Villette (83 page)

It is in every way worthy of what one Great Woman, should have written of Another ... it ought to stand, and will stand in the first rank, of Biographies, till the end of time.

—Patrick Brontë

 

Aside from James Boswell’s
Life of Johnson
(1791), Elizabeth Gaskell’s
The Life of Charlotte Brontë
(1857) is the best-known biography of a literary figure in the English language and the first life story of one Victorian woman novelist written by another. Patrick Brontë and Arthur Nicholls—Brontë’s father and husband, respectively—asked Gaskell (1810-1865), a close friend of Charlotte’s, to write the book after Brontë’s death in 1855. Gaskell is also remembered as the author of
Cranford
(1853),
Cousin Phillis
(1864), and
Wives and Daughters
(1866).

Villette
is widely considered to be Charlotte Brontë’s most autobiographical work (even though Brontë gave
Jane Eyre
the subtitle “An Autobiography”), and she composed in it almost complete isolation at Gaskell’s home. In
Villette,
the fictional capital city and the country of Labassecour stand in for Brussels, Belgium, where Brontë taught at a school for two years, beginning in February 1842. The novel’s Paul Emmanuel, a teacher, has a real-life counterpart in Constantin Héger, the husband of the school’s director. Brontë developed an infatuation with Héger during her time at the Brussels school, where they tutored one another in French and English. In creating her heroine, Lucy Snowe, Brontë drew on this experience as well as the abiding loneliness she felt at the school after the departure of her sister Emily.

The Life of Charlotte Brontë
contains lengthy excerpts from Charlotte’s letters, such as the following revealing note to her friend and sympathetic reader W. S. Williams dated November 6, 1852, in which Brontë discusses her fictional counterpart, Lucy Snowe:

One important autobiographical element present in
Villette,
but not in
The Life of Charlotte Brontë,
is any specific mention of Brontë’s intense feelings for Héger. Warm, good-humored, and scrupulous, Gaskell wished to avoid causing additional sadness to Brontë’s widower by detailing Brontë’s passion for Héger, even though Nicholls and Brontë were not married until 1854, ten years after Brontë had left Brussels. For her part, Héger’s wife remained upset and embarrassed by her depiction as Mme. Beck in
Villette,
so much so that she refused to be interviewed by Gaskell for the biography. One possible allusion to Brontë’s love for Constantin Héger appears in a letter to her publisher George Smith dated December 6, 1852, and reprinted in
The Life of Charlotte Brontë:

The Life of Charlotte Brontë
became one of Gaskell’s best-selling books and helped to cement Brontë’s literary reputation for generations to come. The critic George Henry Lewes, upon reading Gaskell’s book, wrote to her saying that it “will, I think, create a deep and permanent impression.... One learns to love Charlotte, and deeply to respect her.”

 

 

Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure will she have for it, even as an accomplishment and a recreation. To those duties you have not yet been called, and when you are you will be less eager for celebrity. You will not seek in imagination for excitement, of which the vicissitudes of this life, and the anxieties from which you must not hope to be exempted, be your state what it may, will bring with them but too much.

—from a letter to Charlotte Brontë (March 1837)

 

The whole three volumes [of
Villette]
are crowded with beauties—with the good things for which we look to the clear sight, deep feeling and singular, though not extensive, experience of life which we associate with the name of ‘Currer Bell.’ But under all, through all, over all, is felt a drawback, of which we were anxious before, but which is terribly aggravated here—the book is almost intolerably painful. We are wont to say, when we read narratives which are made up of the external woes of life, such as may and do happen every day, but are never congregated in one experience—that the author has no right to make readers so miserable. We do not know whether the right will be admitted in the present case, on the ground of the woes not being external; but certainly we ourselves have felt inclined to rebel against the pain, and, perhaps on account of protraction, are disposed to deny its necessity and truth. With all her objectivity, ‘Currer Bell’ here afflicts us with an amount of subjective misery which we may fairly remonstrate against; and she allows us no respite—even while treating us with humour, with charming description and the presence of those whom she herself regards as the good and gay. In truth, there is scarcely anybody that is good—serenely and cheerfully good, and the gaiety has pain in it. An atmosphere of pain hangs about the whole, forbidding that repose which we hold to be essential to the true presentment of any large portion of life and experience.

—from the
Daily News
(February 3, 1853)

 

Villette is Brussels, and Currer Bell might have called her new novel ‘Passages from the Life of a Teacher in a Girls’ School at Brussels, written by herself.’ Of plot, strictly taken as a series of coherent events all leading to a common result, there is none; no more, at least, than there would be in two years of any person’s life who had occupations and acquaintances, and told us about them. Of interesting scenes, and of well-drawn characters, there is, on the other hand, abundance ; and these, though they fail to stimulate the curiosity of the reader like a well-constructed plot, sustain the attention, and keep up a pleasant emotion, from the first page to the last.

All the emotions excited by art are pleasant, even though their subject-matter be in itself painful; otherwise we should have hesitated in applying the term to the emotions caused by this book. For while the characters are various, happily conceived, and some of them painted with a truth of detail rarely surpassed, the centre figure—the girl who is supposed to write the book—is one who excites sympathies bittersweet, and in which there is little that is cheerful or consoling. Like Jane Eyre in her intense relish for affection, in her true-heartedness, in her great devotion to the small duties of her daily life, there is nothing of a compensation for the affection denied her. If it were not too harsh a word to be used of so good a girl as Miss Lucy Snowe, one might almost say that she took a savage delight in refusing to be comforted, in a position indeed of isolation and hardship, but one still that a large experience of mankind and the miseries incident to the lot of humanity would hardly pronounce to be by comparison either a miserable or a degraded lot. But this book, far more than
Jane Eyre,
sounds like a bitter complaint against the destiny of those women whom circumstances reduce to a necessity of working for their living by teaching, and who are debarred from the exercise of those affections which are indeed the crown of a woman’s happiness, but which it is unwise and untrue to make indispensable to a calm enjoyment of life and to an honourable and useful employment of it. Nor do we think that the morbid sensibility attributed to Lucy Snowe is quite consistent with the strength of will, the daring resolution, the quiet power, the discretion and good sense, that are blended with it in Currer Bell’s conception. Still less, perhaps, is such a quality, involving as it does a constant tormenting self-regard, to be found in common with clear insight into the characters and motives of others, and with the habit of minute observation, which, resulting in admirable and clear delineation, makes Lucy Snowe’s autobiography so pleasant a book in all respects except the spasms of heart-agony she is too fond of showing herself in—we will not venture to hint of showing herself off in, for there is a terrible feeling of reality about them, which seems to say that they are but fictitious in form, the transcripts of a morbid but no less than real personal experience.

—February 12, 1853

I am only just returned to a sense of the real world about me, for I have been reading
Villette,
a still more wonderful book than
Jane Eyre.
There is something almost preternatural in its power.

—from a letter to Mrs. Bray (February 15, 1853)

 

Why is Villette disagreeable? Because the writer’s mind contains nothing but hunger, rebellion and rage, and therefore that is all she can, in fact, put into her book. No fine writing can hide this thoroughly, and it will be fatal to her in the long run.

—from a letter to Mrs. Forster (April 14, 1853)

 

There is a certain charm of attraction as well as compassion wrought upon us by the tragic childhood of Jane Eyre; and no study can exceed for exquisite veracity and pathos the subtle and faultless portrait of the child Paulina in the opening chapters of Villette; but the attraction of these is not wholly or mainly the charm of infancy ... it comes rather from the latent suggestion or refraction of the woman yet to be, struck sharply back or dimly shaded out from the deep glass held up to us of a passionate and visionary childhood. We begin at once to consider how the children in Charlotte Brontë’s books will grow up.

—from
A Note on Charlotte Brontë
(1877)

 

Although the secret of Miss Brontë’s power lies, to a great extent, in the singular force with which she can reproduce acute observations of character from without, her most esoteric teaching, the most accurate reflex from her familiar idiosyncracies, is of course to be found in the characters painted from within. We may infer her personality more or less accurately from the mode in which she contemplates her own spirit. Among the characters who are more or less mouthpieces of her peculiar sentiment we may reckon not only Lucy Snowe and Jane Eyre, but, to some extent, Shirley, and, even more decidedly, Rochester. When they speak we are really listening to her own voice, though it is more or less disguised in conformity to dramatic necessity. There are great differences between them; but they are such differences as would exist between members of the same family, or might be explained by change of health or internal circumstances. Jane Eyre has not had such bitter experience as Lucy Snowe; Shirley is generally Jane Eyre in high spirits, and freed from harassing anxiety; and Rochester is a really spirited sister of Shirley’s, though he does his very best to be a man, and even an unusually masculine specimen of his sex.