Villette in Lizzie's House

After having read so many books whose plots I knew well from film adaptations, or from hearsay, or from being spoiled by academic articles, I decided to read something entirely unfamiliar: Charlotte Bronte's Villette. Wait, I tell a lie: Villette's ending was spoiled for me by Rachel Blau DuPlessis's Writing Beyond the Ending--a book you probably shouldn't read if you don't want to know what happens at the end of books--so I do know what happens at the end, and I think I suspect who the most significant love interest is. But as I found with The Woman in White, an out-of-context reference to something that happens in a novel is often meaningless to someone who hasn't read that novel, and the memory of this reference doesn't really start to surface or take on any meaning until the reader is pretty deep into the novel and familiar with its setting and characters. It's like getting a tiny chip of stone with a couple of runes on it in an unknown language, and then losing the stone; then, years later, having learned the language, you remember the stone, and you can suddenly understand it. And yet you're never sure you're remembering the runes correctly: perhaps it was the sign for "water" and not the sign for "death" after all. You didn't know the language when you saw the stone, so how good can your memory be? That's how I felt reading The Woman in White, and that's how I feel reading Villette. 

When I began reading Villette, I didn't know what to expect. Who or what was Villette, for example? The main character? Another character? A place? I knew the main character was named Lucy Snowe, and I knew she had something to do with teaching--maybe she was a governess? But maybe I was confusing her with Agnes Grey? It's hard to tell those Brontes apart. When I started reading the novel, I realized the narrator wasn't making much of an effort to give me a clearer idea about what was going on. We don't even find out the narrator's name until the second chapter.

I found out that Paul has never read Villette, and in order that he can read it with fresh eyes, I told him I wouldn't post my impressions of the novel until he'd finished it. But since most of my impressions of Villette have to do with obfuscation and confusion, I thought it might be safe to post some of them now, when I'm about halfway through the novel. If Paul--or any other reader--doesn't want to know anything about Villette, stop reading here (or maybe I should have warned you to stop reading before I told you what I new about the novel before I started reading!) But if you do read on, you won't learn much.

Some thoughts about Villette: 

• Everything is Obfuscated. It's like the opposite of that Jonathan Safran Foer book! Just kidding, I have never read that book. But seriously: we don't find out the narrator's name until chapter 2; we don't find out how old she is until much later than that; we don't get details about what she looks like until pretty late either (I should look up precisely when this happens.) Some crucial information is never revealed--or hasn't been revealed yet, at least. Crises occur in her life, crises crucial to the development of the plot, which are never explicitly described; instead, we get extended metaphors, like this one describing some tragedy (a death in the family? later clues suggest this, but they come much later):
  
  "I must somehow have fallen overboard, or that there must have been wreck at last. I too well remember a time--a long time--of cold, of danger, of contention."
  
  It's not unusual for a novelist to liken a personal or family tragedy to falling overboard, or to a shipwreck; but the metaphor is all we get; we only learn what happens to the ship or the sailors, never to Lucy and her family. Which brings us to
• Extended Metaphors! Maybe we should call them metaphysical conceits, because they are super-elaborate, and go on forever, until we feel completely detached from what's actually happening in the material world (see "Introspection/Solipsism" and also "Disquieting Muses.") The metaphors are often very beautiful and very scary--like this one, which I read to Paul last night & therefore which cannot ruin his experience of reading Villette more than it's already been ruined:
  
  "This longing, and all of a similar kind, it was necessary to knock on the head; which I did, figuratively, after the manner of Jael to Sisera, driving a nail through their temples. Unlike Sisera, they did not die: they were but transiently stunned, and at intervals would turn on the nail with a rebellious wrench: then did the temples bleed, and the brain thrill to its core."
  
  Take a minute to think about how crazy that is. Lucy is driving a nail through the temples of her own longings, which turn (grotesquely! graphically!) on the nail in an act that makes their temples--the longings' temples!--bleed, and their brains thrill to the core! Unless it's Lucy's brain, because there's no possessive pronoun there. Since the longings are presumably in her brain, or her soul (lots of weird Victorian mind/body stuff going on in this novel with nerves and physiognomy and so on) I guess her brain is thrilling to the core even as the longings' brains are. There is a lot of stuff going on in Lucy's brain, because this novel is full of . . .

• Introspection/Solipsism. All these observations are related, of course! An introspective novel--a novel more interested in the workings of the narrator's mind rather than the comings and goings of the outside world--is only interested in the outside world inasmuch as it affects the mind. So we don't always know what's going on out there. Although on the other hand we get tons of details about kind of unimportant stuff, like how everyone does their hair. Which you know I love! and which maybe makes sense, because how a girl does her hair is a physical detail that might matter to a weird, shy, confused female narrator; it might be something she wants to figure out, or show her contempt for, so she experiences it materially--she wonders how it's done--while the great dramatic upheavals of her life are mostly emotionally important to her. It's how it feels to her--like being in a storm, like being shipwrecked, like being a man overboard--that matters, rather than what happened. Maybe a hairstyle can't make you feel too much, so we just get the description of the hairstyle. Although! again! there are some great descriptions about the emotional effect objects can have on you. Oh man there is a great scene where she wakes up in an unfamiliar room filled with familiar furniture. It is crazy, you guys. Anyway, I find that I've been falling asleep a lot reading Villette, even though I believe it to be fascinating and crazy, because it's so often abstract, introspective, inside the narrator's consciousness, and I tend to like literature that is very concrete, materialistic, empirical? Filled with evidence of the outside world: dialogue, food, those scraps of written evidence that fill up those other novels I've read so far. Villette has great details, but often huge sections where you feel shipwrecked, like you have nothing in the Real World to hold on to. What is really happening? I recently explained that I don't care if I'm a Brain in a Vat, especially (as Paul pointed out) if I'm communicating with other brains. But I don't necessarily want to know I'm a brain in a vat. I want to believe there's something concrete to hold on to. 
• Disquieting Muses. Related to the extended metaphors & the solipsism: the narrator's habit of personifying all abstract concepts as female figures with whom she is sharing her body--and often with whom she's locked in some kind of weird struggle--contributes to the feeling that there's more going on inside her brain than outside it. The "longings" in the passage above are an example of this, although they aren't feminized; but Reason, Feeling, Despair, and a whole lot of other concepts/emotions are women who haunt the narrator as much as any ghost in a Gothic novel (and Villette is kind of a Gothic novel, and there's some haunting, which I will discuss in the next post, maybe?) Of course I love this, because my new obsession is with doubles and muses in women's writing. How wonderful to have kind of a crazy antagonistic relationship with your own Reason! My creeped-out delight in this was probably enhanced by the fact that, since I spent this morning at my friend Lizzie's apartment waiting for her carpet to be delivered, I read a Batman comic in her bedroom in which Bruce Wayne had an argument with a totally scary inhuman Batman apparition who proposed that they voluntarily split his psyche down the middle like Two Face's is. How interesting.
• French People Are Fat. The narrator of Villette is kind of mean in a lot of ways, the most conventional of which is a very Victorian (and very English in general) hatred of Europeans and Catholics. Like Trollope, Charlotte Bronte seems to think Catholics are all annoying proselytizers out to convert unwilling or unwitting Protestants back to the true Church. New flash, you guys: you are all basically Catholics! No, I guess it makes them extra nervous because Catholics are getting more and more freedom in England throughout the nineteenth century. I guess I should look up some of those dates!
  
  But also it's interesting for me personally: as an English-speaking white person, it's usually pretty easy for me to imagine that British literature is "my" literature, that when a Victorian writer is talking about "us" he's including me, that when Ruskin says "look around this English room of yours" he means my American room. The fact that I'm a woman ought to complicate this, but I'm particularly interested in the experiences of women readers, so I welcome those complications--and if I want to ignore them, I'm so well-trained in editing out my gender for texts with a presumed male reader (most women who read a lot can do this, I think) that I can. But when the Victorians start trashing Catholics I remember that I'm Catholic, and Irish, and American, and that none of those categories are included in the Victorian "us." This happens infrequently enough that when it does happen, it has a painful but salutary defamiliarizing effect. Like a little pinprick. It's a useful reminder. I wonder what relation my reaction to the Catholic stuff bears to the reaction nonwhite readers--particularly those from former British colonies--have to all the painful racist stuff in Victorian literature. I glide by that stuff with the same amused condescension I give to the sexist stuff--"oh, that's just what they do, those Victorians; aren't they cute?"--but of course the racist stuff is worse than the sexist stuff. Because you know the male English writer likes women--his mom is one, his wife is one--even if he thinks we're stupid or whatever. He still wants to hang out with us and sleep with us. But he might genuinely hate and fear the Chinese or Indian or African guy he's stereotyping in this story. He doesn't snuggle up with an African guy at night. Well, if he does, good for him, maybe.
  
  More interesting and maybe less troubling is Bronte's emphasis on the differences between French and English education, particularly education for women. We're still in an era when English girls are known all over Europe--and the world?--for being liberated, unchaperoned but trustworthy. Rousseau went on and on about this in his preface to Julie: English girls are trusted to do all kinds of things and go all kinds of places and meet all kinds of people, and to read novels etc., but when they're married they're expected not to cheat on their husbands, while French girls are kept under lock and key until they're married (there's tons of surveillance in Villette) at which point they are all shocking and having affairs left and right.
  
  Also Villette is hilariously interested in how fat French ladies are and how much bread and jam they like to eat. I guess Charlotte Bronte never read French Women Don't Get Fat.