“Bronte’s finest novel.”
Virginia Woolfe
“It is a still more wonderful book than Jane Eyre. There is something almost preternatural in its power.”
George Eliot
The book? Villette by Charlotte Bronte.
As longtime readers of this here space know, I have long had a deep loathing of Jane Eyre. (More about that anon.) And so saying that Villette is a superior novel is potentially damning with faint praise. So, let us start with a declarative: Villette is good, really good, well worth reading.
Our heroine (and narrator), Lucy Stowe, is a young English woman who finds herself working in a boarding school in the French town of Villette. Love interests? Of course there are (this is a Bronte novel). A strapping young doctor and a jaded French instructor. Ah, but there is also the beautiful young rival, a vain lass lacking any hint of seriousness, and another beautiful rival, lacking any depth of any sort. Toss in an unscrupulous suitor for the first rival, the father of the latter rival, an oddly terrifying matron of the school, and an enigmatic priest. You can now write a story very much like Villette.
In other words, there is nothing about this plot that makes the story in any way significantly different than every other romantic bildungsroman. You’ve read this story a zillion times already. The only questions the reader has throughout the book are a) which love interest will win out in the end? and b) will they live happily ever after?
It is the nature of our heroine that makes the story compelling. Early on, she describes herself:
I had wanted to compromise with Fate: to escape occasional great agonies by submitting to a whole life of privation and small pains. Fate would not so be pacified; nor would Providence sanction this shrinking sloth and cowardly indolence.
Lucy Snowe does not see herself, nor does she want to be, the protagonist in this story. Note the title of the book; Villette is the town in which the story takes place; it would be hard to think of a title for the novel which would signify less attachment to the narrator. Eliot (T.S., not George) could have been writing a character description of Lucy when he wrote:
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous
Secondary characters like that abound in literature. When secondary characters are the narrator, they are usually detached observers of the actions of others. But, in Villette, Lucy tries to fade into the background while narrating the story of her life in which she is the central character of every interesting episode. It is a curiously effective narrative style.
An observer at heart, Lucy notices much of what is going on around her, but only whenever it does not touch on her personally. Perpetually oblivious to how others see her, we have a heroine who is trying to avoid grand gestures or scenes while patiently seeking out and enduring a myriad of small privations and pains, caught up is a grand romantic novel with romantic intrigues all around, occasionally touching herself. It is the narration, not the plot, which makes this novel so compelling. It has the aura of a detective story without a crime; the reader is constantly trying to be one step ahead of the seemingly clueless narrator in figuring out what is really going on.
There are frequent payoffs in brilliantly crafted descriptions. Here, for example, is how the woman who runs the school is described:
Never was the distinction between charity and mercy better exemplified than in her. While devoid of sympathy, she had a sufficiency of rational benevolence: she would give in the readiest manner to people she had never seen—rather, however, to classes than to individuals. “Pour les pauvres,” she opened her purse freely—against the poor man, as a rule, she kept it closed. In philanthropic schemes for the benefit of society at large she took a cheerful part; no private sorrow touched her: no force or mass of suffering concentrated in one heart had power to pierce hers. Not the agony in Gethsemane, not the death on Calvary, could have wrung from her eyes one tear.
Brilliant. I know a lot of people just like that. (This is, in fact, also a great summary of the thesis in Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals. In crisp biographies of intellectual titans in the past couple hundred years, Johnson mercilessly shows how an intellectual having a very public deep concern for mankind does not correspond with treating real people in their lives with even a modicum of decency. Rousseau, Shelley, Marx, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Russell, Sartre, and on and on. “Biography as Character Assassination” could be the subtitle of Intellectuals. It is a brilliant book, and wonderfully fun reading.)
While the novel is well worth reading, Villette is not a perfect story. I enjoyed the first two-thirds much more than the last third, which seemed like a jarring shift in tone. In retrospect, the nature of the last third could be interpreted as a change in Lucy herself—she is the narrator after all, so maybe the change in tone is due to the maturation of the narrator. But as it is, it struck me as quite inelegant.
There is also a truly annoying subplot about a ghost haunting the school (mostly in the attic!), which plays no real role in the story and the grand reveal is simply lame. If you are going to have a mysterious ghost in a novel like this, at least have it do something interesting and have the explanation be a lot less painful.
But, none of the above was the most stunning part of reading Villette. The biggest shock for me personally while reading this novel: I realized I have been wrong all along about Jane Eyre.
Somewhere in the middle of reading Villette, the scales fell from my eyes and I suddenly understood Jane Eyre. Mind, the shock of this realization was huge—I have read Jane Eyre at least three times, and here, reading a completely different novel, I finally understood Jane.
Jane Eyre is simply a slightly more adventurous version of Lucy Stowe. It explains so much about Jane and suddenly the constant descriptions of and obsession with the minor privations and pains which she endures, the weird fascination with Rochester, sticking with Rochester even after she discovers he is keeping his wife locked in an attic, the unwillingness to actually just move on with her life, and on and on—all of that is simply a slight variation on Lucy Stowe.
Don’t get me wrong: I am not eagerly anticipating rereading Jane Eyre. But, for the first time since I first read it, I can understand why everyone else seems to adore the book so very much. Jane is the wallflower who is trying to move to center stage.
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