consciousness; the plot is only of secondary importance to Lucy’s growing self-awareness. It is a psychological exploration, amazingly reflected in the syntax, which sometimes “threatens to dissolve completely in the heat of madness, drug-induced hallucination and desperate desire” as The Daily Telegraph beautifully puts it. Lucy has to exorcise many psychological demons to uncover her identity (amazingly symbolized by the “ghost” of the nun).
I had trouble with this in the beginning and when I was about halfway through I considered giving up on it altogether ( I didn’t because it’s over 600 pages…). Although I found this a very slow read, I didn’t blame it on that or any other aspect of story, but on my edition: Kindle e-book that wasn’t annotated, didn’t have an introduction, nor a foreword or afterword. A great part of this book was written in French and I just got sick of having to look up everything. Anyway, hard work pays off and I’m happy I read it!
I understand the comparison with Jane Eyre: both heroines are on a quest for their identities, the gothic atmosphere, phantoms and ghosts, the passionate writing style… etc. But Jane’s story is much more straight-forward than Lucy’s, many things in the latter’s journey remain unresolved. Brontë likes to leave hints everywhere, but refrains from stating what’s going on most of the time, as in Jane Eyre. Also, whereas Lucy starts off being extremely withdrawn, introverted, and passive, Jane is more outspoken from the beginning and is to a great extent master over her own destiny. What I loved most, though, is that in the end, (If you’re not a fan of (semi-)open endings, I wish you good luck).
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"Not only does [Villette] demonstrate how deep Lucy must go to find her true self, how profound her sentimental education must be, but it suggests that signification - the making and reading of identity and of all meaning - is as much a matter of specular play as it is of unveiling proper meanings, particularly for a woman. The dominant definition of woman as secondary and derivative, as an auxiliary to man, is utterly caught up in a reductive mirroring in which woman never appears, only man and his inverted image, non-man. Throughout Villette, however, is refracted a speculum de L'autre femme ,the possibility of a radically different specularity of otherness which cannot be reduced to the same." - Christina Crosby
Villette (1853) is Charlotte Brontë’s last novel and is a reworking of The Professor (her first novel, but published posthumously in 1857 after being rejected by most publishers). It was heavily influenced by her own experience as an English teacher at a boarding school where she also fell in love with a professor and wrote him long letters (which he tore up and threw away, but his wife recovered – I can feel the drama).
It is literature of consciousness; the plot is only of secondary importance to Lucy’s growing self-awareness. It is a psychological exploration, amazingly reflected in the syntax, which sometimes “threatens to dissolve completely in the heat of madness, drug-induced hallucination and desperate desire” as The Daily Telegraph beautifully puts it. Lucy has to exorcise many psychological demons to uncover her identity (amazingly symbolized by the “ghost” of the nun).
I had trouble with this in the beginning and when I was about halfway through I considered giving up on it altogether ( I didn’t because it’s over 600 pages…). Although I found this a very slow read, I didn’t blame it on that or any other aspect of story, but on my edition: Kindle e-book that wasn’t annotated, didn’t have an introduction, nor a foreword or afterword. A great part of this book was written in French and I just got sick of having to look up everything. Anyway, hard work pays off and I’m happy I read it!
I understand the comparison with Jane Eyre: both heroines are on a quest for their identities, the gothic atmosphere, phantoms and ghosts, the passionate writing style… etc. But Jane’s story is much more straight-forward than Lucy’s, many things in the latter’s journey remain unresolved. Brontë likes to leave hints everywhere, but refrains from stating what’s going on most of the time, as in Jane Eyre. Also, whereas Lucy starts off being extremely withdrawn, introverted, and passive, Jane is more outspoken from the beginning and is to a great extent master over her own destiny. What I loved most, though, is that in the end,
Spoiler
Lucy is the one who really breaks free from the patriarchal stereotype and while it is never stated, one can read between the lines that she is free from any domestic chains.* * *
"Not only does [Villette] demonstrate how deep Lucy must go to find her true self, how profound her sentimental education must be, but it suggests that signification - the making and reading of identity and of all meaning - is as much a matter of specular play as it is of unveiling proper meanings, particularly for a woman. The dominant definition of woman as secondary and derivative, as an auxiliary to man, is utterly caught up in a reductive mirroring in which woman never appears, only man and his inverted image, non-man. Throughout Villette, however, is refracted a speculum de L'autre femme ,the possibility of a radically different specularity of otherness which cannot be reduced to the same." - Christina Crosby