Villette  by Charlotte Bronte
First published 1853
Category: Classic

Charlotte Bronte’s first published novel, Jane Eyre, is one of the most well-known works of English literature. Her later novels, Shirley and Villette, are well known only to a handful of readers.  While I can’t speak to the quality of Shirley, I now have a very good idea of why Villette languishes in obscurity.  It’s not because the plot is boring, or because its characters are unbelievable; the plot is odd but not uninteresting, and in characterization it certainly surpasses its more famous counterpart.  Unfortunately Villette, being semi-autobiographical, is too loosely constructed to be satisfying; the important moments are strung together like pearls on a thread, separated by long episodes of emptiness.  What’s worse is that Bronte’s prose, for reasons unknown, went from being the eloquent and lovely imagery that characterized Jane Eyre to a parody of itself–florid, overwrought, obsessed with meaning, and frequently filled with analogies that Bronte clearly intends to have meaning, but fails to attach to story events.  I liked the book, but I was often frustrated with it, and it’s definitely a book you won’t finish without a great deal of patience and perseverance.

What kept me going was the characterization.  Not of Lucy Snowe, the first-person protagonist.  I don’t know what the heck Bronte thought she was doing with this woman, but for about the first third of the book, Lucy was like an observer in her own story.  Everything that went on happened to other people!  Lucy does have character, but you don’t get to see it for a long while.  On the other hand, Bronte was a master of creating character through just a few lines, a few marks of description, and through interactions with other characters.  She unfortunately wasn’t free of the prejudices of her time–people from different countries either show the traits of their country or are "surprisingly" free of those defects; French girls are silly and prone to laziness, Frenchwomen of any age see nothing wrong with a white lie, you can tell the nationality of a person by his appearance, or someone’s character by the shape of their head–and I think it’s her otherwise outstanding ability to delineate character irrespective of those prejudices that make them so startling when they come up in the text.

In Paul Emanuel, Lucy’s ultimate love interest, Bronte has surpassed herself.  It’s obvious early on that M. Paul (as he’s referred to) is interested in Lucy and jealous of any attachments she might have, but not quite so obvious where that relationship will go.  He is by far the most interesting character in the book, and I think some of what makes Lucy interesting, in the end, is simply the fact that she is connected to him.

But the prose…good heavens.  When you know that the Charlotte Bronte who wrote this book had suffered the loss of her beloved brother Branwell and her two sisters Emily and Anne, you can kind of see how her melancholy affected the story.  Lucy is alone, pitiably alone, and the narrative reflects that misery.  Which is no excuse for rambling on and on about Lucy’s internal dialogues and sorrows.  It feels very much like Bronte was trying too hard to make the reader feel that misery.  What I really hated were the occasional analogies Bronte would go off on that weren’t inspired by anything happening in the story and didn’t actually illuminate what the story meant, which is the point of analogy.  A couple of times I re-read passages twice or more, trying to wring meaning from them, and failing.  Was she trying to emulate the lost Emily, who’s considered the true poet of the three sisters?  Did she think this was the natural extension of what she did in Jane Eyre?  I don’t know.  It just irritated me.

And now we get to the ending.  My friend Julie always says she liked the book except for the ending.  Turns out she meant, like, the actual ending, the last ten paragraphs of the entire book.  If you have any intention of reading Villette someday, you probably want to skip the next paragraph.  No, seriously.

After three years of absence, M. Paul returns to France AND HIS SHIP SINKS AND HE DIES?!?!?!  What the FRACK?!?!  Really, I’m not kidding, WHAT IS UP WITH THAT ENDING?  Are we supposed to take away from this that life sucks and you should never, ever try to be happy, because it will be torn away from you?  And what’s with that passive-aggressive final sentence about how all the bad guys, the ones who made M. Paul leave in the first place, all live to a ripe old age?  This ending has no meaning.  The entire rest of the book, as much as it has a theme in its weirdly twisting plot, is about staying true to yourself despite setbacks and tragedy.  The death of Lucy’s fiance doesn’t do ANYTHING to forward that theme.  Charlotte Bronte, seriously, what is WRONG with you?

When I told my husband about the ending, he teased me about how I should love it because, you know, "you like that tragedy stuff, like Thomas Hardy."  Please.  Thomas Hardy never jerks you around about how everything is going to be all right AND THEN EVERYONE DIES HORRIBLY.  Even in Tess of the d’Urbervilles when Angel and Tess are finally together, you can’t kid yourself that it’s going to end well (believe me, I try every time I read the book).  You know their happiness is terrible because it can’t last.  This was just a dumb ending to an otherwise decent book.  With a little less self-indulgence, a lot of editing to tighten it up, and a different ending, Villette could easily have taken its place beside Jane Eyre–and very possibly might have surpassed it.

("Leave sunny imaginations hope…let them picture union and a happy succeeding life."  Good crap.  Charlotte Bronte, when you and I meet in the afterlife, we will have Words.)