“That Brontë’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 Brontë’s continually darkening sense of the alienating nature of English life.” (50)
l- Barry Qualls
The Secular Pilgrimage of Victorian Fiction: The Novel as Book of Life (Cambridge University Press, 1982)
Qualls’ 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 Brontës, 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).
Qualls 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 the human search for 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 Qualls, what these mid-19th century writers were exploring, and I would tend to agree with him.
Reading this book is touching on intuitions I’ve had about the stories of the authors he examines. 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, though not under that name_ calling it ‘journeying’ or ‘wandering,’ et cetera. But I see, now, that it is a secular pilgrimage that many of these characters were embarked upon.
Qualls argues that progressive Victorians – such as Charlotte Brontë, 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 better balance between Reason and Emotion than the Romanticists had achieved, and they yearned to find a Path through life – as the Puritans had also always wanted to do – leading to meaningful connections between the journeys of characters toward self-fulfillment and traditional pilgrimage themes. The characters in these novels were simply travelling a secular path, with more secularized waystations, themes and foibles.
As regards Villette, Qualls 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. I was glad to find his analysis of the end of Shirley agreeing with mine in that the characters are not as fully self-realized, perhaps, as Jane Eyre, and that their paving-over of the green vale in a pursuit of worldly progress, for instance, is not to be adulated (for this, see my blog, “The End of Shirley”)! Seeing both of these possible ends in Charlotte’s second and third novels, is Lucy Snowe more like Shirley and Caroline, or more like Jane?
Of Lucy he suggests (see 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 Qualls see that term as appropriate if I were to ask him?) The expression “Freedom and Renovation” comes from the opening of Chapter XLI – Faubourg Clotilde – where she says:
She starts out by claiming she has ‘won’ these two “stalwart companions” on the night of the Fetê in the city, when she was confronted with revelations that both un-reined her from certain presuppositions and which, at the same time, opened her toward new possibilities. I can see this, having read the previous chapter. Yet in the very next paragraph she laments their lack of power:
I tried them the very next day. They had boasted their strength loudly when they reclaimed me from love and its bondage, but upon my demanding deeds, not words, some evidence of better comfort, some experience of a relieved life—Freedom excused himself, as for the present impoverished and disabled to assist; and Renovation never spoke; he had died in the night suddenly. (¶ 2)
So they were at that moment “impoverished
and disabled” or dead? As she reflects
more on that night, her noctabulations – under the effect of a sleeping draught
foisted on her by Madame Beck – left her many questions on waking the next
day.
So my question still is, has Lucy achieved this “Freedom and Renovation” by the end of the novel? Does Qualls believe she did; or am I mis-reading him? Does her being alone and in exile from her homeland not count against her self-realization? When I put it that way, I begin to doubt my own initial reaction to the end of Villette. … Exile and solitude are not necessarily negative things.
I had not considered, until I read this book, that Lucy's self-exile from England might also have been connected with changes going on there that were social and cultural, transcending the simply personal. Qualls says, in relation to the end of Shirley in particular, that:
Given Qualls’ description of English society at that time, it is possible to see Lucy as also potentially dis-enheartened by the accelerated social change in her home country, the effect compounding what she herself has gone through personally. The England she knew was no longer 'there.' It had slipped into the past. Lucy has no life left there; for two reasons: personal and because of the way her country was changing. In a way, she is similar to James Joyce; whose self-exile from Ireland was a literal reality in his life, not something that happened to one of his fictional characters only.
Whatever the components of her sense of loss, 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. [*]
Like Frodo in The Lord of the Rings, Lucy leaves her home after a traumatic experience. The England she knew as a girl is no longer to be found; in part, because of what she has gone through, but also because of the ongoing mechanization, industrialism and commercialism that was quickly transforming English society during the lifetimes of the Brontës.
Can I 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 Qualls 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
[*] 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.
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