Villette (4 page)

Like most Brontë heroines it is Lucy’s singularity that causes others to notice her. These admirers include: Ginevra Fanshawe, a fashionable English pupil who “lived her full life in a ballroom; elsewhere she drooped dispirited” (p. 160); the suave and charming Graham Bretton, who reappears in France as Dr. John; and the brilliant, tempestuous Paul Emmanuel, a fellow teacher. All of them bring Lucy into the spotlight seemingly against her will. The lovely Ginevra, whom Lucy first meets on the boat to France, is a spoiled, determined girl out to catch a suitable husband. Ginevra’s antagonistic and playful relationship with Lucy is a contrast to the quieter, more subdued interactions between Lucy and Polly. Unlike Polly, who wishes to be good, Ginevra revels in her selfishness and ability to spark desire in others.

In a strange series of events, Lucy’s identity becomes intertwined with Ginevra’s. First, in the darkness of the garden, a letter intended for Ginevra is dropped in her lap. In a subsequent scene, Lucy is persuaded by Paul Emmanuel to act as Ginevra’s suitor in a school play, a part she insists on playing in her own dress with the ornament of a tie to signify her masculinity. She then discovers that Ginevra is her rival for Dr. John’s affections, and she finally comes face to face with Ginevra in a telling scene in which they are looking at one another in a mirror. Lucy narrates: “She turned me and herself round; she viewed us both on all sides; she smiled, she waved her curls, she retouched her sash, she spread her dress, and finally, letting go my arm, and curtseying with mock respect, she said: ‘I would not be you for a kingdom’ ” (p. 164). Cruelly, Ginevra continues, “I believe you never were in love and never will be; you don’t know the feeling: and so much the better, for though you might have your own heart broken, no living heart will you ever break” (pp. 164—165).

Ginevra’s mistaken assumptions that Lucy will never be in love and that she will never break someone else’s heart are challenges Lucy will win by the end of the story. In the domain of bourgeois social conventions, Ginevra cannot see herself as powerful until she crowns Lucy as powerless. Yet Lucy is not devastated by Ginevra’s remarks, nor does she see her as completely ridiculous. Brontë’s narrative juxtaposition of the two characters, particularly Lucy’s role as Ginevra’s scolding conscience and as her suitor in the school play, suggests that Lucy must contend somehow with the visible possibilities of her identity.

Lucy begins to emerge as an embodied character, a woman with passion and desire, in relation to both her opposition to Ginevra and her secret wish to possess Ginevra’s seductive qualities. When she discovers that Dr. John is Ginevra’s clandestine admirer “Isadore,” Lucy rages inwardly at Ginevra’s unfair treatment of him:

Against her will, Lucy yearns to be noticed and to be loved by Dr. John; she reveals this to her readers in her rant against Ginevra and in the next few chapters when she undergoes a nervous breakdown.

After a period of collapse and recovery at Mrs. Bretton’s home outside Villette, Lucy begins to try on the possibility of becoming a visible presence. As part of her developing courtship with Dr. John, she is taken outside of the confines of the school and the domestic space of the Bretton household to the theater and to an art gallery. In one scene Lucy critiques an overtly sexual painting of Cleopatra along with a chaste series of images depicting “La vie d’une femme.” A few chapters later, she has the opportunity to witness the great actress Vashti perform. (Vashti is modeled after the French diva Rachel, whom Brontë saw perform during the period when she was writing
Villette
.) These moments are meditations on the possibilities for representing the complexity of women using various artistic forms.

Both the spaces of the art gallery and the theater provide an opportunity for Lucy to look and to be looked at. There is something vaguely dangerous about her proximity to the revealing portrait of Cleopatra, which she finds to be “an enormous piece of claptrap” (p. 227). At the same time, the depictions of women in the more acceptable paintings are equally repulsive to her: “All these four ‘Anges’ were grim and gray as burglars, and cold and vapid as ghosts. What women to live with! insincere, ill-humoured, bloodless, brainless nonentitites! As bad in their way as the indolent gipsy-giantess, the Cleopatra, in hers” (pp. 229-230). While musing on these extreme portrayals of femininity, Lucy is startled by Paul Emmanuel, who scolds her for looking at the sensual image of Cleopatra. They exchange biting remarks on the museum bench while Dr. John emerges from the other room. Lucy watches, waits for him to look at the painting, and then leaves Paul to join her preferred suitor. Clearly, in the art gallery Lucy is caught between her two suitors, but she is also suspended in the liminal realm between having come of age and being too old for love, the past and the present, the excessive visibility of the sexual female and the depressing invisibility of the ghostly, grim, and proper woman.

Perhaps testing the limits of her own attractiveness, Lucy decides to wear a pink dress to the theater and personifies the costume as an alien alter ego: “A pink dress! I knew it not. It knew not me!” (p. 235). Catching a glimpse of herself in the mirror, she almost doesn’t recognize the person in the glass: “Thus for the first, and perhaps only time in my life, I enjoyed the ‘giftie’ of seeing myself as others see me. No need to dwell on the result. It brought a jar of discord, a pang of regret” (p. 238). Several chapters later, Lucy’s amazed response to the bold actress Vashti is another cautionary reaction to putting one’s body and one’s desires on stage. Lucy narrates, “I found upon her something neither of woman nor of man: in each of her eyes sat a devil.... Hate and Murder and Madness incarnate, she stood” (p. 291). At the same time, Vashti’s courageous performance is something that Lucy cannot help but admire. “The strong magnetism of genius drew my heart out of its wonted orbit.... I had seen acting before, but never anything like this: never anything which astonished Hope and hushed Desire; which outstripped Impulse and paled Conception” (p. 293). When Dr. John dismisses Vashti’s talents, Lucy laments, “For what belonged to storm, what was wild and intense, dangerous, sudden, and flaming, he had no sympathy, and held with it no communion” (p. 293). In other words, “He judged her as a woman, not an artist” (p. 294). It is the beginning of the end of their relationship.

Brontë’s ambivalence about being a female public celebrity is embedded in Lucy’s double responses to Vashti. While Lucy sees Vashti as a true artist, an immensely powerful and all-consuming presence, she still must distance herself from the actress’s unmitigated representation of emotion. The connection between Vashti’s art and her physical presence is something both monstrous and fantastical. When a fire breaks out in the theater after Vashti’s performance, Lucy and Dr. John are caught in the rush to get out of the building. Someone inquires if Dr. John is with anyone and he replies, “I have a lady ... but she will be neither hindrance nor incumbrance” (p. 296). These dismissive words effectively banish Lucy back to the invisible shadowy world of insignificance. Lucy’s hopes with Graham have gone up in flames.

In rejecting a representation of femininity through the theater and the arts—both embodied, visual genres—Brontë implies that what is left is writing. The fascinating essence of the provocative Vashti—what Lucy terms “wild,” “intense,” and “flaming”—can perhaps be expressed only through the expansive possibility of words. Lucy begins to imagine what such passion might look like in language. Suddenly there are two Lucys writing in the novel: one composing rational, cryptic letters to Graham, the other narrating the tortuous process of creating these vexed public documents while desperately waiting for a response. When Lucy vehemently revises and rewrites letters to Graham, actions dictated by the “hag reason,” the anguish of the prose in the novel is at its most heightened.

Perhaps ironically, the death of Lucy’s romance with Graham—symbolized by her sealing his letters in a glass jar and burying them under a tree in the garden—is the birth of her connection to Monsieur Paul. The last third of the novel details their strange and vexed courtship, a relationship haunted by Lucy’s memories of Graham. Paul’s recognition of Lucy’s desire for Graham and her mourning his loss—at one point Paul exclaims, “You remind me, then, of a young she wild creature, new caught, untamed, viewing with a mixture of fire and fear the first entrance of the breaker-in” (p. 262)—enables him to see her as no one else does. Before Lucy can recognize and return Paul’s passion for her, she must relive witnessing the pairing of Graham and the newly arrived, now adult, Polly Home. Once again, Lucy becomes ghostly, while Polly takes center stage.

Lucy’s emotions are expressed through her particular attention to specific objects: Graham’s letters and a cigar case that Lucy received the evening they went to the theater. Lucy explains, “To this day I keep my cigar-case: it serves, when I look at it, to remind me of old times, and one happy evening” (p. 252). In this instance, Brontë reveals Lucy in the scene of writing, reminding her readers that they are in the theater of the novel—immersed in scenes from Lucy’s past. The effect is similar to drawing up the curtain at an unexpected moment. All of a sudden, we are forced to acknowledge that there is a world outside of the story, one that includes the old and mostly invisible Lucy Snowe. Our inability to see the “real” Lucy both physically and emotionally is an uncanny displacement that the reader must contend with in order to make sense of the story.

This positioning of distant author and present heroine (a version of the author’s past self) mirrors Brontë’s complex relationship to the semi-real events in the novel. Just as we can’t make one-to-one connections between Brontë’s life and Brontë’s fiction, we also have the same difficulty reconciling the authorial Lucy’s narrative with the story unfolding in the novel. For instance, although the reader wants to believe in Lucy’s romance with Paul, because it is a romance of equals, there is still the unsettling knowledge that after many years Lucy is still holding on to relics of Graham.

Since we are aware of Lucy’s fondness for objects, when she makes a special watchguard for Paul’s festival day we are clued in that she is beginning to see him as someone worthy of her attention. Perversely, she decides not to give him the present at the moment she is expected to, creating an odd and awkward spectacle. M. Paul responds to her neglect with a public diatribe on the horrors of English women. Lucy narrates:

Imbedded in M. Paul’s rant is a kind of vituperative laundry list of their differences: He is French, she is English; he is Catholic, she is Protestant; he is classically educated, she is not; he is emotional, she is reserved. In short, neither one is what the other expects to be drawn toward. Their extended denial of affection eventually turns into love. Lucy forgives M. Paul for spying on her, yelling at her, and embarrassing her by pointing out her desire for Dr. John. Interestingly, Lucy can’t see Paul as a love object until there are obstacles: Madame Beck, whose own passion for M. Paul threatens to destroy their romance, and the tiny witch-like creature Madame Walravens, who holds the key to M. Paul’s mysterious past.

In one of the last segments of the novel, Lucy takes a walk around Villette under the influence of opium. The resolutions of the novel play out in front of her in a carnivalesque series of images. Lucy describes the events using theatrical imagery: “Somehow I felt, too, that the night’s drama was but begun, that the prologue was scarce spoken: throughout this woody and turfy theatre reigned a shadow of mystery; actors and incidents unlooked-for, waited behind the scenes” (p. 515). Lucy watches Polly, Graham, and Mrs. Bretton in a blissful moment of familial contentment. She looks at Graham but believes that he does not see her: “He might think, he might even believe that Lucy was contained within that shawl, and sheltered under that hat; he could never be certain for he did not see my face” (p. 515). She imagines that he keeps a small closet for her in his psyche called “Lucy’s room,” and she holds one for him, “All my life long I carried it folded in the hollow of my hand” (p. 515).

In her ghostly costume, Lucy floats on, witnessing several scenes that help to wrap up the plot of the novel. In one she discovers the schemings of Madame Beck, Père Silas, and Madame Walravens, who have plotted to send M. Paul to the West Indies to get him out of her way. In another, she spots Ginevra and her lover, who is the key to the mystery of the ubiquitous nun, eloping in a carriage.