A Reprise

Villette has become more intense. Lucy Snowe has become without her knowledge an active participant in life and in the human passions she has forbidden herself. Unfortunately she has chosen an object we would not have for her, and realizes for him emotions she has repressed too long in herself. The following scene has been my second-favorite in the book, the first being Lucy's older friend relating the story of her tragic Christmas-eve. "I excuse everything," he interrupted; "my mood is so meek, neither rebuff nor, perhaps, insult could ruffle it. 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." Unwarrantable accost!--rash and rude if addressed to a pupil; to a teacher inadmissible. He thought to provoke a warm reply; I had seen him vex the passionate to explosion before now. In me his malice should find no gratification; I sat silent. "You l...

This is to me not like Jane Eyre. Jane Eyre is dramatic and melancholy, a true period romance, while Villette contains too many little heartbreaks and no large ones that would constitute a romance. Lucy's wild delirium of loneliness is the most emotional interval I have read in the story. In this she reveals fully the passions that lie beneath her cool exterior. Soon after we learn that she has closed even the reader off in some information, such a private person she is, and she has returned to her cool reserve. She describes in painful yet analytical detail what it is like to make a living as a woman, and even more interestingly, in a woman-dominated work. As a reader I identify, I recognize, I rage. As a working woman I feel I am looking into a mirror, examining a world nearly two centuries ago full of the same kinds of people in this one. Two older matriarchs dominate Lucy's life, and are remarkably similar to each other. One is genteel, the other dishonest and underhanded, ...

"My dear girl," she said, "one happy Christmas Eve I dressed and decorated myself, expecting my lover, very soon to be my husband, would come that night to visit me. I sat down to wait. Once more I see that moment--I see the snow twilight stealing through the window over which the curtain was not dropped, for I designed to watch him ride up the white walk; I see and feel the soft firelight warming me, playing on my silk dress, and fitfully showing me my own young figure in a glass. I see the moon of a calm winter night, float full, clear, and cold, over the inky mass of shrubbery, and the silvered turf of my grounds. I wait, with some impatience in my pulse, but no doubt in my breast. The flames had died in the fire, but it was a bright mass yet; the moon was mounting high, but she was still visible from the lattice; the clock neared ten; he rarely tarried later than this, but once or twice he had been delayed so long. "Would he for once fail me? No--not even for on...