Just a few days ago, I finished Villette, which is Bronte's last and most autobiographical novel. And, of course, while reading Villette, I couldn't help but to make comparisons to Jane Eyre.
In many ways, Jane Eyre and Villette are very similar. Both are about young women who are more or less on their own and who find themselves questioning their roles in society. Both Jane and Lucy Snowe (Villette's protagonist) achieve independence through education. Jane becomes a governess; Lucy becomes a teacher and ultimately ***SPOILER ALERT*** Lucy opens a school of her own. Both protagonists fall in love with Byronic men whose mysterious pasts make it difficult for our protagonists to marry them.Jane and Lucy are not completely similar, however. Lucy I think is a more (for lack of better word) controlled version of Jane. What I mean is that both young women are passionate, but Lucy is much better at controlling her emotions. In fact she is so good at controlling her emotions that every character has a different opinion of her. Graham, Paulina, Paulina's father, and Mrs. Bretton think Lucy is solemn and perhaps a little dull, as well as a loyal and kind friend. Ginerva Fanshawe thinks Lucy to be grumpy and crotchety. And the eccentric M. Paul Emanuel's first impression of Lucy is that she is strange, passionate, and a little vain. For the most part, Lucy is very reserved, but when sufficiently provoked, she erupts into a fury of passion.
Jane Eyre, on the other hand, is less reserved. This is especially true at the beginning of the novel when Jane is a young girl not afraid to state her opinions and to talk back if she feels she has been wronged. As Jane grows older, she does better control her passions, but there is still a poignant difference between Jane and Lucy's attitudes. And I think that main difference is that Jane is more confident than Lucy.
Of course, one of the main themes of Jane Eyre is Jane's uncertainty of her position in society. She is a woman in a patriarchal society; she is a governess, her place is above that of a servant, but she is scorned by Mr. Rochester's equals; and she struggles to balance her feelings for Mr. Rochester and her duty to God. Yet despite this, throughout the book Jane seems to know who Jane is. Her personality is consistent and Jane always stays true to herself which is why, in the end, she able to find that balance between passion and duty. Jane Eyre may not know where she belongs in society, she may feel alienated and out-of-place, but she is certain of herself.
Unlike Jane, I think Lucy Snowe is uncertain of herself. She has recently lost her family and finds herself in a country that speaks a language which she hardly knows. A Protestant in a country of Catholics, Lucy finds herself questioning her religion in a very different way than Jane Eyre. Jane is in a situation where she needs to decide whether she is willing to sacrifice her values and religious duties so that she can be with Rochester. But she never wavers in her actual religious beliefs. Lucy, however, finds herself comparing and contrasting Protestantism and Catholicism. She feels alienated because her religious beliefs, and she questions which religion is superior. For the most part, Lucy is fairly stalwart in her preference of Protestantism, however, at one point in the novel she does seek comfort in a Catholic church and pours her heart out in a confessional.
But more importantly, there is the differences in how all the other characters view Lucy. Villette is told in first person from Lucy's point of view, but she is fairly reserved in the thoughts she divulges to the reader. Thus we, the readers, as we try to discover Lucy's personality by reading between the lines, find great interest in what the other characters think of her. And while Lucy does not necessarily change herself for different people, the reader does see that different sides of Lucy come out when she is dealing with different people. And, as we read between the lines, we see that because Lucy is so out-of-place in this new country, because different people bring out different sides of her, both the reader and the Lucy are aware of a certain degree of insecurity in the narrator.
Lucy Snowe is a young woman who is unsure of who she is; feelings which no doubt stem from her lack of family (I think it is very notable, and not at all an accident, that the reader knows absolutely nothing about Lucy's family and of their fate), from her alienation as a foreigner, and from the differing opinions her friends hold of her. She appears, to the reader, rootless.
The rootlessness and uncertainty of Lucy Snowe's character should be no surprise to any reader who knows a little bit about Charlotte Bronte's life. At the time Villette was written, Bronte had lost all of her siblings to tuberculosis and was questioning her place in society as she found herself in the literary spotlight and facing the harsh criticisms of Jane Eyre and Shirley. The back of my copy of Villette dubs the novel, "Charlotte Bronte's last and most autobiographical novel," an epithet which I find very believable, having read The Life of Charlotte Bronte by Elizabeth Gaskell.
Lucy Snowe's experiences in the fictional country of Lambassecour are based off of Charlotte and her sister Emily's experiences at a girl's school in Brussels. Charlotte and Emily had attended a school in Brussels, and to help pay their tuition, they taught a music class. Charlotte allegedly developed feelings for the school's headmaster, M. Heger, a pious Catholic Frenchman with a wife. Thus, we see the inspiration for M. Paul as well as Lucy's battle with unrequited love. Furthermore, because of her awkward position in society as a controversial female writer, Bronte no doubt many a time questioned who she was as she tried to separate the Charlotte Bronte from Currer Bell.
Oh geez, I was hoping to also compare M. Paul's character to Mr. Rochester as well as go into more detail about the autobiographical facet of the novel but this post is already super long. I haven't even told you of what I thought of the book overall! I guess this will have to be a multi-post extravaganza. So stay tuned for more on Villette! And for those of you following my Great Shakespearean Challenge, look forward to a post on Richard III, coming soon!
I liked reading this..... although I never at any point thought Lucy questioned her beliefs- she goes to the Catholic Church out of total desperation, she needed to be heard, and the Catholic Church often presents such an opportunity through Confessionals.
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