Hawthorne's Light and Shadow (15 August 2025)

“In Hawthorne, light needs to be modified, or, as the case may be, accentuated, by shadow; heat, tempered with coolness; reality, relieved by a Something Else that will vary according to the reality opposed.” (4)

-        Richard Harter Fogle Hawthorne’s Imagery: The “Proper Light and Shadow” in the Major Romances (1969)

This weekend while working on a triptych of blogs about the Garden—Tree—Alley complex in Villette, I have also been re-reading this great old book by Fogle; finding in it numerous touchstones of my own earthen philosophy, poetics and spiritually.  This is one of those books I read back in the 80’s that first enabled me to put words to much that I was intuiting and feeling about aesthetics, poetics and mysticism.  As I now vividly realize, it was for me a wellspring of mystical and earthen thought.

Right from the beginning, in the opening chapter – titled “The Prefaces and Other Criticism” – I became aware of myself in relation to this text, remembering my initial excited reactions to it back in the early ‘80s’.  The first thing that caught my attention was a quote from the “Old Manse” essay in Mosses from an Old Manse (1846) in which Hawthorne mentioned “fairyland,” describing it as a place where time passes strangely, where “three years hastened away a noiseless flight, as the breezy sunshine chases away the cloud shadows across the depths of a still valley.”  This theme is very well-known to me, now, from a variety of sources, including Celtic myth and Neo-Paganism. Wonderful to realize that Hawthorne was someone who referred to faery lore and adapted a version of it to his stories and novels!  Could reading Hawthorne have been one of the first places I came across this theme in a non-mythic literature?

The next thing that caught my attention was Fogle suggesting a relationship for Hawthorne between transience and harmony.  I sensed this in many of the author’s narrative scenarios and symbolic signifiers, in his short stories as well as in the novels, back when I was reading him.  What is in harmony in a scene or scenario is often also in transition; it is passing, even as it is experienced—perhaps tending toward a new harmony.   Fogle says:

“Hawthorne frequently reaches out toward synthesis and totality, but the gesture is always tentative.  He never commits himself to a single image, a single mood.  There is in him the sense of a consummate whole, but one ideally attainable, never to be realized concretely.”  (4)

Synthesis involves bringing elements together in an harmonious way.  Totality, however – the seeing of the ‘whole picture’ – is beyond his (and our) comprehension as finite mortal beings.  I sense in the use of these terms an allowance for and recognition of the presence of Mystery in our lives; an awareness of the complexities of the reality in which we dwell and quest for meaning, while at the same time allowing for the incompleatness of our expression of it.  Fogle says further, elucidating on this point, that:

“Fullness is perhaps conceivable as a moving panorama, or even as a globe that can be turned before one on its axis; but it can be only perceived in the aspects immediately presented, not grasped as a unity.” (4)

We cannot encompass or even comprehend the whole of reality; except via the parts to which we are exposed and have access.  This is not an argument for provincialism; but rather an offer of perspective allowing for the limits of human perception, intelligence and understanding—while still affirming these abilities as valuable components of our being-in-becoming.

Fogle then discusses Hawthorne’s work-experiences, in particular his time at the Salem Custom House; the essay dealing with it being the introduction to The Scarlet Letter (1850).  Hawthorne there affirms that all of his life- and work-experiences were preparatory; that he accepted them with gratitude for the role of Providence in his life.  For almost-40 years of my life I was cast into various experiences and did a variety of work; all of which I did intuit as preparatory_ for what?  My vocation as a Poet-Writer; of which I first came to the thresholds of realization through an epiphany I had after my first retreat at a Trappist monastery in the summer of 1989.

Hawthorne says that while working at the Custom House, he felt that “A gift, a faculty, if it had not departed, was suspended and inanimate within me.”  I cannot say exactly the same; as all the while I was seeking academic positions and doing odd jobs, I was striving toward self-realization as a Poet.  Not even at my present place of employment – where I’ve been now for 17 years – do I feel that my “gift” and “faculty” has been suspended, much less inanimate in me.  Working where I have all these years has allowed me to support myself and bring a couple hundred blogs, five published books and four more still in manuscript – to fruition.  I do understand what Hawthorne is saying, however, and sympathize.  I then more fully embrace what Hawthorne says next of his preparatory time:

“I never considered it as other than a transitory life.  There was always a prophetic instinct, a low whisper in my ear, that, within no long period, and wherever a new change of custom should be essential to my good, a change would come.”[1]

I, too, long-experienced an anticipatory sense of directioning in my life.  An intuition of what I was seeking, though unable to put words to it and embrace it until after that ‘moment’ in 1989.

Next, Fogle discusses something that has become foundational to me: The role of the Moon and moonlight in poetics, aesthetics and Creative Imaginings!  Fogle says that for Hawthorne, “the most comprehensive image of artistic creation, or the most favorable condition for artistic creation, was illuminated by moonlight and firelight.” (5)   I read this in my mid-20’s and it soon became a rune of the nature of creativity and the influence of the Moon, for me, on my way, at that time and over the decades since, journeying with and into an understanding of – and communion with – the ‘Muse.’  (See my blog “A Musing Life” [2 February 2018] for a narrative of my poetic and spiritual journey into communion with the Muse.)

Hereinafter comes the long text on the effects of Moonlight on the familiar world in which we inhabit in the daylight hours.  _An inspiring text that I wrote-out several times in different notebooks, and later typed-out in the late-1980’s, having kept it in my Preliminarian ever since.  _And if I do not rein-in my enthusiasm, I may copy out the next few paragraphs from Fogle’s book here in full!   I cited it back in the Spring, in a blog (“Hawthorne’s Other Bench” [6 January 2025]) posted at this site.  So let me start by quoting what Fogle says about it, instead:

“Moonlight was for Hawthorne peculiarly the light of Imagination, though seldom sufficient in itself.  The distinctness of the figures of the carpet also had a special significance, for distinctness was to him an attribute of reality, the vision of which was very precious to him, very hard to gain, and tragically easy to lose.   The clarity of outline was in partial opposition to the illusiveness that moonlight and imagination implied.” (6)

Hawthorne here touches on something that every creative or thoughtful person has probably had to face; the nature of reality—at one time or another.  What is this world, this existence—in which we find ourselves?  Or in Martin Heidegger’s poetic phrasing; ‘this world’ into which we have found ourselves ‘thrown?’  Reality is not really like a ball or globe that we can simply turn and look at and comprehend in full from our finite vantage point.  Reality is vast and deep, and it requires a lifetime – at least – to even achieve a moderate comprehension of it.  Yet we strive and seek and quest for understanding, and do come to a certain grasp of it; enough – perhaps sometimes more – to be able to navigate through this brief life adroitly.  What I now see, from my current vantage point, is that Hawthorne formulated in this introduction to The Scarlet Letter a praxis (theory & practice combined) for understanding, grappling with and expressing reality. 

Just before this, Hawthorne is lamenting that his imagination was often a clouded mirror when at the Custom House, and that, if it did not even clear in the late hours of night, when the room was illuminated by Moonlight and Firelight, so much the worse.  I’ve known that experience.  Most creative people have probably experienced something like this at one time or another?  The circumstances for creativity are right, the time is available; but nothing comes of it.  I once wrote a poem about this called “A Poetics of the Creative Process”[2] in which I struggled with the inevitable failures and disappointments, and in some cases the final success, of the creative process.  As a response to his own dilemma, Hawthorne then pleads for the richness and aptness of Moonlight and Firelight to his ‘subject,’ saying (yes,  _I’m apparently going to quote the whole text here, again…):

“If the imaginative faculty refused to act at such an hour, it might well be deemed a hopeless case.  Moonlight, in a familiar room, falling so white upon the carpet, and showing all its figures so distinctly—making every object so minutely visible, yet so unlike a morning or noontide visibility,—is a medium the most suitable for a romance-writer to get acquainted with his illusive guests.” 

[Here is the “carpet” Hawthorne referred to in the quote from Fogle.]

Looking at a room, a forest glade, or any other locale in moonlight, one experiences a distancing from ‘everyday reality’ and perhaps – if we are fortunate; the Muse smiling upon us – the resonance of “Another World.”  That is, a ‘fictive,’ imagined, imaginary world; the realm of faërie—as I have more recently learned to call it through my reading of Tolkien!  Is this the first place I read it so plainly stated; in the words of a literary author with whom I immediately felt a sympathy, having discovered – as I did with Wordsworth about the same time in my life – a kindred spirit?!

The distinctness of objects – all too familiar in the light of day – is wrought in a different way in the light of the Moon or, as Hawthorne will point out, that of a fireplace.  It is a strange distinctness.  You know what the object in your sense-field is, at least most of the time, but in Moonlight it presences differently than it will in the sun’s light.  I love watching Moonlight sweeping across a scene, whether indoors or outside_ in town or in the woods, feeling the transmutation of the familiar under its effect, and then the threat of the unusual or strange emerging from it – that possibility often stemming from the apprehension of something that should be familiar, yet is not!  “What is that?” _or more chillingly, “What is that?”

I have oft sat in a darkening room with a window opening toward the east, where the Moon rises; feeling inspired to stay and watch the coming of the moonbeams into the room—now touching the floor for the first time, and then illuminating the first object as rays move in retrograde within the room to the rising of the Moon in the sky.  Here I whole-heartedly relate to the kind of experience that Hawthorne describes next; the transmutation of the ordinary into ‘Something Else:”

“There is the little domestic scenery of the well-known apartment; the chairs, with each its separate individuality; the centre-table, sustaining a work basket, a volume or two, and an extinguishing lamp; the sofa, the bookcase; the picture on the wall,—all these details, so completely seen, are so spiritualized by the unusual light, that they seem to lose their actual substance, and become things of intellect.”

The unusual emerges out of the usual, the strange out of the familiar; the extraordinary out of the ordinary—and so, if you are not open to and immersed in the ordinary, you may not notice or fully experience the extraordinary.  Hawthorne says:

“Nothing is too small or too trifling to undergo this change, and acquire dignity thereby.  A child’s shoe; the doll, seated in her little wicker carriage; the hobby-horse—whatever, in a word, has been used or played with, during the day, is now invested with a quality of strangeness and remoteness, though still almost as vividly present as by daylight.”

The moonlit world has a ‘dignity’ all its own; not ‘better’ than daylight actuality—just different, and which is conducive to Imaginings and Creativity.  This is a primary touchstone of a Romanticist paradigm!

Hawthorne then introduces a dyadic construct; that between Actuality and the Imaginary—wherein I find a tap-root of my propensity to refer to all ‘reality’ as “real,” whether it is part of the natural and social worlds in which we dwell – Earth & Cosmos – or whether a poem, painting, story, or anything else imaginatively created or ‘visited’ in dreams, perhaps under the spell of faërie.  Hawthorne says:

“Thus, therefore, the floor of our familiar room has become a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other.”

There is the Actual World, and then there is the Realm opened up by the Imagination.  These two come into concert with one another – in the neutral territory of our proximately experienced world; wherever that may be; wherever we are – allowing us to express our inspirations, dreams and visitations—telling the stories born out of this confluence; i.e., this ‘neutral’ place.  Here is a basic ontological distinction constituting a Romanticist way of experiencing the world.  It is in the meeting and mingling of the Actual and the Imaginary that Inspiration takes hold; at least for the Romantic Poet, Writer, Musician or Artist.  Within this confluence; at this “neutral territory,” Hawthorne says:

“Ghosts might enter here, without affrighting us.  It would be too much in keeping with the scene to excite surprise, were we to look about us and discover a form beloved, but gone hence, now sitting quietly in a streak of this magic moonshine, with an aspect that would make us doubt whether it had returned from afar, or had never once stirred from our fireside.”

Seeing a ghost might be considered ‘natural’ in either moonlight or, as Hawthorne also intimates here, fireshine.  The Imaginary is connected with fairy-land, and so the travelling back and forth between worlds – That one and This one – becomes something at least potentially non-frightening; because—we are in the neutral space where Actuality and the Imaginary confluence with one another.  I would agree, and say so, except perhaps when an apparition is come for retribution or recompense—as in many stories and folkloric tales!?

Moonlight and Firelight are thus complementary in their relation to Actuality and the Imaginary!  Often, when out camping or sitting near a campfire at a friend’s house, I have experienced this subtle transformation of the environs all-around in the aura of firelight to which Hawthorne here refers!  He says, describing a coal – rather than wood – fire:

“The somewhat dim coal-fire has an essential influence in producing the effect which I would describe.   It throws its unobtrusive tinge throughout the room, with a faint ruddiness upon the walls and ceiling, and a reflected gleam from the polish of the furniture.  This warmer light mingles itself with the cold spirituality of the moonbeams, and communicates, as it were, a heart and sensibilities of human tenderness to the forms which fancy summons up.  It converts them from snow-images into men and women.”

Moonlight and Firelight can co-mingle in the illumination of the ordinary world.  Firelight is associated with warmth, as Moonlight is associated with chill and coldness.  Out of their confluence arises a space for human sensibilities.  “Snow-images” is here a term Hawthorne uses to describe the coldness of Moon-lit scenes.

Reading this brings back memories of sitting by a fireplace and watching the dance of light and shadows upon all the surfaces in the room.  The dance of light and shadows!  I can see them now!  It is this experience that drew me into writing Yule stories about a family that came to be called “The Whittiers;” those stories oft being explorations of Life-Together in Earth & Sprit under the dyadic theme of “Heart & Hearth.”  As I imagine sitting in the main room of the Whittier House, gazing into the large fireplace, I look up and_ I see images dancing in the large mirror over the mantel!  Hawthorne then takes us further_ into that Looking-Glass!  He says:

“Glancing at the looking-glass, we behold—deep within its haunted verge—the smouldering glow of the half extinguished anthracite, the white moonbeams on the floor, and a repetition of all the gleam and shadow of the picture, with one remove further from the actual, and nearer to the imaginative.”

I have often imagined mirrors as portals into otherworlds.  (Have you?)  Hawthorne connects the looking-glass with the impetus toward “romance,” or – I would also call it – “mystical” creativity:

“Then, at such an hour, and with this scene before him, if a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need never try to write romances.”

I might say “bring out the truth” of the scene, instead of making it “seem” like truth.  But that may be too strong.  Yet, that allowed, the mirror stands for an “imitation” of the blended Actual and Imaginary, and is therefore a rune of the Work of Art conceived and perhaps executed in – or at least in the memory of – the blended world that is reflected in the mirror.

As I have often felt and understood – intuited and tried to express – the Actual is too heavy a burden, as Hawthorne sees as well, for the actuation of Art.  It needs the infusion of the Imaginary.  Without that, a work of art simply reproduces the natural and social worlds in which we find ourselves.  It re-presents the ‘what-is’ without having that poetic distancing from it that the confluence of the Imaginary with the Actual provides.

I must now say that I affirm “Realist” and “Naturalistic” story-telling, and have read many novels and stories told from that perspective.  If what you want is a representation of ‘the way things are,’ then creating within the Actual only and bringing forth works of Art that show it forth – but may also reify it – is a worthwhile praxis.  “Realist” or “Naturalistic” Art also uses the Imagination; but it is not, perhaps, utilizing “the Imaginary” in the same sense in which Hawthorne uses that term.  Not in a Romanticist sense.

We need to grapple-with and try and understand the Actual in order to live-life, at the very least to survive – but to really live-life-to-the-fullest, I believe, we may need the Something More that the Imaginary grants to us when infusing and mixing with the Actual in that ‘neutral’ space.  The Imaginary on its own is perhaps just as much a burden as is the Actual without the Imaginary.  You may end up living in a partial-fantasy; for true Fantasy will mirror and allude to the Actual without simply replicating it.  Our focus on ‘Realism,’ so-called, is valuable.  But without the Imaginary to infuse and transmute it, it may be more difficult to see past the what-is to the what-might-be, much less enable us to delve below the surface of the what-is in order to better understand it’s girth and heft.  Our hopes for a better or even just different world are often the fruit of the Imaginary acting upon the Actual, and vice versa.  Whether in a Realist or a Romanticist paradigm, how else could we envision new possibilities except by imagining them?

At this point, Fogle turns to the “Main Street” story in The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales that I analyzed at length in “Hawthorne’s Other Bench,” and then goes on to discuss the prefaces to the major works in terms of the use of Light and Shadow in those texts.  Each of the major novels deals with the interplay of the Actual and the Imaginary.  I have only dealt here with about four pages from the Preface, and hope this whets your interest, as Fogle’s analysis is worth reading.

I hope to re-read Hawthorne’s novels someday.  Hawthorne is one of the great, original novelists in the early American Tradition.  I had forgotten how Gothic his work was and how deeply Romanticist he was in his praxis.  I am glad to have re-discovered Fogle’s excellent book, and Hawthorne through it!

Finis

 

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[1] Fogle does not provide page numbers for the quotes from Hawthorne, and neither does the Gutenberg pdf of The Scarlet Letter that I am using.  The quotes begin in ¶45 of “The Custom House.”

 [2] Published as the Prelude to Tales from the Seasons (Authorhouse, 2008).

The End of Villette, Again (20 June 2025)

“At the deepest, most archaic level of Brontë’s fiction resides the vision of an idealized Romantic love.  It controls her earliest work as it informs her last. Although its manifestation steadily alters, it never loses its importance, even in the most placid characters, it sends out tremors from below.” (66)

- Karen Chase  Eros and Psyche: The Representation of Personality in Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens and George Elliot (Routledge, 1984)

 It has been just over a year since I finished reading Villette for the first time, and I am still engaged with the text and with Lucy Snowe; coming to appreciate her state-of-soul as well as her life-situation at the end-point of her narrative.  Hence this third blog.[1]  My journey has brought me from a deep concern for her at the end of my first read; having felt that she was likely still in a state of unresolved trauma with regard to those unnarrated 8 years of her life between the early chapters in Bretton and her engagement as companion to Miss Marchmont—toward a more positive consideration of her state at the end of her story.

This change was first prompted by my reading Barry Quales’ The Secular Pilgrimage of Victorian Fiction: The Novel as Book of Life (Cambridge University Press, 1982), in which the author suggested that there is evidence in the text that Lucy may have achieved a degree of self-realization, and might even have been ‘happy’ by the end of her tale.  I had to ask: Had she navigated through life and come to a place where she is herself; alone, yes, but not un-self-realized?  Quales said:

“That Brontë’s heroines … 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)

Quales encouraged me to consider that her being alone at the end of her narrative – having rejected John Graham Bretton and lost M Paul Emmanuel – was not necessarily a negative state.  I certainly don’t think that myself; as I value solitude as much as community, relationship with others as much as independence.  What his analysis prompted me to consider, however, was that Lucy underwent a transformation through the course of her story, both in the living of it and in the telling of it – and that her state-of-soul by the end is not as sad and unfortunate as I first understood it to be?

This was reinforced and given heft through my more recent read of Karen Chase’s engaging exploration of the role of eros and psyche in the novel.  She has pointed me to specific texts providing evidence of another way of looking at Lucy Snowe at the time when she was writing her story.  For Chase, Lucy is a person struggling between independence and romance; a dialectical tension similar to Quales’ theme of “Freedom and Renovation.”  Chase first made me take notice of Lucy’s avowal of “success;” so plain-stated that I shouldn’t have neglected to take it into account on my first read.  She says—

“The secret of my success did not lie so much in myself, in any endowment, any power of mine, as in a new state of circumstances, a wonderfully changed life, a relieved heart.  The spring which moved my energies lay far away beyond seas, in an Indian isle.” (Ch XLII ¶ 5)

She asserts her success while attributing it to forces beyond her own will; something that is not as often acknowledged as it perhaps should be—the interplay of our own will and desires with those of others.  New circumstances can ofttimes open a person to new life-possibilities.  For Lucy, it is the friendship that developed between her and M Paul Emmanuel and then his gifting her the little house in which she was able to start a school of her own; something that she had been dreaming of doing as her life at the pensionnat unfolded—this gift being an impetus for change and growth.

Chase then pointed me to Lucy’s next avowal; another one that I had perhaps not given as much attention to as it deserved!  Lucy says:

“Do not think that this genial flame sustained itself, or lived wholly on a bequeathed hope or a parting promise. A generous provider supplied bounteous fuel.” (Ch XLII, ¶ 6)

Lucy’s assertion of herself as having or being a “genial flame” is once again humbly attributed to an external catalyst; just as was her success.  It was not self-sustaining.  She did not live for years after M Paul’s departure by hope alone, nor did she sustain herself solely on his “parting promise” of return.  The fuel that sustains her is none other than M Paul Emmanuel’s friendship and generosity.

I have been grappling, as a reader, with accepting this evidence as a true description of Lucy’s state-of-soul at the time she is finishing her narrative.  I have come to a confluence of flow in this regard; it may be part of our understanding of Lucy Snowe, at least, but I would urge that it is not the whole picture.   To rune this out, I began to think about Lucy’s relationships with John Graham Bretton and M Paul Emmauel.  These are the two men in her life in Villette, and the way they respond to her, treat and understand her gives heft to the claim that Lucy sees M Paul as the sustaining force behind her “genial flame” and “success.”

There are several scenes and themes in the narrative through which John and M Paul are being implicitly compared; as persons in themselves as well as in their relation to Lucy.   I want to focus on just one of these themes here; how they each react to Lucy’s confession of having seen the Nun.  There is a clear difference in their reaction, as well as in their approach to the confession and to Lucy herself as the one claiming to have had this unusual, out-of-the-ordinary experience.

Lucy’s first encounter with the Nun occurs in the garret of the school in Chapter XXII, “The Letter” – after which John queries Lucy as to what she has seen, teasing her that if she did not tell him, he would never write her another letter. (¶ 43).  (Note that Lucy was up there reading John’s first letter for the first time!)  Despite this meanness, Lucy submits, as she wants – needs – to share with someone what happened up in the garret.  She tells him what she saw.  And what is his reaction?  To write it off, saying that what she really needs is to seek to be happy.  He says: “Happiness is the cure—a cheerful mind the preventive: cultivate both.”  (¶ 65)  “This is all a matter of the nerves,” he had said even before she described the apparition of the Nun (¶52). 

Once he heard her story he pronounced, “I think it a case of spectral illusion: I fear,  following on and resulting from long-continued mental conflict." (¶ 63).  Dr John here reduces Lucy to the level of one of his patients.

After his ‘diagnosis,’ Lucy is left alone in her musings as to what happened in the attic.  He has planted doubts in her mind as to what she experienced, leading her to question her own mental health.  Compare this with her discussion with M Paul in the Forbidden Alley in the Garden in Chapter XXXI, “The Dryad,” in which the Nun – its nature and intent – is brought up in a conversation in which M Paul’s care and concern for Lucy has been confessed and made manifest in an act of kindness!

Just before this scene, Lucy had been asleep at a desk in one of the classrooms, and upon waking found herself shawled and her head resting on another shawl (¶ 6).  She wonders who could have done this; who had had enough care for her to keep her comfortable and free from getting chilled as she slept?  Madame Beck seemed the best candidate, but later, when strolling out into the Garden in the moonlight, she discovers the actual perpetrator of the caring act!

She gravitates, as usual, to the Forbidden Alley – her favorite haunt of solitude – which she has not visited since she buried John’s letters in what I call a ‘jar of confinement.’[2]  There Lucy reflects on that ‘epistolary’ burial, which is right below her feet at the foot of the Methuselah Tree, interred just above what is said to be the resting place of the ‘nun buried alive’ in “centuries past” for some misconduct against the rules of her order.

It is interesting that Lucy is here reflecting on her friendship with John, allowing herself to doubt, for a few moments, whether she should have so severed her heart from her hopes regarding John as to have buried his letters, saying:

“I recalled Dr. John; my warm affection for him; my faith in his excellence; my delight in his grace. What was become of that curious one-sided friendship which was half marble and half life; only on one hand truth, and on the other perhaps a jest?” (¶14)

 _but, sobering, realizes that her hopes would never have come to pass.  She sees that it was “one-sided” as well as stone-like and possibly a joke!  She then says, finally, a closing ‘reply’ to John, spoken to him though he is not present, “Good-night, Dr. John; you are good, you are beautiful; but you are not mine. Good-night, and God bless you!” (¶ 17)

This “good night” is echoed by another voice and, turning, Lucy finds M Paul standing quite near her in the fading evening light.  As they begin to talk, he admits that he was the one who shawled her in the classroom against the chillness of the evening, after which a very honest conversation unfolds, approaching a threshold of depth that will continue to be explored as their story unfolds through the rest of the novel.  They discuss his modesty and how he is not impervious to embarrassment; which impresses Lucy, who then feels towards him “a sincerity of esteem which made my heart ache.” (¶ 45).

M Paul then tells her how he keeps his eye on the Garden from a window high up in the boys’ colleges, and how he has long been aware of Lucy’s attraction to the Forbidden Alley; that he has “noticed her taste for seclusion, watched her well, long before” they had come to be on “speaking terms.” (¶ 47).  While Lucy criticizes M Paul for his surveillance, she recognizes the concern for herself and the well-being of the students at the school that it represents.  She suggests that were it anyone else surveilling the Garden from a high window, she might have more qualms; indicating that she already at this point recognizes M Paul’s good intentions in what he does—even if the acting-out of those intentions raises concerns.

M Paul then lets her know that Madame Beck often comes into the Garden while Lucy is secluded in the Forbidden Alley, and espies her, watching what is going on.  The surveillance of M Paul from his window is contrasted with the spying eyes of Madame Beck, for he lets Lucy know this as a warning for her to be on her guard.  While Madame Beck’s surveillance of the students and staff in general can, on the one hand, be considered done for the welfare of those spied upon, like M Paul, with regard to Lucy, however, Madame Beck’s surveillance has more complicated motives!  This information, shared with Lucy, is one more indication of his care and concern for her.  While M Paul sees himself as a benevolent surveillant, he implies that Madame Beck may have less ‘honorable’ motives.

Going deeper into the connection emerging between them, M Paul queries her: “do you recollect my once coming silently and offering you a little knot of white violets when we were strangers?” To which she replies: “I recollect it. I dried the violets, kept them, and have them still.” (¶ 48).  This happened before they had begun to be(come) friends, and for that reason her preservation of the proffered violets carries a load of significance!  These violets from M Paul were in Lucy’s drawer where she kept her valuables; they were there when she stowed John’s letters away in that same drawer for safe keeping.  Imagine_ the scent of the violets from M Paul adding their fragrance to John’s letters?  This reminder of the violets certainly speaks to an initial opening toward their eventual relationship sometime early in Lucy’s residence at the pensionnat!

The discussion then moves toward a revelation between them of something they have both seen in the Garden.  At first M Paul is fishing; he wants to discover if what he suspects about Lucy may be true.  When Lucy queries what he means, sensing that she might know but being unwilling to divulge having seen the Nun – still troubled by John’s dismissive reaction to her experience – he confesses “I have seen, Miss Lucy, things to me unaccountable, that have made me watch all night for a solution, and I have not yet found it.” (¶67).  In preparation for further revelation, he queries her whether or not Protestants believe in the supernatural, and whether she is superstitious.  After some back and forth between them in relation to these religious questions, M Paul confesses:

“Something comes and goes here: there is a shape frequenting this house by night, different to any forms that show themselves by day.  I have indisputably seen a something, more than once; and to me its conventual weeds were a strange sight, saying more than they can do to any other living being.  A nun!”  (¶ 83)

 To which Lucy replies – I always sense when I read it – with a liberated feeling of relief:

 “Monsieur, I, too, have seen it.” (¶ 84)

 This is a significant moment in the story, as in it, Lucy begins to recognize in M Paul a kindred spirit.  While his attitudes towards her are often patronizing and even overbearing, he struggles, through the course of the novel, to achieve a better understanding of Lucy, until his eventual profession that “I know you, Lucy Snowe,” rings truer.

M Paul is open to extra-ordinary experience, and in his sharing with Lucy that he has also seen the Nun – whatever and whomever it may be – he does not reduce her to a subordinate position in regard to himself.  They seem to me more like equals in this exchange; the acceptance of one another’s equality being a necessary basis of true friendship – each acknowledging an experience the other has had, and neither rationalizing the other person’s experience away.  Whereas John ‘stood above’ Lucy in his evaluation of her experience of the Nun, M Paul is confessing to Lucy that he has seen a ‘something’ and is hoping Lucy might accept his acknowledgment of it.  She does.

M Paul’s confession frees Lucy from the doubts she has had as to the reality of what she has actually seen; the Nun! – regardless of what or who the Nun may be.  This shared avowal of having seen a ‘something’ in the Garden is then confirmed at the experiential level by another ‘apparition’ of the Nun, right after their mutual confession!  They both see her!

His confession and then the strange experience that they share reveals to Lucy that in M Paul she has found someone who, while oft too-assuredly asserting that he does in fact ‘know her,’ she has something in common with; their state-of-soul and their bearing toward the world are in some sense in alignment, though they are different persons from differing backgrounds.  These differences – even the religious ones – they eventually come to accept and affirm in their equality as true friends.

There are other moments in the narrative when M Paul is shown to be a better friend to Lucy than John Graham Bretton ever was or could be.  While her feelings for John are never completely assuaged (she admits at one point that she dug-up the letters and re-read them later in her life) by this point in the novel she clearly realizes that he is not ‘for her,’ nor her ‘for him.’  Their relationship would have perhaps remained ‘superficial’ or at least ‘formal,’ whereas Lucy desires depth; depth of feeling and passionate, significant experiences.  I was as stunned as she was, I think, when John confessed to her that, had she been a boy back in Bretton, instea of a girl, they should have been ‘great friends!’[3]  _i.e., ‘just friends.’

By counterpoint, her feelings for M Paul Emmanuel are deepening as they journey through the novel together until their love becomes manifest and true friendship is avowed.  He mentors her, but allows her to maintain her independence.  She learns from him without being reduced to being ‘just a student.’  She stands up to him; she is free to criticize him and the way he treats her—helping to free him from certain cultural and personal biases he has had toward her.  They are friends sharing together in an experience of learning and growing in relationship with each other.

How does this analysis inform for me the question as to Lucy’s state-of-soul at the end of the novel?  How is she faring?  How does she stand in relation to her life and her experiences; to John and M Paul especially?  Is she (1) successful and contented, or (2) succeeding in the world, as a teacher, yet still not fully resolved with regard to her losses; first that of her family and second, the loss of M Paul?

On the one hand, she professes her success and attributes it to M Paul’s influence, his gift of the school, and his mentoring of her before he left on his voyage.  She is a “genial flame,” “genial” being an adjective related to cheerfulness, cordiality, being warm and amiable, friendly and even affable.  On the other hand, we have the three storms she passes through; the first storm being a metaphor for the tragedy of circumstances she underwent during that unnarrated 8-year period between chapter III and chapter IV. Though no actual external ‘storm’ occurred, she uses the metaphor of “storm” to express – without explaining the particulars – how her life became a “shipwreck.”  The second “storm” – both an actual and an existential one – brought about her collapse on the steps of the Beguine Church (Chapter XV, “The Long Vacation” ¶’s 54-55); the description of the storm being resonant with that of a storm at sea; herself once again being the ship that is being wrecked.  She sank, but then she rose again.  The third storm is that which took M Paul.  He died in what was probably a massive hurricane on the Atlantic Ocean.  What kind of storm did that cause in Lucy’s soul?  The reader is not told.

Though the last two storms are actual meteorological events, one can easily imagine, as the reader, what the emotional and psychological effect of those storms might have been upon her.  Of the second storm we have an account, as poignant as brief.  When she awakes afterwards, she finds herself in a ‘replica’ of the Bretton house she visited as a girl, and muses whether or not she is dreaming or dead and passed over into an Otherworld.  Much to her surprise, she finds herself in the company of Mrs Bretton, and is soon reunited with John and Paulina.  This fosters a noticeable change in Lucy’s life; she grows and matures through the experience.  How does she respond to the third storm and the loss of M Paul?  As with the first “storm,” she does not say.  In fact, she prevaricates and does not describe the actual events which took place around that loss in any more than a summary way.  It takes less than a page to share with us the loss of M Paul Emmanuel!

Only two paragraphs describe the assumed shipwreck at sea in which M Paul was lost.  I still sense – as I did on my first read – that her trauma over the loss of M Paul may be manifest in the disruption of her narrative at that point, when she suddenly leaves off a description of the disaster and says:

“Here pause: pause at once. There is enough said. Trouble no quiet, kind heart; leave sunny imaginations hope. Let it be theirs to conceive the delight of joy born again fresh out of great terror, the rapture of rescue from peril, the wondrous reprieve from dread, the fruition of return. Let them picture union and a happy succeeding life.” (Chapter XLII, ¶ 17)

Only two lines follow this disruption, relating the long and happy lives of Madame Beck, Madame Walravens and Père Silas.  As such, the paragraph above first seemed to me like an evasion of a narrative that could have been given; and perhaps suggests a reluctance – even an inability – even after a number of years (untallied in the narrative itself) to face or reconcile herself with what happened.  Or is it simply that she no longer has any need – psychological or emotional – to go over the story of her loss of M Paul, once more, now for her readers?

So what do I now understand about Lucy at the end of her story?

Is she a success and a happy, congenial, etc., person, living the life of a teacher in her own school, thanks to the generosity of M Paul?  Does that, or could that possibly, sum her up?  Or is this avowal of success a stance – a plausibly necessary one – by and in which she persists in her career over the course of however many years it has been since M Paul’s death, making the most of what she has and trying not to allow the storms that have hit her wreck her ship ultimately?

I am moved by all of these reflections toward the second possibility.  I think she had, by the end, steeled herself and lived her life as well as she could, as a reasonably independent woman, given what she has been through, and in that way is a ‘success,’ though not in the superficial sense in which that term is usually bandied about.  She has weathered the storms and come through still being functional and able to live as fully as any mortal can in the circumstances in which they find themselves, having made the choices they have made and weathered the consequences resulting from those choices.  In Lucy’s case, much of what she has weathered was not a direct result of her choices, but indirectly flows from choices arising through and after what has happened to her.  She is a survivor.

Seen in this second sense, I have a great respect for Lucy Snowe, and while I am still trying to understand – much less comprehend – her pilgrim-like journey through the story on many levels; through the various experiences she has had and how she responded to them—and while I don’t think it probable that I will ever ‘understand’ her in any full psychological sense – can anyone really be so understood? (I don’t think so!) – I resonate with her story and will no doubt read this novel again (and again) in the years to come.

The understanding at which I have now arrived regarding Lucy Snowe allows a blending of my initial reaction to the ending with the subsequent emendations – via reading Quales and Chase – showing that there was indeed a positive aspect to it.  After all of my reflection on the end of Villette, I am also encouraged to allow this ending to stand as ambiguous; it is ultimately left to us as readers of her story to try and understand her state-of-soul in the later years of her life, when she is a ‘gray-haired old woman.’

To those who have read the novel, would you agree at all with this analysis and the stance I have come to as to Lucy’s state-of-soul at the end of the novel?   I would be curious to know.

- Montague Whitsel 

 

Finis

 

[1] “Jane, Shirley & Lucy Snowe” (28 August 2024) and then “The End of Villette – Reconsidered” (17 October 2024)

[2] “Jar of Confinement” – in Chapter XXVI “A Burial” Lucy engages in what seems to me like an old magical ritual I am familiar with from occult literature, the purpose of which is the containing and/or preserving of some object.  Lucy’s going to an old “Broker’s Shoppe,” whereat she found a jar in amongst “ancient” things and then the way in which she treated it (¶’s 23-27), sealing John’s letters within it and then burying it, reminds me very much of this old occult ritual.  That she buries the jar beneath the old, mysterious Methuselah tree – beneath which a nun was said to have been buried alive – connects the ritual with the protective forces of the Underworld.

[3] In Chapter XXVII The Hotel Crecy, John says: “I believe if you had been a boy, Lucy, instead of a girl—my mother’s god-son instead of her god-daughter, we should have been good friends: our opinions would have melted into each other.”  -- which stings Lucy’s conscience and her understanding of her relationship with John.