Austen, Brontë, Eliot

Quotes for Villette reading

Letters from Charlotte Brontë:

• “[A]mongst 120 persons, which compose the daily population of this house I can discern only 1 or 2 who deserve anything like regard -- This is not owing to foolish fastidiousness on my part – but to the absence of decent qualities of theirs – they have not intellect or politeness or good-nature or good-feeling – they are nothing -- I don’t hate them – hatred would be too warm a feeling … but one wearies from day to day of caring nothing, fearing nothing, liking nothing, hating nothing – being nothing, doing nothing…. Nobody ever gets into a passion here … the phlegm that thickens their blood is too gluey to boil – they are very false in their relations with each other. … The black Swan Mr Heger is the sole veritable exception to this rule (for Madame, always cool & always reasoning is not quite an exception) but I rarely speak to Mr now … from time to time he shows his kind-heartedness by loading me with books – so that I am still indebted to him for all the pleasure or amusement I have …” Charlotte Brontë to her brother, Branwell, after returning to Brussels for her second term (without Emily). May 1, 1843.
  
• “However, I should inevitably fall into the gulf of low spirits if I stayed always by myself here … so I go out and traverse the Boulevards and streets of Brussels sometimes for hours on end. … [One evening] I found myself opposite to Ste. Gudule and the bell … began to toll for evening salut. I went in, quite alone … wandered about the aisles … till vespers began. Still I could not leave the church or force myself to go home – to school I mean. An odd whim came into my head. … I felt as if I did not care what I did, provided it was not absolutely wrong, and that served to vary my life and yield a moment’s interest. I took a fancy to change myself into a Catholic and go and make a real confession to see what it was like. Knowing me as you do, you will think this odd, but when people are by themselves they have singular fancies. … [In the confessional] I saw the priest leaning his ear towards me. … I commenced with saying I was a foreigner and had been brought up a Protestant. The priest asked me if I was a Protestant then. I somehow could not tell a lie and said ‘yes.’ He replied in that case I could not [confess], but I was determined to confess, and at last he said he would allow me because it might be the first step towards returning to the true church. I actually did confess – a real confession. When I had done he told me his address, and said that every morning I was to go … to his house – and he would reason with me and try to convince me of the error and enormity of being a Protestant!!!” Charlotte Brontë to her sister Emily. September 2, 1843.
  
• “I have seen Rachel – her acting was something apart from any other acting it has come in my way to witness –her soul was init – and a strange souls hd has – I shall not discuss it – it is my hope to see her again -- She and Thackeray are the two living things that have a spell for me in this great London ….” Charlotte Brontë to her friend Amelia Taylor after seeing the great French actress Rachel Felix perform. June 11, 1851.
  
• “On Saturday I went to hear and see Rachel – a wonderful sight – terrible as if the earth had cracked deep at your feet and revealed a glimpse of hell – I shall never forget it – she made me shudder to the marrow of my bones: in her some fiend has certainly taken up an incarnate home. She is not a woman – she is a snake – she is the --.” Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey. June 24, 1851.
  
• “As to the name of the heroine – I can hardly express what subtlety of thought made me decide upon giving her a cold name ; but – at first –I called her ‘Lucy Snowe’ (spelt with an e) which ‘Snowe’ I afterward changed to ‘Frost.’ … A cold name she must have … partly [because of] the fitness of things – for she has about her an external coldness. You say that she may be thought morbid and weak unless the history of her life be more fully given. I consider that she is both morbid and weak at times – the character sets up no pretensions to unmixed strength – and anybody living her life would necessarily become morbid. It was not impetus of healthy feeling which urged her to the confessional for instance – it was the semi-delirium of solitary grief and sickness. … I might explain away a few other points but it would be too much like drawing a picture and then writing underneath the name of the object intended to be represented. We know what sort of a pencil that is which needs an ally in the pen.” Charlotte Brontë to her publisher William Smith Williams. November 6, 1852.
  
• “I had a letter the other day announcing that a lady of some note who has always determined that whenever she married, her elect should be the counterpart of Mr Knightley in Miss Austen’s Emma – had now changed her mind and vowed that she would either find the duplicate of Professor Emanuel or remain forever single!!!” Charlotte Brontë to W.S. Williams. March 23, 1853.

Nineteenth-Century Criticism of Villette:

• “What faults there are in Villette, I think grave: but the merits are downright wonderful – as for the faults – I do deeply regret the reasons given to suppose your mind full of the subject of one passion – love – I think there is unconscionably too much of it (giving an untrue picture of life) &, speaking with the frankness you desire, I do not like its kind …” Harriet Martineau (an accomplished author and contemporary of CB) to Charlotte Brontë. February 1853.
  
• “Villette makes one feel an extreme reverence for any one capable of so much deep feeling and brave endurance and truth, but it makes one feel ‘eerie,’ too, to be brought face to face with a life so wanting in harmony … I wonder whether Miss B. is so, and I wonder too whether she ever was in love; surely she could never herself have made love to any one, as all her heroines, even Lucy Snowe, do. …. Yes: there are bits that go very deep into one’s heart; more especially with me all she says about facing and accepting some evil fate. And yet, yet, it never goes quite deep enough; it comes to an heroic Stoicism which is grand, but not the best.” Catherine Winkworth to Emma Shaen (two of CB’s acquaintances). March 23, 1853.
  
• “The difference between Miss Brontë and me is that she puts all her naughtiness into her books, and I put all my goodness. I am sure she works off a great deal that is morbid into her wiring, and out of her life ….. I believe [Villette] is a very correct account of one part of her life; which is very vivid and distinct in her remembrance, with all the feelings that were called out at that period, forcibly present in her mind whenever she recurs to the recollection of it. I imagine she could not describe it in the manner in which she would pass through it now, as her present self; but in looking back upon it all the passions and suffering, and deep despondency of the old time came back to her.” Mrs Gaskell (CB’s friend, biographer, and fellow novelist) to Lady Kay-Shuttleworth (friend of CB). April 7, 1853.

Twentieth-Century Criticism of Villette – for in-class exercise:

• “Brontë is using Lucy Snowe’s deceptions to escape the dictated conventions of the realistic form. Author and narrator reject the maxims of behavior available to them and develop a sense of female power, to be gained in part through the act of narration. … Narration as well as judicious silence, therefore, can allow a seemingly passive woman to act; if she cannot control her existence, she can at least control the telling of that existence.” Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, “’Faithful Narrator’ or ‘Partial Eulogist’: First –Person Narration in Brontë’s Villette” (Journal of Narrative Technique 15 (1985) 244-255).

• “[In Villette], description defies its supposed function – that of making something visible to the reader – by creating scenes based on blindness, invisibility, concealment, and distortion. … We can read this [technique] as symptomatic of Lucy’s method of controlling her characters and her desires. By disrupting the representation of the object, she can keep it safely at a distance – both from her memory and from her readers’ general perception.” Francesca Kazan, “Heresy, the Image, and Description; or, Picturing the Invisible: Charlotte Brontë’s Villette” (Texas Studies in Literature and Language 32 (1990) 543-566).

• “Villette, more than any other Victorian novel, is obsessed with the theater and theatricality. … [The novel’s theatricality] stems from the recognition that, if one is inscribed in a constraining social context, one can at least act out the various processes of one’s textualization, thereby achieving a certain leverage with which to displace that prior system. … Lucy suffers her acquaintances to superimpose their received ideas – sexist, class-bound, sentimentalizing – upon her, but … she manages at the same time to rewrite the parts others would make her play….” Joseph Litvak, “Charlotte Brontë and the Scene of Instruction: Authority and Subversion in Villette” (Nineteenth-Century Literature 42 (1988) 467-489).

• “Thackeray and Dickens performed their works on stage as if to say that fiction published for a mass audience was really not that different from the vocal utterances of storytellers, men present to an audience gathered in one place. Brontë emphatically rejects such a model for novel-writing. Instead, she offers fiction that denies the connection between the words on a page and an embodied voice. … [Villette] suggests that language accrues significance by remaining undivulged. The process of locking up, encasing, should be understood, however, not as a construction of privacy but instead of that interiority that retreats and withdraws in order to attain the value of writing …” Ivan Kreilkamp, “Unuttered: Withheld Speech and Female Authorship in Jane Eyre and Villette” (Novel 32 (1999) 331-354).

• “In Villette Brontë creates a duplicitous female narrator in Lucy Snowe who makes the divisions [between social conformity and self-expression] a part of her narrative strategy…. I am suggesting that we see this split and the maintenance of it as a necessary strategy on Lucy’s part, a refusal to be placed, to be absorbed into any system. Lucy vacillates between the two sides; and in this movement, in the gap between the two sides, she finds her own voice.” Patricia Johnson, “’This Heretic Narrative’: The Strategy of Split Narrative in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette” (Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 30 (1990) 617-631).