Cheat

[stoutfellow]

I've been on a bit of a Brontë kick lately. I just finished reading Charlotte Brontë's Villette, which is, for the most part, rather charming - little or none of the Gothic, little over-wrought emotion. The narrator is almost supernaturally calm in the face of the vicissitudes of life, and the story develops toward romance smoothly and organically.

Unfortunately, the ending can only be called a diabolus ex machina. Had the book been made of paper rather than electrons, I think I would have thrown it across the room - and I almost never feel that way about a book. I felt cheated, frankly.

Comments

[al_zorra]

I love Villette. It may be my favorite Bronte novel.

The ending isn't a cheat, though it's a bit difficult to parse, particularly without the information we later readers have.

The real life professor in Brussels upon whom CB modeled her narrator's love interest, Paul Emmanuel, was married to the school mistress. As CB was pursuing him -- stalking is the term we would use today -- the mistress and her husband withdrew from CB emotionally, which was reasonable if one asks me -- particularly for a marriage in which the partners are head mistress and head teacher of a school of live-in female pupils.

The author couldn't honestly have that happy fulfilled ending she wanted. Thus, he drowns in the sea wreck of a ship named for the novel titled Paul and Virginie by Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1788):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_et_Virginie

Thus the ambiguous ending, for which the author serially blames the wife, the Catholic Church and "French" moral principles -- because she seemingly couldn't face the fact of her highly inappropriate passion for this married man.

Villette is remarkably autobiographical -- though not as much as The Professor, which wasn't published until years after CB's death, and which she wrote before either Jane Eyre or Villette. As we seen then, this was the formation r/Romantic event of CB's life. Gaskell really downplays all of it, and seemingly doesn't know everything either, in her biography of CB.

For me, knowing all this just makes Villette even more interesting.

Nor do I agree with you that is less passionate or that Lucy Snow is calmer than Jane Eyre. She's a boiling volcano at all times about to erupt, which she does by turning the fury upon herself during the Long Vacation, in which she falls into life-threatening fever and hallucinates.

For me Villette is one of the most, and most convincingly, passionate works of fiction ever made, equal to the poetry of Emily Dickinson.

[stoutfellow]

On the subject of calmness: I was thinking primarily of her outward demeanor. In other respects, I concede the point.

As to your other points... First, I do not find that the fact that the story was based on an actual episode in CB's life, nor the details of that episode, have any effect on my appreciation of the story. Perhaps it is a defect in me. Second, and more important: had CB modeled the story more closely on the actual episode, the ending would probably have displeased me less. What kept CB and her professor apart - his being married - would have been inherent in the situation, inviting the reader to wonder whether this obstacle could be overcome. Either answer to that question could have made an effective story. Here, though, CB introduced obstacles, which the two of them overcame, and then, in order to provide the author's desired outcome, she supplied a wholly extraneous, unforeshadowed, and alien element, in the form of the storm. I see this as being essentially the same in nature as a Greek tragedian's deus ex machina - although it is, shall we say, opposite in polarity. My reaction to it is to feel cheated.

These are my reactions only; I do not expect anyone else to feel the same. Nor am I interested in defending them; they are, to me, the raw data on which I found a judgment. I liked the story very much, right up to that ending, but I find that I cannot abide such a tactic.

[al_zorra]

At this point, after hundreds of re-readings of All The Books, the biographies, the critical works, etc., knowing the history of the world and the period, politically and culturally -- I can't even imagine how someone reading this novel for the first time, without that whole history of the book, the author and the history of the English novel and women, would read it.

It's kind of like the way the Brontes's novels were first received by the public, particularly when quickly their male pseudonyms were stripped away -- outrageous and disgusting that women could write works of this nature, going so against what women were expected to write.