Completed reading Charlotte Bronte’s Villette. It is a magnificent work. I expected some flashes of brilliance or a craftily arranged plot. What amazed me is the denseness of her imagination and the maturity of her thought.
Lucy Snowe the orphan heroine of the novel arrives in Villette searching for a vocation to establish herself and live her life. What follows is the psychological conflict Lucy is forced into with the other people in her life. Madame Beck, Ginerva, Dr.Bretton, Paulina, M.Bassompierre her Godmother, Paul and Pierre Silas; all her superiors in life, in fortune, in connections and familial bonds. Lucy Snowe’s desperate need for love draws her closer first to Dr.Bretton and then to Paul Emmanuel the literature teacher at Madame Beck’s pensionnat.
A strong mood of Platonic spirituality permeates the novel and the expression of love is mostly fraternal. Only towards the final chapters, two marriages are consummated; that of Paulina with Bretton and that of Ginerva with Count Hamal. The hope of Lucy’s union with Paul Emmanuel on his return from the West Indies after 3 years remains unfulfilled as there is a hint of a violent storm wrecking all the vessels in the Atlantic.
There is certainly an element of Gothicness in the novel. Villette is a charming little town with its parks, alleys, farmhouses, churches and boarding houses. The establishment of Madame Beck too has its share of surprises; garrets, attics, a dead man, abandoned parks, and a nun walking the nights. The Gothicness perhaps lies in the protagonist chiefly. She is a sufferer; she lacerates herself in pain, in denial and in abandoning the tenets of optimism and joiedevivre. Not for her the goodness or the robustness of life. She is one who finds her solace in work.
Villette will be remembered for the splendour of its language, the richness of its narration, the tremendous force of its heroine, who loves and suffers, agonizes and rejoices,who is re conciliatory and reconciled but lives with an energy suffused in self doubt. One would want to draw parallels between the novels written by the other Bronte sisters. The character of Jane Eyre for example who is also a governess or Catherine in Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte have a striking resemblance to Lucy Snowe in that they are all of them intense, enigmatic and impenetrable. They carry a plaintive note, acutely aware of their social position and standing, soliciting solitude and work rather than company and gaiety. The circumstances of their family, suffering and deprivation coupled by illness and death of loved family members could have cast a cloud of gloom over their novels. Although sombreness over shadows the novel, it doesn’t diminish the literary quality of the novel. Gothicness is the predominant quality that characterizes both Jane Eyre and Villette. The fear of the unknown both in Nature and people around us leads to many surprising discoveries, small horrors and a general feeling of stupefaction at the turn of events unfolding. This quality that shapes the novels of Charlotte Bronte is touched upon in Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Bronte. Her strong religious views tempered by an enlightened understanding of individual freedom, ability and choice, the family circumstances and the towering spectacle of Nature around her county dominate the narrative process in these novels. Novels like Villette cannot be written any more especially because; the moorings of the novelist, the angst of the times, and the spirit of modernity in protest against a stifling, decadent patriarchy cannot be recreated. A similar battle waged by Tess in Tess of the D’Urbervilles ends in tragedy. Read Villette to enjoy Charlotte Bronte’s narrative power, the microscopic portrayal of character and the subtle play of human emotion in love and conflict.