Tag Archives: Villette

Physical Appearance in Charlotte Bronte’s “Villette”

Charlotte Bronte’s most popular novel is Jane Eyre, but Villette is by far her most complex, and my favorite. This near-psychedelic maze of a novel charts the narrator Lucy’s survival in a foreign country, her challenges as a working woman, and the price of solitude – illness, hallucinations, and mental breakdown – when she lives alone at the school during the two-month vacation. Not all readers like quiet, reserved Lucy,: in fact, Elizabeth Gaskell told Charlotte that she disliked Lucy.
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And yet I don’t see her as cold or dull. Lucy is a sweet but deeply flawed woman defined by a fierce intelligence, Protestantism, quiet charm, and hidden passion. She is not without bitterness, but that is born of circumstances and poverty. In the 19th century she navigates the uncertain career path of an unskilled woman. Marriage is one of life’s goals but not for her: with her parents’ death she fell out of the middle class into poverty.

it is not entirely different today: single women in our society are expected to marry, and often face a brutal struggle to find a “mate,” as opposed to bad blind dates. (Jill Bialosky writes about this in her brilliant memoir, Poetry Will Save Your Life.) Many women, like Lucy, still live on bare-bones salaries, because women’s salaries tend to be lower than men’s. Lucy is lucky to find a teaching job, but must live in the dormitory of the school. The students are rich; the teachers, ironically, are very poor, and cannot afford a home. But Madame Beck, the headmistress and owner of the school, values Lucy’s teaching and treats her like an equal.

In her twenties, Lucy has not given up on marriage; she has never dreamed of it at all. As an exceptional teacher at a girls’ school in Villette (Bronte’s fictional name for Brussels, where she herself went to school and taught for a few years), Lucy is a realist about her situation. But she is surrounded by talk of marriage. Her fellow teachers and her students dream about love and marriage. She knows it is unlikely that her colleagues will have the opportunity to marry.

But, first and foremost, Lucy’s plain appearance defines her in people’s eyes. Is she as homely as she thinks she is? This is not a problem for Charlotte Bronte’s other heroines. In Jane Eyre, Jane attracts the rich, rakish Mr. Rochester. In Shirley, Caroline and Shirley are both attractive, and both marry attractive men. Lucy does not value looks, but at the same time knows that her future might be different if she were better-looking. Eventually she does have a boyfriend. More later, but a hint: she might be better off without.

At the school, different classes of women – the students being the upper class, the employees the lower – have completely different expectations in terms of beauty and fashion. The students are well-dressed, but Lucy cannot afford fashionable clothing, nor does she wish to wear it. She is mousy, and her dresses are gray. She considers a simple, light pink dress, given her by her godmother, almost too bold to wear in public. She wants to disappear into the woodwork, to be unseen.

Contrast this with one of her students – a beautiful, vain English girl, Ginevra Fanshawe– who constantly talks about her clothes and her two boyfriends, whom she plays off against each other. Ginevra has persuaded one of her suitors – the one who can’t afford it, Dr. John – to give her gifts of of clothing and jewelry. She also regards her rich uncle as a bank. But however much Ginevra has, it is never enough. Fashion leaves her ravening for more.

Although Lucy finds Ginevra exasperating, Dr. John, the school doctor, is madly in love with her. Lucy learns all about it when she has a nervous breakdown, collapses on a street at night, and is discovered by Dr. John and a priest, who take her to Dr. John’s house to recover. And there she meets her godmother, Mrs. Bretton: it seems that Mrs. Bretton and her son, Dr. John, lost their money and moved to Villette, where John’s medical practice is thriving. Lucy and Dr. John become close friends, but he constantly praises Ginevra, and talks about how much Lucy must like and admire this sweet, naive girl. His delusions irritate her, and at one point she snaps at him. She has a sharp tongue, and his feelings are hurt.

But at a concert hall Lucy has a rude awakening: she is plain, perhaps plainer than she’d thought. She sees three fpeople walking toward her, and it turns out it is the reflection in a a mirror of the Brettons and herself: she is startled and disappointed when she recognizes herself in the pink dress. She had hoped that perhaps it would transform her, but no. And she has strong feelings for Dr. John, who does not return them. At one point he says that if she had been a boy they would have been brothers, friends who agreed about everything.

Eventually Lucy does have a boyfriend: an “absurd little man,” as she calls him, who teaches at the school. M. Paul is a fanatical Catholic. Educated by Jesuits, he spies on Lucy and others at the school. He goes through her drawers. He constantly harangues her and criticizes her. He reduces both Lucy and his students to tears. People are terrified of him, though Lucy staunchly ignores him when he oversteps. As the book goes on, he finally shows kindness to her.

Will Lucy marry him? Or not?

Parts of Villette are loosely – very loosely – autobiographical. Charlotte taught at a school in Brussels and fell in love with the married headmaster. But neither Emily nor Anne married, and Charlotte married a curate only after her sisters’ deaths. Charlotte died a year after her marriage of an intestinal infection while she was pregnant.

The Villette Rebellion

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I have a Villette book bag.

I designed and ordered a unique Villette bag from a personalized wedding paraphernalia website. I love to tuck a copy of Charlotte Bronte’s Villette into the mysteriously-named bag. (Villette is Bronte’s fictional name for Brussels, the city where she studied, taught, and fell in love.) On my first trip to London, Villette was my comfort book. When I got lost in Green Park (at least I think it was Green Park), I read Bronte to calm myself. Like Lucy Snowe, I had to ask directions.

Villette is the best kind of spinster lit. You don’t have to be a spinster to love it. The heroine Lucy Snowe’s story still appeals after many readings. She is witty and funny, as well as intense. The destitute Lucy surprises herself when, after the death of her employer, she dares to spend her last money traveling to Belgium alone. There’s nothing left for her in England. And in Villette, by the barest chance, Lucy reinvents herself as a brilliant English teacher.

This marvelous book is partly a realistic examination of love and work, and partly a Gothic novel with supernatural manifestations. In a couple of scenes, Lucy sees what may be the ghost of a nun; and there is a long hallucinatory scene after her rival administers a drug to her so she won’t be able to meet M. Paul, her potential lover. And so it’s a very modern book published in 1853: “Tune in, turn on, and drop out,” said Timothy Leary in the ’60s. Bronte in detail describes Lucy’s drug experience. Lucy would, however, never drop out. Lucy hangs in there. She might have liked the ’60s.

My much-read Penguin hardcover of Villette and my cheap on-the-road Wordsworth paperback.

It used to be difficult to find copies of Villette, so I was delighted when Penguin published a hardcover edition in 2016. It has the same introduction and notes as the paperback, but the paper is of a much higher quality. However, I may have read this poor book almost to death. Do the leaves in the middle and on the right side look as though they are fading away? I fear that this gorgeous book has suffered from outings in the Villette bag. I need to pay it more respect.

One of the nicer Wordsworth covers, but it has been replaced several times, and as you can see mine (above) is different.

I now have a backup plan for traveling with Villette. I bought one of the cheapest copies I could find for reading at cafes, outdoors, or on the road: I recommend the Wordsworth edition ($4.95) or a Signet ($4.71). Although all my books are reading copies, paperbacks don’t have to be in pristine shape. I have no conscience about carrying this in my Villette bag. If it gets slightly scrunched, so be it.

Are you a Villette fan? And what edition do you have? And do you have multiple copies of any of your favorite books?

If Alison Lurie Had Written “Villette”…

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If Alison Lurie had written Villette, the heroine Lucy Snowe’s life would have gone in a different direction. In Charlotte Bronte’s novel, Lucy has few options. During a summer break at the Belgian school where she teaches English, she becomes so lonely that she decides to go to Confession at a Catholic church. She is not Catholic, but she needs to speak to someone. One wonders at her choice, because she has already seen the ghost of a nun in the attic and been terrified. But she has hit rock bottom.

The priest is comforting, but when she leaves she gets dizzy and faints on the church steps. The priest and a doctor rescue her, and the doctor takes her home to be nursed by his mother, who turns out to be her godmother, Mrs. Bretton, whom she has not seen in years. The Brettons are refreshingly Protestant, but the dangers and attractions of Catholicism haunt Lucy, particularly after M. Paul takes an interest. Bronte’s Catholics are quite a Jesuitical bunch.

After reading Alison Lurie’s Foreign Affairs, I can imagine Lucy as a Vinnie type. (See my blog on Foreign Affairs.) If she got lonely, or exhausted from her research at the British Library, she might go out for a Cappuccino. “I abhor Americanos,” she would tell the barista. Not to be confused with Americans: the Americano is a drink. Like Vinnie in Foreign Affairs, she would run into the American middle-aged businessman she met on the plane. I mean, why not? He has escaped from the package tour of Ye Olde England, because the Tower of London wasn’t his thing. England wasn’t his thing. Mind you, I do think Lucy might alternatively go shopping at Harrods. Give her a bit of Mrs. ‘Arris Goes to Paris. She could use a new dress, or slacks, or whatever. And shopping, at least in small doses, can be fun. But did she lose her credit card? That would not be fun!

Fortunately, it was in the Lost and Found at the British Museum.

The Fate of a Genteel Career Woman: Lucy Snowe in “Villette”

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In Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, the narrator, Lucy Snowe, a poor, genteel young woman, is lucky to find a job teaching English at a girls’ school in Villette (a fictitious city based on Brussels).

Brontë’s masterpiece, Villette, is a dark take on her more popular novel, Jane Eyre. Like Jane, the penurious Lucy is an orphan. She is plain. She has no relatives or connections. And the kind old woman to whom she was a paid companion has died.

Most of the women characters in Villette – all except the teachers and servants – have the opportunity to marry. As for Lucy, her prospects of marriage are scant. Remember Newsweek’s notorious claim in 1986 that women over 40 were “more likely to be killed by a terrorist than find a mate”? This famous line was not based on statistics – it was printed to sell magazines – but much the same thing was probably gabbled in the 19th century about poor genteel English women over, say, 20. Lucy is only 23, but seems doomed to spinsterhood. (The sell-by date was younger then.)

Like modern women, plain or pretty, Lucy lived under the shadow of this future Newsweek scare. Unlike the heroines of BBC costume dramas, she would not be discovered at a ball or weekend party by a dazzling, charming, preferably rich gentleman. Lucy wishes she could marry and have a home, but knows how unlikely it is.

Modern women have the same problems. As for the marriage prospects of single or divorced women in the late 20th century and the zips, we cannot pretend they were sanguine. Love scenes did not unfold like a Netflix comedy: you would not meet the ideal man at a club, i.e., a dimly-lit, gritty warehouse with black walls, loud bands, and terrible acoustics, nor would you metamorphose into Meg Ryan and end up with Tom Hanks in Sleepless in Seattle. And the darling friend who urged you to place a personals ad was a fantasist: she was sure you could meet the owner of a baseball team (“We’re not Jane Fonda!”), the director of an orchestra (dubious, as we did not listen to classical music) or the wealthy director of a private charitable foundation (our reaction was blank, because we couldn’t imagine such a person).

Single, solitary Lucy courageously travels to Belgium, thinking it will be an adventure and that she might as well starve there as in London. Arriving in Villette at night, she has two experiences with men, one comforting and the other terrifying. An English gentleman gives her directions to an affordable hotel and accompanies her part of the way; but then she is stalked by two intimidating men, runs away, and ends up serendipitously in front of the school where she finds a job.

And so Lucy becomes a career woman. She has 60 students in a class, all of whom are ready to rebel at any sign of weakness. She establishes her dominance on the first day by pushing an unruly girl into a cabinet and locking her in. This is not an acceptable practice, of course, but even the other girls empathize with Lucy, because they dislike the troublemaker and respect Lucy for quelling a riot in her class. (Ah, this would make a great film, like Up the Down Staircase, The Emperor’s Club, To Serve Them All My Days, To Sir with Love, and maybe even Bad Teacher!)

Much is made of Lucy’s quietness, her grey dresses, her uneasiness when she is given a pink dress, and her general invisibility.

But she isn’t quite invisible. By chance, Lucy meets and falls in love with Dr. Graham, a young doctor who is called in when the girls at school are sick. He likes Lucy – he saves her life when a priest finds her collapsed on the street with delirium and illness – but he certainly doesn’t love her. When Lucy regains consciousness, she is in a bed in a strange room, and yet not totally strange, because she recognizes the furniture of her godmother, Mrs. Bretton. Lucy learns that Mrs. Bretton has moved to Villette and that Graham is her son. And so Lucy becomes their pet and is frequently invited to concerts and theater.

But Lucy is Graham’s pal, not his girlfriend. He confides in her about the two women he falls in love with.

It is difficult to maintain the role of buddy, and it doesn’t help that Graham regards her as the perfect friend.

At one point Graham says,”I believe if you had been a boy, Lucy, instead of a girl – my mother’s god-son instead of her god-daughter -we should have been good friends: our opinions would have melted into each other.”

Basically he is saying they are soulmates, but he doesn’t want to think of her as a woman. Later, she wonders if Graham would have regarded her differently if she had had money or was of a higher class, like the two women he falls in love with.

Perhaps Lucy is more attractive than she thinks. She has a suitor, M. Paul, the literature teacher at the school. He is ugly, bossy, histrionic, snoopy – he goes through her desk – and I find him exasperating, even though he gives her books and chocolates. Lucy finds him ridiculous at first, but gradually comes to appreciate his good qualities. He is definitely second-best.

Villette is a brilliant novel, with a surprising ending that shows you Charlotte doesn’t always aim to please. This novel isn’t exactly about work, or love, or triangulation (so many triangles!), or marriage: it is a portrait of the messy, scraped-togethr lives of poor, genteel women in the 19th century.