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long ago one gorgeous night
I was thinking, this morning, as one does, about romantic teleology and Charlotte Brontë. (which as I'm writing about Love's Labour's Lost this week is actually rather odd, but I habitually think about Charlotte, so.)
One of the frustrations I've had with critical approaches to Villette, which atm is by far and beyond my favorite Brontë book, is the way they hinge on M. Paul Emmanuel as some kind of final destination for Lucy Snowe: the answer to her conundrum about self and solitude. If Paul was that sort of Lover True, the emotional remoteness and indeterminacy of Lucy's final narration would, in fact, make no sense; and folk are generally puzzled by it. Paul heads of in a boat to check out his holdings in the West Indies, and then there was a wreck - and Lucy's not saying he drowned, but she's not saying he didn't, whatever lets you sleep at night dear reader. It doesn't seem like she has that many shits to give either way - she doesn't care how you think her story ends, she doesn't care if you think she lived happily ever after with her true love or mourned him forever while getting on with her career. Gloriously, she also doesn't seem to care if you think she's a stone bitch, which is great, and ttly why she's my favorite.
In fact, Villette is a profoundly bisexual book. Lucy forms intense affective/libidinal pair bonds with four people of alternating genders over the course of the novel: Ginevra Fanshawe, Dr. John Bretton, little Paulina Home de Bassompierre, and finally M. Paul Emmanuel. Each of the four relationships has the same general progression and problems: they all want Lucy to be somebody for them, and while she doesn't object in theory it's never who she really is. Ginevra wants to play this femme one-upsmanship thing that Lucy is deeply bored by; Lucy likes Ginevra very much, but not in the way that her male suitors do. Lucy isn't enchanted by Ginevra's prettiness or her sexuality, but by the strand of bitterness they share, their ability to see through the world most of the time.
Dr. John, of course, tries to diagnose Lucy as a damaged hysterical melancholic, in need of his prescriptive treatment. Even though, turns out, she really was seeing the figure of a nun haunting the school - a dude sneaking in in disguise to boink Ginevra, in point.
I think that, of the four of them, Lucy might have been most genuinely tempted by Paulina. For one thing, something is needed to explain the structural positioning of Lucy and Paulina, back when she was still baby Polly, at the significant point of the book's first chapters. The first emotion we see Lucy feel for another person is her response to Polly. She's aloof and needy, doesn't get why she likes the little girl so much but desperately wants her trust and confidence. When they reconnect as adults Lucy's been through the wringer and Paulina is there for her, gentle and kind and commodious. Paulina wants Lucy to be her companion, and Lucy very nearly says yes - but ultimately still feels alienated from her reflection in Paulina's eyes. Paulina sees Lucy as all sweet and good, and Lucy's a good girl but she's also a bitter bitch, and Paulina can't handle or perceive her completely because she can't deal with Lucy's less-than-perfect impulses.
M. Paul, then, the last one. He tries even harder than the others to force Lucy into a role that isn't her own, going so far as to have her examined by outside authorities in an attempt to prove that she has a different background than the one that she admits to - because he can't believe that her writing could be so good if she were really working in a non-native language. He's wrong; he doesn't really deal with it? Lucy kind of likes the way he plays the game, though, because she feels authorized to snap back and rebel and disagree, and like I said she's a disagreeable person, it's an inseparable part of her charm.
Lucy's maybe going to settle with him - and then the shipwreck happens, and he may or may not have ever come back to her. All along she's been riding this push-pull of letting people in only to later reject them and retreat back into absolute solitude when they too much threaten her sense of self, and there's an obvious possibility that the book might be about How Lucy Snowe Got An Emotional Education and Dealt With It. But I don't think M. Paul is a strong enough contender for the position of Lucy Snowe's One True Love for that reading to really roll. The book ends on an emotionally reserved note from Lucy, belying a reading of the novel as chronicling her socialization; she's as antisocial as she ever was at the end, maybe even more so.
Just because Paul was her last lover chronologically doesn't mean he was the best of the bunch. It doesn't automatically designate him as an emotional endpoint, despite the traditional assumption that stories always work that way. This is, I think, one of the reasons for bi-phobia as a phenomenon; I'm thinking of bits like Lois McMaster Bujold's crack in Barrayar that Aral was bisexual but now he's monogamous. Bisexuality indicates the reality of serial relationships that actually take place in a person's lifetime - a reality that isn't compatible with One True Love fantasies that do necessarily assume that the Last must also be Best.
There's a persistent anxiety in both Charlotte and her baby sister Anne's works about the legitimacy of serial monogamy. (Emily scares me; I make no claims about her.) The complementarian ideal that was setting in when they were writing, codified a decade or so later in (bestselling) domesticity propaganda like Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies, with its fantasy of the One True Lover, the Soul Mate, a predestinate Other Half, doesn't allow for serial monogamy - the thing that most human beings end up doing a lot of the time in reality - as anything but failure. It's like the silly ramble the Prince Charming from Ever After goes on to Da Vinci the Fairy Godmother: what do you do if you miss The One? Or if you find two?
Anne spends a lot of time wrestling with the issue in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, as if she needs to prove that, in order for Helen Graham to be legitimately able to love again, marry again, she was never Arthur Huntingdon's wife in any meaningful way. The problem is that, due to his abusive duplicitious presentation of himself to her, she WAS his wife in her heart, for a little while; it's only that, as she discovers, she was the more deceived. But it's against the laws of god to divorce your spouse, no matter what, and bigamy is a sin in the eyes of god. Eventually Huntingdon dies and frees her of the conundrum - but what if he hadn't? How horrible and unjust would it be for her to be bound to him forever, never free to love again, not licitly?
One of the reasons why critics of Villette tend to pick Paul as Lucy's true love is that he's pretty directly modeled on M. Constantin Heger, the older married man Charlotte studied under in Brussels and fell madly inappropriately in love with. The Lucy/Paul portions of Villette are a reworking of Charlotte's earlier attempt at processing her feelings via fiction, The Professor - but, I think, a much more emotionally sophisticated one. Instead of the blatant wish-fulfillment of The Professor, Villette treats Paul/Constantin pretty levelly, as a not-entirely-desirable figure.
Unlike M. Heger, M. Emmanuel is unmarried, although Lucy does run afoul of others' plans for his marriage. But the thing is - Charlotte also knew M. Heger's wife. They were all living there at the school together. (Intriguingly, Mme. Claire Heger was the one who repaired and kept Charlotte's ill-advised passionate love letters to her husband.) And I wonder if some of the racist othering of Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre, a novel which is of course also notably concerned with the sin of bigamy, isn't a redirection of Charlotte's potential feelings of guilt toward her married lover's wife. The most horrifying scene in the thing for me as a young reader was the one of Bertha rending Jane's veil - horrifying because it showed that, through no fault of her own, Jane had betrayed another woman badly.
(I had a similar sensation recently, watching the episodes with the cloned Johns in Farscape; it was intensely horrifying to me because I would feel such shame and guilt myself if I had to poach on my own happiness. I would know how much she would need to be me, and I feel like I would have to give Main Identity over to her, because to hurt her like that knowing as I do how bad it would be for her would be more than I could do. I'm afraid that I would end up feeling a responsibility to give up myself.)
One of the frustrations I've had with critical approaches to Villette, which atm is by far and beyond my favorite Brontë book, is the way they hinge on M. Paul Emmanuel as some kind of final destination for Lucy Snowe: the answer to her conundrum about self and solitude. If Paul was that sort of Lover True, the emotional remoteness and indeterminacy of Lucy's final narration would, in fact, make no sense; and folk are generally puzzled by it. Paul heads of in a boat to check out his holdings in the West Indies, and then there was a wreck - and Lucy's not saying he drowned, but she's not saying he didn't, whatever lets you sleep at night dear reader. It doesn't seem like she has that many shits to give either way - she doesn't care how you think her story ends, she doesn't care if you think she lived happily ever after with her true love or mourned him forever while getting on with her career. Gloriously, she also doesn't seem to care if you think she's a stone bitch, which is great, and ttly why she's my favorite.
In fact, Villette is a profoundly bisexual book. Lucy forms intense affective/libidinal pair bonds with four people of alternating genders over the course of the novel: Ginevra Fanshawe, Dr. John Bretton, little Paulina Home de Bassompierre, and finally M. Paul Emmanuel. Each of the four relationships has the same general progression and problems: they all want Lucy to be somebody for them, and while she doesn't object in theory it's never who she really is. Ginevra wants to play this femme one-upsmanship thing that Lucy is deeply bored by; Lucy likes Ginevra very much, but not in the way that her male suitors do. Lucy isn't enchanted by Ginevra's prettiness or her sexuality, but by the strand of bitterness they share, their ability to see through the world most of the time.
Dr. John, of course, tries to diagnose Lucy as a damaged hysterical melancholic, in need of his prescriptive treatment. Even though, turns out, she really was seeing the figure of a nun haunting the school - a dude sneaking in in disguise to boink Ginevra, in point.
I think that, of the four of them, Lucy might have been most genuinely tempted by Paulina. For one thing, something is needed to explain the structural positioning of Lucy and Paulina, back when she was still baby Polly, at the significant point of the book's first chapters. The first emotion we see Lucy feel for another person is her response to Polly. She's aloof and needy, doesn't get why she likes the little girl so much but desperately wants her trust and confidence. When they reconnect as adults Lucy's been through the wringer and Paulina is there for her, gentle and kind and commodious. Paulina wants Lucy to be her companion, and Lucy very nearly says yes - but ultimately still feels alienated from her reflection in Paulina's eyes. Paulina sees Lucy as all sweet and good, and Lucy's a good girl but she's also a bitter bitch, and Paulina can't handle or perceive her completely because she can't deal with Lucy's less-than-perfect impulses.
M. Paul, then, the last one. He tries even harder than the others to force Lucy into a role that isn't her own, going so far as to have her examined by outside authorities in an attempt to prove that she has a different background than the one that she admits to - because he can't believe that her writing could be so good if she were really working in a non-native language. He's wrong; he doesn't really deal with it? Lucy kind of likes the way he plays the game, though, because she feels authorized to snap back and rebel and disagree, and like I said she's a disagreeable person, it's an inseparable part of her charm.
Lucy's maybe going to settle with him - and then the shipwreck happens, and he may or may not have ever come back to her. All along she's been riding this push-pull of letting people in only to later reject them and retreat back into absolute solitude when they too much threaten her sense of self, and there's an obvious possibility that the book might be about How Lucy Snowe Got An Emotional Education and Dealt With It. But I don't think M. Paul is a strong enough contender for the position of Lucy Snowe's One True Love for that reading to really roll. The book ends on an emotionally reserved note from Lucy, belying a reading of the novel as chronicling her socialization; she's as antisocial as she ever was at the end, maybe even more so.
Just because Paul was her last lover chronologically doesn't mean he was the best of the bunch. It doesn't automatically designate him as an emotional endpoint, despite the traditional assumption that stories always work that way. This is, I think, one of the reasons for bi-phobia as a phenomenon; I'm thinking of bits like Lois McMaster Bujold's crack in Barrayar that Aral was bisexual but now he's monogamous. Bisexuality indicates the reality of serial relationships that actually take place in a person's lifetime - a reality that isn't compatible with One True Love fantasies that do necessarily assume that the Last must also be Best.
There's a persistent anxiety in both Charlotte and her baby sister Anne's works about the legitimacy of serial monogamy. (Emily scares me; I make no claims about her.) The complementarian ideal that was setting in when they were writing, codified a decade or so later in (bestselling) domesticity propaganda like Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies, with its fantasy of the One True Lover, the Soul Mate, a predestinate Other Half, doesn't allow for serial monogamy - the thing that most human beings end up doing a lot of the time in reality - as anything but failure. It's like the silly ramble the Prince Charming from Ever After goes on to Da Vinci the Fairy Godmother: what do you do if you miss The One? Or if you find two?
Anne spends a lot of time wrestling with the issue in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, as if she needs to prove that, in order for Helen Graham to be legitimately able to love again, marry again, she was never Arthur Huntingdon's wife in any meaningful way. The problem is that, due to his abusive duplicitious presentation of himself to her, she WAS his wife in her heart, for a little while; it's only that, as she discovers, she was the more deceived. But it's against the laws of god to divorce your spouse, no matter what, and bigamy is a sin in the eyes of god. Eventually Huntingdon dies and frees her of the conundrum - but what if he hadn't? How horrible and unjust would it be for her to be bound to him forever, never free to love again, not licitly?
One of the reasons why critics of Villette tend to pick Paul as Lucy's true love is that he's pretty directly modeled on M. Constantin Heger, the older married man Charlotte studied under in Brussels and fell madly inappropriately in love with. The Lucy/Paul portions of Villette are a reworking of Charlotte's earlier attempt at processing her feelings via fiction, The Professor - but, I think, a much more emotionally sophisticated one. Instead of the blatant wish-fulfillment of The Professor, Villette treats Paul/Constantin pretty levelly, as a not-entirely-desirable figure.
Unlike M. Heger, M. Emmanuel is unmarried, although Lucy does run afoul of others' plans for his marriage. But the thing is - Charlotte also knew M. Heger's wife. They were all living there at the school together. (Intriguingly, Mme. Claire Heger was the one who repaired and kept Charlotte's ill-advised passionate love letters to her husband.) And I wonder if some of the racist othering of Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre, a novel which is of course also notably concerned with the sin of bigamy, isn't a redirection of Charlotte's potential feelings of guilt toward her married lover's wife. The most horrifying scene in the thing for me as a young reader was the one of Bertha rending Jane's veil - horrifying because it showed that, through no fault of her own, Jane had betrayed another woman badly.
(I had a similar sensation recently, watching the episodes with the cloned Johns in Farscape; it was intensely horrifying to me because I would feel such shame and guilt myself if I had to poach on my own happiness. I would know how much she would need to be me, and I feel like I would have to give Main Identity over to her, because to hurt her like that knowing as I do how bad it would be for her would be more than I could do. I'm afraid that I would end up feeling a responsibility to give up myself.)
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Then again: in Angria you have Zamorna and his various love interests, long before Charlotte ever fell in love with anyone, and certainly at least one of them is a dark-haired almost insane proto Bertha Mason, if I recall correctly? And if Charlotte his channelling her Mme Heger emotions in Jane Eyre, my guess is not solely through Bertha but also through Blanche. Who is polished, with a high standing in society, and rich and beautiful (all true for Mme Heger), but Rochester doesn't want her and only pretends to for a while.
(Juliet Barker also suggests that Charlotte's reaction to the whole Branwell/Lydia G. fiacso channels Charlotte's rage and pain about the Hegers, because here was Branwell having an actual affair with his married lover (and claiming she loved him back), at the very same time Charlotte was writing letter after letter to M. Heger and not getting anything back.)
re: Villette and Charlotte's life transformed in creation, and Lucy's choices, what happens with Lucy and Dr. John Bretton also has this dimension of a dialogue between Charlotte and her publisher, doesn't it? Who read the novel while it was still being written. Given he was the model for Dr. John and wanted him to end up with Lucy while getting the installments, and Charlotte's letter where she explains why that wouldn't be a good match very much was a turning point in her until then flirtatious relationship with him as well?
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The racist/monster stuff that attaches to Bertha is very Angrian, isn't it? Angria!Charlotte is the Charlotte I think I understand least, in a way. She showed herself so easily able to identify with men against women, and I'm no good at that at all.
in re: Juliet Barker, I will say that she left me feeling very defensive of Charlotte, especially when it came to matters of sibling politics. I'm not saying Charlotte was a perfect girl or anything but I've always felt for her: she wasn't supposed to be the oldest one, that was Maria and Elizabeth's position, and she was never suited for or attracted to it. I can imagine it being very difficult for her, still awfully young herself, grieving these maternal sisters and being thrust into the maternal function herself all unwanted.