The Columbia History of the British Novel

with others. Gone also are the Gothic elements and melodramatic contrivances of Jane Eyre (except for some stage business with a nun and the reemergence of the Bretton family in Villette). The only thing that survives is the Puritan autobiographical form Brontë used for Jane Eyre (and The Professor, written in 1846 but not published until 1857, after Brontë's death), with its depiction of life as a stern pilgrimage and its allegorical -360- treatment of experience. In Villette that form is chastened in ways closer to Bunyan than to Jane Eyre. Yet even Bunyan allows his Christian an origin, a family on which to turn his back and choose God's way, and a Faithful and Interpreter to help him find that way. Brontë's Lucy Snowe admits no origin and no guides; she begins her «life» in a fictional convention: a godmother's house that recalls 'the sojourn of Christian and Hopeful beside a certain pleasant stream.' Villette, as Barbara Hardy has noted, 'is as much a Providence novel as Jane Eyre, but the Providential pattern is shown, and seen by the heroine, to lead towards loss.' Forçade's comment is apt: 'Currer Bell has a mixture of restrained passion and irony, a kind of virile power; the struggles she delights in are those in which the individual, alone and thrown entirely on his own resources, has only his own inner strength to rely upon… she preaches with Titanic pride the moral power of the human soul; her books contain vigour and originality, never tears; she interests, but she does not soften us; she is protestant to the last fibre of her being.'

From the beginning, Brontë presents in Lucy Snowe a protagonist who calls herself a 'mere looker on at life,' 'a personage in disguise' who does not 'look the character' of a major player in a narrative and, as a result, does not expect her life to provide material for romantic stories. Indeed the interests that drive her-to secure work in order to live and not be morbidly self-enclosed-have no place in women-centered romance, even though the imagination may want to indulge 'the life of thought' and escape 'that of reality.' From the time she looks as a young girl on the idealized Paulina Home and sees that the child must 'necessarily live, move, and have her being in another,' whether father or lover, Lucy knows that such a life cannot be hers. She is too alienated and unconnected, and too ambitious to be herself-whatever that is. And if, at times, she envies women's ability to be angels in the houses of men (and wants to «live» in a romance with Graham Bretton), she knows that such a life will not satisfy. She knows too that marriage and novels that close in lovers' vows are allied in a way that leaves no room for representing a woman who cares for herself as an independent human being. Thus she must be a spectator, a reader of others' romances, whether of Ginevra Fanshawe's flirtatious fooleries or Paulina Home's progress toward domestic bliss in marriage to Bretton: 'It was so, for God saw that it was good.'

Lucy Snowe must also be a debater with men about her 'role.' The word appears repeatedly; indeed, few novels since Mansfield Park and -361- Vanity Fair have used the language of the theater and of art so tellingly to describe a woman's behavior in a patriarchal world. With Graham Bretton, the doctor who is the novel's romantic hero, Lucy realizes that 'He wanted always to give me a role not mine,''to expect of me the part of officious soubrette in a love drama.' She adds: 'Nature and I opposed him.' Nature and she also oppose the directions, given repeatedly, of M. Paul Emmanuel, the anti-hero (though not quite in the Rochester mold) whom Brontë's contemporaries found so fascinating. This little man, hardly heroic in appearance or action, sees in Lucy from their first meetings a character of passion and ambition who 'must be kept down.' He demands that she perform in his play, and she discovers 'a keen relish for dramatic expression' to be part of her nature, a part she determines to repress. He demands that she look not at a painting of Cleopatra, 'une personne dont je ne voudrais ni pour femme, ni pour fille, ni pour soeur,' but at 'La vie d'une femme,' a series of four paintings depicting women from girlhood to widowhood that Lucy labels 'bloodless, brainless nonentities.' Lucy finds him 'like Napoleon Bonaparte' in his desire to rule: 'He would have exiled fifty Madame de Staels, if they had annoyed, offended, out-rivaled, or opposed him.' He warns Lucy about her 'contraband appetite for unfeminine knowledge,' and tells her that

a 'woman of intellect'… was a thing for which there was neither place nor use in creation, wanted neither as wife nor worker… He believed in his soul that lovely, placid, and passive feminine mediocrity was the only pillow on which manly thought and sense could find rest for its aching temples.

Yet this man becomes her «Greatheart» because he finally accepts her need to define herself through work and through an independence that is marked by her differences from all women. She comes to see him as a man of 'inward sight' whose mind is her 'library,' 'collyrium to the spirit's eyes.' In him she finds the possibility of love that does not demand a woman's role-playing nor require a woman's silencing. The moment of her acceptance occurs when she can use the word 'home.'

I was full of faults; he took them and me all home. For the moment of utmost mutiny, he reserved the one deep spell of peace. These words caressed my ear:-

'Lucy, take my love. One day share my life. Be my dearest, first on earth.'

We walked back to the Rue Fossette by moonlight-such moonlight as fell on Eden-shining through the shades of the Garden… Once in their lives -362- some men and women go back to these first fresh days of our great Sire and Mother…

Yet this acceptance, like most of Lucy's narrative, is defined not in personal terms but in allusions, in archetypal or conventional scenes (like her origin chapter) that displace Lucy Snowe from her history and substitute the language of familiar storytelling.

That language's limitations and dangers are exposed, and Lucy's terrible independence from them is articulated, in the storm scene that concludes the novel. Her repetition of Christ's words to the waters, 'Peace be still,' calms no storm and brings no Paul back, but produces, simply, a halt in the narrative. Language has no power except to record its powerlessness. Lucy Snowe's 'book of life' ends not in marriage but with an elderly woman telling the story of how, with a man's help, she became a schoolmaster. Villette is the triumph of Charlotte Brontë's life of writing, her determined break with the marriage plot of English fiction.

Women Reading and Rewriting Charlotte Brontë

At one point in Shirley, as the two women discuss Milton's Eve, Shirley declares, 'We are alone: we may speak what we think.' The great mark of Charlotte Brontë's novels, as all her contemporaries noted, was this 'speaking what we think,' as if only narrator and reader were in conversation and all conventionalities were for the moment forgotten, or at least forced aside (the frequent direct addresses to readers in her pages emphasizes Brontë's efforts to educate her 'romantic readers'). Such forceful speaking was the characteristic that removed her work from what one reviewer called 'the generic term 'novel'' because, as another proclaimed, 'there is nothing but truth and nature about it… no high life glorified, caricatured, or libelled; nor low life elevated to an enviable state of bliss; neither have we vice made charming.' Such a comment recalls the silver-fork and Newgate novels of the earlier nineteenth century, and perhaps alludes to Dickens's handling of poor orphans. Brontë's orphans are as homeless, physically and metaphysically, as Dickens's children, but they are tougher, their lives incomparably more difficult psychologically and their feelings expressed in language and actions that would be impossible for a Dickens or Scott or Thackeray woman (or man).

Tellingly, Brontë's influence on her contemporaries, especially on the sensation novelists like Mrs. Braddon and on George Eliot, derives -363- from this same boldness of representation, particularly in the insistence that women are ambitious and desire some independence. Of course, the sensation novel, which made vice charming by making its perpetrator a woman ('the fair-haired demon of modern fiction' was Oliphant's label), replaced moral stringency and individuality with female-generated crime and made homes either the scene of the crimes or the polluted territory of the woman's plotting. With their un-Brontësque golden curls and simpering voices, the sensational women like Lady Audley want (economic) independence and know how much the appearance of womanly virtue is worth financially. Yet the sensation novelists criminalize the very desire for independence that Brontë celebrates. With sensation novels, we are not far from the stereotypes of romance novels, which, in their blatant vulgarizing of feeling, recall as they ignore the severe intensities of feeling in the Brontës. (Mrs. Braddon, comparing Brontë and George Eliot, called Brontë the 'only genius the weaker sex can point to in literature.')

George Eliot's response to Charlotte Brontë was more complicated. She admired the self-sacrifice represented in Jane Eyre but not the language and the plot. She found Villette 'almost preternatural in its power.' Her women face many of the same issues as Jane Eyre and Brontë's other women: Maggie Tulliver in the Red Deeps recalls Jane in the red-room; Dorothea Brooke's long night of suffering in Middlemarch recalls Lucy Snowe's