Villette Read Free Page A

many editions of novels by the Brontës, including Wuthering Heights, New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2004).
    In her descriptions of the simple lives and tragic early deaths of Emily and Anne, “two unobtrusive women” whose “perfectly secluded life gave them retiring manners and habits,” she begins to outline some of the most salient characteristics of the complex and difficult heroine of Villette. Brontë described her sister Emily as a unique and untamed presence: Under Emily’s “unpretending outside, lay a secret power and fire that might have informed the brain and kindled the veins of a hero.” The more demure Anne was “long-suffering, self-denying, reflective, and intelligent, a constitutional reserve and taciturnity placed and kept her in the shade, and covered her mind, and especially her feelings, with a sort of nun-like veil, which was rarely lifted.”
    Lucy’s combination of inner passion and outer reserve, repressive self-denial and deliberate strength, bitter resentment and outward goodness echoes qualities of both sisters. Lucy’s greatest attraction is her lively, intense, and unpredictable imagination; yet she is always checked by her “constitutional reserve,” the nun-like veil that hides her feelings, and her stringent sense of rationality. (The phantom-nun character that seems to appear in the novel at moments when Lucy is the most vulnerable is perhaps an ironic commentary on Lucy’s desire to bury her true desires.) Brontë’s acknowledgment that Emily and Anne were nothing to strangers, to superficial observers “less than nothing,” articulates a central paradox of the novel and of her unique position at the time the book was being conceived: How can a nineteenth-century woman be visible and invisible at the same time? Is the price of being somebody worth losing the safety of remaining a nobody?
    Unlike the straightforward narratives of Brontë’s earlier novels, particularly Jane Eyre, Villette is at times deliberately difficult to follow. With its mix of literary genres, the dizzying array of characters who appear, disappear, and appear again with different names, and a narrator who resists disclosure at the same moment that she is telling the story, the novel is a hall of mirrors, a descent into an uncanny world of deceptions and ambiguities. Throughout the book Brontë suggests that what you see is not always real, and that what you believe is imagined has its own haunting reality.
    Lucy is narrating the story from her recollections of a distant past; she is the central actress in the novel, but also the novel’s principal ghost. As she tells us, “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 white cap, like snow beneath snow” (p. 50). This is one of the few moments in the novel when Lucy refers to her present self. What we see is her past persona, the young Lucy coming of age, falling in love, bitterly disappointed and then finding romance again with a more appropriate and less conventional suitor. The narrative is an extended memory, and like all memories it is told through a series of emotions that have already occurred. Brontë captures this sense of doubleness, of existing in both the present and the past, through Lucy’s embodied and spectral personas. In imagining a heroine who remains ghostly and inaccessible, Brontë thwarts a strategy of reading that assumes complete knowledge and mastery. We cannot fully see and understand Lucy Snowe, in the same way that we will never be able to gain access to the real Charlotte Brontë.
    The first scenes of Villette take place at Lucy’s godmother’s house, where she is a frequent guest. There is no quick summary of her background or childhood; instead we are introduced to Polly Home, the small, doll-like child who will be the focus of the beginning of the novel and will later return to become one of the central female characters in the book.