Reading Desire: Villette as “Heretic Narrative”

Abstract

READING DESIRE: VILLETTE AS “HERETIC NARRATIVE’ KATE LAWSON Wilfrid Laurier University Charlotte Bronte’s novel Villette, like her earlier works of fiction, exhibits a powerful interest in Christianity both as a structure of thought and as an institution, whether in its Protestant or Roman Catholic form. Villette in several respects repeats and refines the vision of her first rejected novel The Professor; Bronte’s continental experience again forms the core of the novel, and, as in the first novel, she paints a portrait of Catholicism that is, on the whole, unattractive. But Villette’s vision of the distinction between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism is a much more complex one: The Professor is controlled by a simplistic dualism — Protestantism is good, Roman Catholicism is bad. There is little subtle shading of morality in that novel, so that characters are often caricatures — tiresomely good Protes­ tants or predictably “evil” Catholics. Villette’s great departure from this earlier work is that, rather than projecting division out onto the universe in this way, it takes the radical step of discovering within its heroine, Lucy Snowe, a primary division. The more sophisticated narrative of Villette rec­ ognizes that division is first of all internalized in the human subject, that a primary separation exists, not between Protestantism and Catholicism as in The Professor, nor between God and Nature as in Jane Eyre and Shirley, nor even between self and world, but rather between different parts of the self. In other words, the central problem in the novel is not denominational or religious but psychological. As psychoanalytic thought asserts, the hu­ man subject is a divided one: it is both conscious and unconscious; it is a construction of various energies and forces. The idea of a unified integrated self belongs to the realm of the imaginary; it is an idea granted to the sub­ ject, not arising from it, and thus is finally a source of alienation, a source of further division. The singular speaking voice really consists of an inter­ weaving of different voices.1 While the distinction between Protestantism and Catholicism is important to Villette, it is of a secondary order; it arises from the fundamental division within Lucy Snowe herself. She is a divided subject who speaks with a divided voice. An examination of the religious vision of Villette must take account of this dichotomy.2 In the early part of the narrative of Villette the division within Lucy Snowe is marked in several ways. For example, Lucy Snowe claims to be “guiltless of that curse, an overheated and discursive imagination,” and yet English Stu d ies in Ca n a d a , x v ii, i , March 1991 finds her godmother’s home to be “haunted” (15) by Polly Home. Lucy Snowe’s calmness is almost a byword — “I, Lucy Snowe, was calm” (28) — and yet a “ceaseless consciousness of anxiety” lies in wait for her “like a tiger crouched in a jungle” (82). Her love is divided; she loves two men in the novel — Graham Bretton and M. Paul. The clearest evidence of the breach, however, is marked in the abstractions that proliferate in this novel. The narrator states, “I seemed to hold two lives — the life of thought, and that of reality” (105, my emphasis). When corresponding with Graham Bretton, she finds she cannot write one letter; she must write two, one written “under the dry, stinting check of Reason,” and the other “according to the full, liberal impulse of Feeling.” In this writing, her loyalties are divided: “I served two masters: I bowed the knee in the house of Rimmon, and lifted the heart at another shrine” (363). Or again, as she regains consciousness in the Bretton household after fainting in the streets of Villette, she finds “the divorced mates, Spirit and Substance, were hard to re-unite: they greeted each other, not in an embrace, but a racking sort of struggle” (235). Perhaps the most striking early example of Lucy Snowe’s double consciousness comes when she is sailing from England to Labassecour, leaving her “home-land” — where she has no home — and striking out for a foreign shore: In my reverie, methought I saw the continent of Europe...