Villette Read Online Free PDF Page A

presence, she still must distance herself from the actress’s unmitigated representation of emotion. The connection between Vashti’s art and her physical presence is something both monstrous and fantastical. When a fire breaks out in the theater after Vashti’s performance, Lucy and Dr. John are caught in the rush to get out of the building. Someone inquires if Dr. John is with anyone and he replies, “I have a lady ... but she will be neither hindrance nor incumbrance” (p. 296). These dismissive words effectively banish Lucy back to the invisible shadowy world of insignificance. Lucy’s hopes with Graham have gone up in flames.
    In rejecting a representation of femininity through the theater and the arts—both embodied, visual genres—Brontë implies that what is left is writing. The fascinating essence of the provocative Vashti—what Lucy terms “wild,” “intense,” and “flaming”—can perhaps be expressed only through the expansive possibility of words. Lucy begins to imagine what such passion might look like in language. Suddenly there are two Lucys writing in the novel: one composing rational, cryptic letters to Graham, the other narrating the tortuous process of creating these vexed public documents while desperately waiting for a response. When Lucy vehemently revises and rewrites letters to Graham, actions dictated by the “hag reason,” the anguish of the prose in the novel is at its most heightened.
    I suppose animals kept in cages, and so scantily fed as to be always upon the verge of famine, await their food as I awaited a letter. Oh!—to speak truth, and drop that tone of a false calm which long to sustain, outwears nature’s endurance—I underwent in those seven weeks bitter fears and pains, strange inward trials, miserable defections of hope, intolerable encroachments of despair. This last came so near me sometimes that her breath went right through me (p. 302).
    Perhaps ironically, the death of Lucy’s romance with Graham—symbolized by her sealing his letters in a glass jar and burying them under a tree in the garden—is the birth of her connection to Monsieur Paul. The last third of the novel details their strange and vexed courtship, a relationship haunted by Lucy’s memories of Graham. Paul’s recognition of Lucy’s desire for Graham and her mourning his loss—at one point Paul exclaims, “You remind me, then, of a young she wild creature, new caught, untamed, viewing with a mixture of fire and fear the first entrance of the breaker-in” (p. 262)—enables him to see her as no one else does. Before Lucy can recognize and return Paul’s passion for her, she must relive witnessing the pairing of Graham and the newly arrived, now adult, Polly Home. Once again, Lucy becomes ghostly, while Polly takes center stage.
    Lucy’s emotions are expressed through her particular attention to specific objects: Graham’s letters and a cigar case that Lucy received the evening they went to the theater. Lucy explains, “To this day I keep my cigar-case: it serves, when I look at it, to remind me of old times, and one happy evening” (p. 252). In this instance, Brontë reveals Lucy in the scene of writing, reminding her readers that they are in the theater of the novel—immersed in scenes from Lucy’s past. The effect is similar to drawing up the curtain at an unexpected moment. All of a sudden, we are forced to acknowledge that there is a world outside of the story, one that includes the old and mostly invisible Lucy Snowe. Our inability to see the “real” Lucy both physically and emotionally is an uncanny displacement that the reader must contend with in order to make sense of the story.
    This positioning of distant author and present heroine (a version of the author’s past self) mirrors Brontë’s complex relationship to the semi-real events in the novel. Just as we can’t make one-to-one connections between Brontë’s life and Brontë’s fiction, we also have the same