Villette

"I don’t want to decry Jane Eyre —this isn’t an anti- Jane Eyre stance!—but I think that it’s a fairy story. Not that I’m averse to fairy stories. I’ve just contributed to a new volume of stories called Reader, I Married Him , all based on that iconic final line. I, personally, have never liked that line, I think there’s something smug and self-satisfied about it. I also think—and this is me psychoanalysing Charlotte Brontë—that there was something in Charlotte Brontë that needed to cut Rochester down to size and put Jane finally in control over him, and I suspect that that is something to do with her own dented romantic adventures, the areas in which she herself experienced rejection and the areas in which she herself experienced feeling sexually unattractive. And so it’s a moment when I feel the author’s ego superimposes itself on the organic evolution of the book. “There was something in Brontë that needed to cut Rochester down to size, and I suspect that that was to do with her own dented romantic adventures” In Villette , though, she’s become a much more mature writer. Brontë does not try to make Lucy Snowe attractive. In Jane Eyre , the protagonist is supposed to be small and plain but you know you’re really supposed to find her appealing, as Rochester does. Brontë doesn’t do that with Lucy. She leaves her as she is—she remains plain and emotionally repressed. She’s very angry. And Brontë sustains this courageously, right up until the end when she may or may not get her heart’s desire. There’s a sort of withholding of the personality of Lucy Snowe; she does nothing at all to seduce the reader. Brontë is very brave in this: she is not prepared to make Lucy Snowe attractive to the other characters or to the reader. Yes, she tries out different selves. She dresses as a man when she’s obliged to play the part in a school play; and then she dresses in a very feminine pink gown when she goes to the theatre with Dr John and his mother. There’s something about her trying out these alternative selves that, again, I think is very interesting and quite radical. Yes, and there’s the most brilliant description of a nervous breakdown at the very centre of the book, too, when she’s left virtually alone by Mme. Beck in the school while everyone is on vacation. It’s an extraordinary piece of writing. There’s a fragmented quality to the prose, so that you yourself, as a reader, find an incoherence as you read it, and identify with it. It’s very, very painful and I’m sure that’s why Villette has not been so popular. Although Jane Eyre looks a little painful, you sort of know she’s going to get a happy ending. Brontë doesn’t give Lucy a happy ending. We don’t know if Monsieur Paul is going to come back to her at the end. It’s much more persuasive. She’s had the courage to live with the kind of psychology that she best knows, which is her own psychology, but which she has managed to objectify brilliantly in Lucy Snowe. She’s choosing not to ply herself with the kind of consolations that an author can. I like to think that she’s, in a way, doing something very modern which is giving to the reader the kind of experience that Lucy Snowe is experiencing. We are not allowed to have any secure sense of what is actually going on and what is going on around her. So it evokes in us the same kind of insecurities that Lucy is herself undergoing. That’s a very modern technique—you don’t get that in George Eliot, who is a supreme psychologist. I think Villette is Charlotte’s Wuthering Heights . There’s the same kind of upset to the readers’ comfort, and this brilliant sense of we think it’s one thing and it turns out to be another. That’s one of the areas where the book does become a little heavy-handed; I’m not a great fan of the Protestant-Catholic element of the book. Part of the effect of the book is down to its multifacetedness, though, and there are bits that she could probably have done with an eagle-eyed editor plucking out. And yet it’s a bit like 1984 which has this incredibly boring bit in the middle but if you took it out it wouldn’t be quite so effective and it’s really hard to say why. With modern editing there’s a tendency to pander to the reader and streamline and I know why that is—they have to sell the books and get them into the supermarkets and so on—but sometimes I think it would be interesting to leave those lumpy bits in. “With modern editing there’s a tendency to pander to the reader” The nun, the fact that there is a haunting, definitely acts as a kind of co-relative to Lucy Snowe’s fragmented state of mind and delirium, but it also links in with this bee in Charlotte’s bonnet about Catholicism and Protestantism. I don’t know that it would have been a better book without it. I suppose I do quite like the lumpiness of it."