“That Bronté’s heroines also achieve a certain happiness attests to her romance impulse: that her final heroine, Lucy Snowe, can achieve that happiness – “Freedom and Renovation” – only in exile and alone attests to Bronté’s continually darkening sense of the alienating nature of English life.” (50)
- Barry Quales
The Secular Pilgrimage of Victorian Fiction: The Novel as Book of Life (Cambridge University Press, 1982)
I have been deeply engaged reading this very interesting book over the last month, the chapter on Charlotte Bronté’s novels broadening and challenging my own perceptions! Quales’ grounding idea is that Thomas Carlisle was a key writer in a transition from the kinds of religious pilgrim stories that were written before his time (e.g., Pilgrim’s Progress) and the secular pilgrim stories that he sees evident in the novels of writers like the Brontés, Dickens and George Elliot. He then argues that many of the great novels of this period function as Books of Life; that the main characters pilgrim through life – in the secular, industrializing, increasingly mechanized and rationalized world of the 19th century – seeking fulfillment, meaning and ‘self-realization’ (my term).
Quales says that while the religious-based temptations presented in writers like Bunyan were serious for the intended audience (and perhaps still are), the protagonists of many 19th century novels were facing temptations and trials of their own; challenges of a secular nature to their moral compass and deep values—these being just as sure to ruin a soul as were the temptations characters endured and struggled with in the earlier religious paradigm. Three of these secular temptations were Materialism, Rationalism and Industrialism. These three threats to the soul and to well-being participated in_ and furthered the tendency to use_ a machine metaphor for all of society; of God, and all of life within the world—as well as the very practical mechanization of daily life that was its mantle. The question is how do you maintain the integrity of a human soul; how to keep it fed and nurtured – in a world so quickly transforming; in a world more and more devoid of a connection with Nature; in a world where people were becoming more and more cut-off from deep and compassionate interactions? This is, for Qualles, what these mid-19th century writers were exploring, and I would tend to agree with him.
Reading this book is allowing intuitions that I’ve had about the stories of the authors he examines to coalesce. I have noticed this theme of pilgrimage in many of the 19th century novels I love and have been analyzing, reflecting and meditating upon over the years! I am awakened to these intuitions, reading Qualles, who is drawing my attention into a clearer focus upon them!
Quales argues that progressive Victorians – such as Charlotte Bronte, Dickens and Elliot – were seeking a way beyond both the Puritanism and the Rationalism of the Enlightenment as well as the limitations of the Romanticist paradigm that arose in their wake. Romanticism, he says, came forth and was formulated at a time just before the surge of industrialization and mechanization that came to dominate the Victorian World by mid-century in England. The Progressive Victorians wanted a balance between Reason and Emotion, and they wanted to find a Path through life – as the Puritans had also always wanted to do – leading to meaningful self-fulfillment. They were simply travelling a secular path, with more secularized waystations, themes and foibles.
As regards Villette, Quales is the second critic I have encountered who seems to see Lucy Snowe in a more positive light by the end of the novel. My first read left me feeling that she was as yet un-self-realized and that she had a long way to go before she might reach the kind of state in which we find Jane Eyre, for instance, by the end of her story. He agrees with me that the characters at the end of Shirley are not fully self-realized, and that the way they have paved over the green vale in their pursuit of progress, for instance, is not to be adulated (for this, see my blog, “The End of Shirley”)! But of Lucy he suggests – in the epigraph to this blog – that she has navigated through life and come to a place where she is herself; alone, yes, but not un-self-realized? (Would Quales go that far if I were to ask him?)
Has Lucy really achieved “Freedom and Renovation” by the end of the novel? Does Qualles believe she did; or am I mis-reading him? Does her being alone and in exile not count against her self-realization? When I put it that way, I begin to doubt my own reaction to the end of Villette. Exile and solitude are not necessarily negative things.
I had not thought, until I read this, that her self-exile from England entails an implicit critique her homeland. She has no life there; perhaps she felt herself somewhat of an outsider there—possibly because of the suffering she had undergone in that 8-year period after the initial Bretton sojourn? Given Qualls’ suggestion of an implicit critique of English society in the novel, perhaps Lucy is similar to Joyce; whose self-exile from Ireland was a literal reality in his lived-life, not that of one of his fictional characters only.
It is obvious from what she says that there was nothing left for her back in England. At one point just before going to Villette, Lucy avers that she has no family, no home and that no one who would miss her if she left England, never to return. Writing this, just now, I thought of Frodo in The Lord of the Rings who, in the end, cannot stay in Hobbiton; he cannot really dwell there, having become who he now is. The world of The Shire is not for him as it was before he left, though he has played a key role in saving it for everyone else. Frodo and Lucy have both gone through life-changing experiences; both have been traumatized by what they went through.
But whereas Frodo does not criticize the Shire after his return, he has achieved a kind-of self-realization through his experiences which makes him unable to stay there, Lucy leaves England as there is nothing left for her there. Obviously not because she has ‘saved’ it, as Frodo has helped save Middle Earth – at least for a time – but because she cannot come into her own, become self-realized, if she stays in England. The England she knew as a girl is no longer to be found; in part, because of what she has gone through.
Can I really accept the idea that Lucy is ‘happy’ – or at least reasonably satisfied with her existence – at the end of the novel, even if this is what Qualles is implying? Perhaps the close re-reading in which I am now engaged may lead me to a different conclusion than did the first read. I will certainly allow that. However, I still feel that somehow – at some level – Lucy has never come to terms with whatever happened to her in that unnarrated 8-year period. Does she need to? Or maybe she has come to terms with her past ‘off stage,’ not in the overt narrative that she is giving us? Perhaps my current re-read of the novel will divest me of this feeling, and I will see her as reasonably self-realized?
We’ll see.
Any comments or responses, please share them. - MW
No comments:
Post a Comment