Villette

Lucy Snowe is such a fascinating character. Brontë's ability to add so many layers to her narration is what makes the book. The withholding of self, of feelings, the tricks we play on ourselves to endure suffering -- the contrast of her with the other female characters -- the humor -- the intrigue ... The end still got me.

Strano romanzo. Cupo, prolisso, triste. Eppure contiene qualcosa di prezioso a suo modo. La prima parte è assolutamente noiosa, la protagonista piuttosto antipatica perché pare soffrire delle proprie disgrazie (non precisate) e riversarle sugli altri sotto forma di cinismo. Decisamente strana, nevrotica, sincera fino alla quasi maleducazione, insolita... Moderna. La seconda parte è leggermente più interessante e movimentata.. ma il finale è brusco, in poche righe la possibilità di una felicità si rompe e non c'è più tempo e voglia di raccontare nulla, come se la morte calasse un velo nero anche su chi rimane vivo. In certi tratti si nota troppo la voce dell'autrice, che espone molto se stessa sotto le spoglie di Lucy. Di solito show more non mi dà fastidio leggere l'autore tra le righe, ma mi è venuto in mente quello che dice la Woolf sulla Brontë in "Una stanza tutta per sé": e cioè che la Austen le è superiore perché pare essere in qualche modo andata oltre il dolore della sua condizione mentre la Bronte no. Ho trovato questo giudizio perfettamente calzante. Il confronto con Jane Eyre è significativo. Villette (che poi anche il titolo non è granché perché la cittadina di lingua francese - fittizia - non è che un contorno in fondo, mentre le protagoniste sono senza dubbio le sofferenze psichiche della protagonista) è più maturo perché non ha un lieto fine, perché parla anche di tematiche complesse. Convertirsi al cattolicesimo o restare protestanti? In realtà da questo sviluppo della trama sgorga una difesa aggressiva del protestantesimo che è sicuramente nel cuore e nella testa dell'autrice e non di Lucy. Sperare nell'Amore è consolazione o illusione? Il messaggio del libro pare essere: amici miei, la felicità esiste, l'amore esiste, esistono le Polly e i Graham, ricchi, intelligenti e uniti; ma a me Lucy Snowe/Charlotte Brontë non è stato dato in sorte che dolore. Se ne esce quindi con una teoria nichilista quasi: impossibile prescindere dalla fede religiosa in tale contesto storico, ma la sensazione è che a volte l'autrice stessa non sappia come definire le prove che Dio manda ai suoi figli sfortunati, e ne coglie quantomeno una sorta di teoria della predestinazione negativa. Quindi le tematiche sono molto impegnative e in questo senso è sì un romanzo maturo... ma senza speranza. Senza leggerezza. Buio, senza redenzione, almeno in questa vita. Jane Eyre sicuramente è più giovanile, più insulso come tematiche, ma pur essendo la protagonista di temperamento piuttosto malinconico, ha una vena più fresca e una scrittura più piacevole rispetto a certe tirate moralistiche decisamente pesanti e a certe descrizioni assolutamente lente e meno naturalistiche (non per nulla il contesto è quasi sempre cittadino: strade, carrozze, stanze piùo meno lussuose, sobborghi. Molto raramente giardini, che sembrano però prigioni recintate; pare un romanzo quasi claustrofobico). In conclusione la penso esattamente come la Woolf: testo maturo, testo molto filosofico ma ahimè di valore letterario alla fine parecchio inferiore ad altre opere meno significative forse, ma più godibili, almeno a mio parere. show less

Lucy is one of the most coy narrators I've encountered, almost annoyingly so. She seems almost to enjoy subterfuge: "There is a perverse mood of the mind which is rather soothed than irritated by misconstruction." She indulges this mood more than a little, not just with other characters but with the reader as well. She doesn't want to talk at all about what drives her out of England on an aimless path to Brussels - pardon, Villette - only referring vaguely to an unhappy home life she could no longer tolerate. There's some strange withholding of information that would normally irritate me, but here I find forgivable because it's such of a piece with the portrayal of Lucy's character. So far as narrators go, she's untrustworthy but not show more always through meaning to be; she is, rather, deeply engaged in hiding things from herself.

I find it strange to say, then, that Lucy emerges as a character with incredible depth. Charlotte Bronte was brilliant at writing grounded women who have their emotional struggles but reason through and past them. Lucy's struggle is with her avoidance of feeling or desiring anything too intensely. Strong emotion overwhelms her and she keeps all of it at bay, the good together with the bad. When she does release it, it tends to come forward in emphatic bursts. Otherwise she maintains her inner and outer peace, often at great cost to herself and confusion for those around her. She presents differently to each person (a very real phenomena) such that all of the secondary characters almost know her as being different people. She is satisfied to play these various roles for these various audiences, an actor in life even while proving she has no interest in the stage.

The romantic pairing comes as a total surprise, and is a reverse of what Bronte did with Jane: there, the obvious match proved less than ideal (at first). Here, a seemingly far from ideal match proves otherwise. As a reader I was both pleased and amused by it. Were Lucy my daughter, however much he redeems himself I might still have cautioned her against the match. A man of sudden temper who indulges in extreme verbal abuses without warning? And his first physical touch is to pull her ear? The conclusion is as equally surprising, and brave. show less

In the introduction to the second volume of Absolute Sandman, Alisa Kwitney defined literature as fiction that creates "a taste for itself" rather than simply satisfying pre-existing tastes.

I read this definition the same night I finished Vilette, and thought it went a great way to explaining why I love nineteenth-century novels. Written just as the novel was getting into stride, novels like Vilette are bold and striking because their authors knew they were being more ambitious than much of what had come before, and knew better than to play by the rules. The Brontës are of course a special case because they were women literally playing by their own rules, writing fiction under male pseudonyms for a readership which they had little in show more common with. (Of course at the same time the Brontës are writing gothic novels, but they are no more true gothic novels than Sandman is a true horror comic.)

So Vilette is long, winding, off-kilter, and occasionally a little sentimental or frustrating, but it's a fantastic novel, because it's so rich and convinced of its own richness. It's a theological inquiry into the meaning of suffering, an off-kilter courtship novel, an orphan story, a psychological study, a gothic novel rich with symbolism, a story about gender roles, a story about nationality and faith, and a postmodern novel with an unreliable narrator who dares to end her tale with a piece of metafiction which led to infuriated letters from Brontë's close friends.

There is only one Vilette. It's a really good novel. Go read it!

ETA: Oh, I did mean to put in a little note about how you will spend like a fifth of the novel flipping to the end to read French-to-English translations. I have some basic French reading comprehension but there is an awful lot of it in this one. I suppose it simply was very common to speak French in 1850s England. It's a common assumption of many novels of the period but Vilette is one of the most extreme. I bet it would be really enjoyable for confident bilinguals, though, because she does such an interesting job code-switching. show less

SPOILERS THROUGHOUT THIS REVIEW

TL;DR: There are a few things I liked about this book, but overall, to me, this is an instance where changing times and mores have rendered earlier centuries’ attitudes too distasteful to be ignored.

I liked the main character. Miss Snowe is clever, resourceful, and knows what she wants (even if her ambitions are low). Her snarkiness plays a big role in her charm. She’s a wonderfully complex character. There were enough interesting musings and general bird’s-eye views on life mixed in with the text, too. It drags in places, but overall the narrative maintains a pleasant momentum.

However.

The attitudes espoused in the book and held up by the characters as “how things ought to be” I found too show more distasteful to overlook: there’s aggressive patriarchal abuse, there’s sanctimonious posturing with religious credentials, and there’s colonial-style racism aplenty. They may make the text a rich field to explore intellectually, but they annoyed much of the reading pleasure out of me.

First, there’s the gender issues. Viewed as a romance novel, Villette presents the main character, introverted expat teacher Lucy Snowe, with the choice between two love interests. One is an ideal (English)man, whose ideal spouse is one who is his intellectual partner. And on the other hand there is M. Emanuel, a domineering, exacting brute with frightening anger management issues and temper tantrums, who will not tolerate contradiction or even imagined disobedience. His ideal woman is one who obeys him absolutely (an arch eyebrow will trigger a “know your place, woman” speech), who immerses herself in him, lives up to his exacting yet unspoken standards, and who successfully navigates his moving-the-goalposts scrutiny. Spoiler: This is the one Miss Snowe ends up choosing.

Brontë “redeems” M. Emanuel in true battered-woman form: his exactitude, tyranny and temper tantrums merely stem from genuine, full-on passion and honesty, dontcha see? That’s just who he is. Also, he’s been hurt before: doesn’t that earn him indulgence and compassion? That time he scolded her for wearing clothes that weren’t mouse-grey and wildly (and knowingly) exaggerated their showiness because even a mild “transgression” is a transgression? That’s not domineering, it just shows you he cares. His constantly lording his academic superiority over her, well he only means the best for her, and his expectations are high! Don’t you see that he needs to test her, to be sure she’ll live up to his standards? It’s for her own good. Really, he means well. That time he showed her some much-needed affection and then went completely incommunicado for two weeks, well, that was necessary because he was preparing a surprise, and he would not be able to keep it from her if she subjected him to her sincere and irresistible feminine questions. So you see, it really was her own fault. Also, her emotional despair during the interval is irrelevant, this really was about his emotions.

Lucy Snowe (and the reader) is not to notice the systematic pattern of denigration and abuse. We are invited to see him as a poor, suffering victim who needs fixing by a special woman who can see the real person underneath the abuse and tyranny.

This is where the religious hypocrisy comes in: M. Emanuel is, after all, a very pious man -- surely that will vouch for his decency?

Much is made of Emanuel’s strongly held Roman Catholicism: to illustrate that, it is revealed that he has been spending his last twenty years in self-imposed mortification, near-poverty and deprivation, in order to benefit people who kinda sorta wronged him. Brontë presents that as laudable and redeem-worthy because isn’t he just sooo pious? I thought it was merely perverse, a case of ostentatious and downright pathological Catholic guilt taken to extremes. Especially because the revelation about his mortification is presented to the reader as an invitation to reconsider the quality of his character: it takes principles and lofty morality and strength of resolve to commit to this course of action. Well, no. To me, this turns the whole affair into a case of ostentatious flagellation, calculated to trigger goodwill: showy Catholic suffering used as emotional manipulation while pretending to high morality. Somebody is suffering beyond necessity; therefore the issue is deep and admirable and worthwhile. No, it really, really isn’t. (It is true that it is Brontë who sets it up like this, but in-universe it is M. Emanuel who expects the revelation to change Miss Snowe’s opinion of him, too.)

And finally, there is the racism. The main cast consists mostly of smug, impossibly arrogant English expats looking down on both the locals and the immigrants -- except other Englishmen, and the occasional Frenchman, who, after all, represents a prestigious and long-standing High Culture. They are so smug they do not realize they are immigrants too -- and do not realize their smugness. The native people of Labassecour/Belgium are generally described as too rural, ugly and stupid to merit any interest, except for a few of the ones who’ve mastered enough French to not sound like a local. Anyone who’s worth noticing is either a French or an English expat/immigrant; even the indigenous royalty, nobility and bourgeoisie is dismissed haughtily, not to be taken seriously as company or one’s intellectual equals.
(Disclaimer: I myself am Belgian.)

It’s not as though these issues are mainly located in the background as (well, the racism is, usually): the patriarchal abuse is held up front and center, and the main focus of the book, and this made it too hard for me to give the book the benefit of the doubt. The fact that pretentious religious posturing is presented as a redeeming factor did not help. show less

"I seemed to hold two lives--the life of thought, and that of
reality; and, provided the former was nourished with a sufficiency of the strange necromantic joys of fancy, the privileges of the latter might remain limited to daily bread, hourly work, and a roof of shelter."

Lucy Snowe, the book's heroine, has good common sense, steely nerves, and no protectors. Not for her the life of a hothouse bloom--she must fend for herself from an early age. After the old woman she works for dies, she is left homeless and without friends or family to appeal to. On the spur of the moment, she uses her small store of money to go to France, and thence, to the little town of Villete. There, she lucks into a position at a ladies' school, headed by the show more strong-minded, light-moraled Madame Beck.

Bronte made a few choices I didn't like. The book is almost comically prejudiced against "popery" and foreigners in general. The paragraphs upon paragraphs of how beautiful, dainty, feminine, delicate-minded, etc. Polly is seem to last forever. And I'm still not sure why Bronte had a nun haunt the school (I assumed it was to A) remind us of Lucy's repression and B)fufill the need for sensationalism), only to explain away the spectre in a sneering aside.

My problems aside, I enjoyed this book, mostly because I loved Lucy so much. She has a low opinion of herself but very high standards, is often depressed but refuses to be ruled by her darker moments, is thoughtful and introverted. She is, overall, someone I'd very much like to meet. Although she has a keen eye and recognizes her friends' faults, she never turns her incisive wit against them. After her love becomes disillusioned with his own paramour, the frivolous, selfish Ginevra, he denounces her to Lucy. Lucy points out that as mercenary as Ginevra is (as she warned him at the start), she has many good qualities; Lucy doesn't sound like a goody-two-shoes, but rather a girl defending her friend. Bronte writes friendships very well and very realistically, and these relationships, along with Lucy's engaging personality, are the backbone of the novel. show less

This book is 600 pages, but feels like 2,000. That's not to say it's a boring or difficult book, but it's a deeply introspective one (and veers a little too close to stream-of-conscience writing at times, to the book's detriment). It didn't always keep my attention and it would have benefited from better plotting, but the prose made me stop to admire it sometimes and I found Lucy a relatable, sympathetic character. Jane Eyre is far superior to this book, IMO, but I'm glad I gave this one a chance, even though at times I just wanted to finish it already so I could move on to something else (I had to return two books to the library unread while I worked through this one; it's not often that it takes me two weeks to finish a novel).