“The truth about living in the universe is elusive, exciting, and mysterious, and it is in the pursuit of mystery that we find all that is worth having, including ourselves. If we catch Truth and put it in a cage – it dies. It only flourishes in flight, in splendid flashes of living light briefly glimpsed through revelational vision, mythic story, and deeply profound poetry.” (1)
- Moyra Caldecott Women in Celtic Myth: Tales of Extraordinary Women from the Ancient Celtic Tradition (1992)
There are in literature settings or inanimate objects that have become like characters in their own right. The house in Dickens’ Bleak House and the one in Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables each have such a status for various readers. In Villette is it not an inanimate object but a spatial setting that strikes me as having this status of a character; the Garden connected to the pensionnat. This Garden plays an important role in the story, being the setting of several key scenes, and is especially significant when being visited – by Lucy and two other characters – at dusk or in the dead of night.
I became fascinated on my most recent read of Villette with this Garden and what happens in it. At first seemed that it might function as a symbolic signifier in some way similar to sacred gardens in mythology. It has a mysterious about it which, as a poet and mystic, intrigues me. While I first thought it might have some resonance with the Garden of Eden myth, I soon found that what is going on here is no mere allegory or a Biblical trope, nor is there any way I have found to use the Biblical story to illuminate the story of the Garden in Villette.
What might this Garden signify in Lucy’s story? What resonances might it have? What themes could it be connected with and express, and how do those themes play out in the story over all? These questions I would like to pursue in this series of blogs. Whatever I find by the end, the close analysis of key scenes taking place in the Garden wherein Lucy Snowe is a participant will hopefully be rewarding in their own right.
As soon as a reader becomes aware of the Garden behind the school, they realize there is a Tree in this Garden. Because of its age, it is called “the Methuselah Tree;” named after the mythical biblical patriarch (Genesis 5:21–27)[1] who is attributed with having lived a long life of 969 years. This Tree is also a Pear Tree, which has some resonance with the Biblical story, as the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden has sometimes been said to have been a species of Pear, rather than of Apple. However, this Tree is no Tree of Life, as it is rather decrepit by the time of Lucy’s story. It persists; she says it is strong, and it continues to bear some fruit. Beneath it, however, is said to be buried a nun; interred alive centuries ago for violating some aspect of her vow. Thus the Tree stands over a “sepulchre.” With this revelation, the mystery of the Tree – and by extension the Garden, began to deepen for me! How does this Tree function in the story? What is its nature and why is its connection to the nun buried beneath it important?
Lucy says that although the Tree is already “dead;” there being “all but a few boughs which still faithfully renewed their perfumed snow in spring, and their honey-sweet pendants in autumn” (¶ 2), there are no strictures associated with it; no ‘commands’ not to ‘eat of the fruit’ of this old Tree. It is implied that students and teachers may partake of the few pears that it produces each year, as there is a reference to girls at the school shaking pears from the trees (Ch XXXI, The Dryad; ¶ 47) and while this could refer to the fruit of other, younger pear trees in the Garden; Lucy never tells us it was not ‘allowed’ to eat Methuselah’s pears.
So there is a Garden with a Tree within it. But – once again seeking a connection with the biblical Eden, is there temptation? And if so, what is it, and what is its object?
Surprisingly, the temptation in this Garden – what is forbidden – has naught to do with the Methuselah Tree. Rather, what is forbidden is entry into an Alley along the one side of the Garden bordered by the backs of the houses of the boy’s school next to Madame Beck’s pensionnat. It is always referred to as the “allée défendue” – “The Forbidden Alley.” Students are strictly warned never to go into this alley. A punishment is said to be meted out to any student found there or having visited it. Though mild – as is characteristic of Madame Beck’s discipline generally, Lucy points out – the temptation to enter the Alley is designated with a punishment. As will be noted in the analysis below, teachers and staff of the school had their own reasons for not entering the Alley.
So, just as the Methuselah Tree is not really a Tree of Life, neither is the “temptation” in this Garden to eat of its fruit. Yet we have a Garden with a singular, mysterious Tree in its midst and an Alley; access to which is restricted—to everyone but Lucy Snowe. As we will see, there are two other characters who also venture into the Alley, under differing circumstances, with whom Lucy meets-up at significant points in her story.
The question is if anything can be made of this complex of Garden—Tree—Alley? How is Charlotte Brontë using the Tree-in-the-Garden motif in her story of Lucy Snowe’s life? What happens to Lucy while she is in the Garden? In the Alley? _Often near the Old Tree at the end of the Alley? Does she experience any variety of ‘temptation?’
To address these questions, I want to look at how the Garden—Tree—Alley complex functions in four key scenes in the novel. An engagement with these scenes will hopefully reveal themes and perhaps even symbolic motifs related to this potentially symbolic complex. To begin with we will start our journey in Chapter XII “The Casket.”
I.
The Garden at the pensionnat is introduced slowly. We hear of it before we get to Chapter XII. The first mention of it is in Ch VIII “Madame Beck” (¶21), in which the pupils have ‘escaped’ out of the school and into the Garden to seek relief from the summer heat; which has made the school a hothouse. There, Madame Beck held her classes, as well as engaging in sewing and reading amidst the fruit trees and rose bushes. There is a second scene – in Chapter X “Dr John” – which also focuses on Madame Beck and her care and treatment of her children. In ¶4 of that chapter, Désirée – one of Madame Beck’s less well-behaved children – is said to hide baubles she steals from students, teachers and staff in a hole in the Garden wall! Each of these references is descriptive of ordinary life at the school. However, the last reference – to Désirée’s secluding stolen items in the wall – rings with possible significance, though I have not yet divined it out.
Later in this chapter, we find Lucy observing Dr John and meditating on his character. She is gazing at him in a mirror used by Madame Beck to surveille her students. Lucy is caught, however, looking at Dr John in a way that Lucy cannot characterize and is then mildly rebuked by him for her ‘effrontery!’ (¶ 25). He sees her in the mirror as well, and does not rightly evaluate her gaze. This takes place in the Garden and is a moment of revelation for Lucy, which plays into a theme we will explore in the different scenes we will analyze in later blogs in this series.
This is all we know of the Garden at the opening of Chapter XII. It seems just a normal garden. In this chapter, however, Lucy introduces us formally to the Garden—Tree—Alley complex; and then—an event transpires that will initiate a narrative thread to be woven in-and-out of the fabric of the story to its end. There are 12 uses of the word “garden” – in this chapter – more than anywhere else in the text – as well as one reference to Lucy having become a “gardener” of the “Forbidden Alley.” Lucy begins, saying:
Behind the house at the Rue Fossette there was a garden—large, considering that it lay in the heart of a city, and to my recollection at this day it seems pleasant: but time, like distance, lends to certain scenes an influence so softening; and where all is stone around, blank wall and hot pavement, how precious seems one shrub, how lovely an enclosed and planted spot of ground! (¶ 1)
“There was a Garden.” It is remembered as “pleasant,” though Lucy nuances her recollection of it with “seems,” intimating the powers of memory to alter what one had at one time experienced. Time “softens” the experience brought to her by recollection. That the Garden is said to be “lovely” in the midst of all of the stone and concrete of the city outside it, gives a sense of it being a refuge or perhaps a place of retirement and resourcement.
The role of memory is a pertinent theme in Lucy’s story; she seeming aware of the ways in which memories can be blended and changed in our recollection of the past. No memory is a pure, ‘objective,’ ‘empirical’ account of ‘what happened.’ Our perspective – the vantage-point from which we are remembering an event, person or place – cannot help but have an impact upon our memories. This is not to say it ‘falsifies’ them – though that can and certainly does happen – but they are often recollected according to how we now understand the artifacts of our past. This is a significant point to bear in mind when reading Lucy’s story, as she is telling us her story solely from memory, many years after the events related.
Gilding her description of the Garden for the reader, Lucy next informs us that Madame Beck’s school had once, some centuries before, been a convent. She calls it “a tradition” (¶ 2), so is it possible that this was not the case? Yet, throughout the novel, analogies are made in which the school is compared to a “convent” and Lucy described as a “nun.” This “tradition” is deep-linked to the life and presence of the Tree; vis-à-vis it being believed that a woman; young or old we are not told—had been buried beneath it, a nun who in some way broke her vows and was interred alive beneath the Tree now called Old Methuselah. One might be tempted to infer here that this burial of the ‘sinner’ beneath the Old Pear Tree somehow blighted it, or at least led to its current decrepit state? Yet the Tree may just as readily be seen as a guardian of the unfortunate nun buried beneath it – if in fact this actually happened; this being one of the many ambiguities that permeate the narrative of Villette.
We are next told that the ghost of this nun is said to visit the Garden; it has been seen by some number of unspecified spectators, up to – but not since? – the time of Lucy’s habit of sojourning in the Forbidden Alley begins. Because of this suggested tragic long-ago ‘event,’ the Garden – if you accept the story of the nun-buried-alive – is haunted. At least by this story of a nun, if not by the ghost of that nun herself. The taproot of the haunting is the Tree. It is the present physical artifact of the nun’s story, still known to the current dwellers at the school; teachers and students—as well as guests who come to the school, some number of whom we might suspect are more or less acquainted with the tale. While there is a slab of stone beneath the roots of the Tree; not too deeply buried, the corner or edge of which is still visible—perhaps this artifact might be what led to the story of the buried-alive-nun, rather than being evidence of it? Lucy does refer to the story as a local legend, yet the Garden is still haunted_ by “a Something,” as M Paul Emmauel calls it in Chapter XXXI, “The Dryad,” to which we will turn in the last blog in this series.
The story of the ghostly nun, I noticed on my second read, is said to be “unconfirmed and unaccredited, but still propagated” (¶2), which casts the whole suggested series of ‘appearances’ – both before the time of the novel and during it – into a questionable light. Lucy calls the story “romantic rubbish” (¶3), whether because she thought so at the time or because she knows – at the vantage-point from which she is telling her story – the true nature of the Ghost Nun. This knowledge, however, does not necessarily cast doubt upon earlier apparitions of the Nun; though by the time of Lucy’s residence at the school they may be little more than anecdotal? We don’t know; Lucy doesn’t tell us.
Once she disses the nun legend as “romantic rubbish,” Lucy describes for us the daylight aspect of the Garden, then contrasting it with its more enchanted nocturnal presencing—
Doubtless at high noon, in the broad, vulgar middle of the day, when Madame Beck’s large school turned out rampant, and externes and pensionnaires were spread abroad, vying with the denizens of the boys’ college close at hand, in the brazen exercise of their lungs and limbs—doubtless _then_ the garden was a trite, trodden-down place enough. But at sunset or the hour of _salut_,[2] when the externes were gone home, and the boarders quiet at their studies; pleasant was it then to stray down the peaceful alleys, and hear the bells of St. Jean Baptiste peal out with their sweet, soft, exalted sound. (¶4)
During the day, the Garden is just an ordinary garden, like what you might plant and tend and get vegetables, fruit and spices from. It is “trite” – unoriginal or of little need for mention – and being “trodden-down” – overused, underfoot, indicating even used-up by the frequenting of students and teachers. It is, as such, a place of ordinary daylight rounds, being the setting for the activities in and surrounding school life.
At dusk, however, the Garden takes on a somewhat more-than-ordinary aspect. It is a lonesome place; a place of solitude—as the “externes” – students who come to the school by day but do not live there – are gone home and the boarders – students who do reside at the school – are indoors at their studies. At such a time Lucy likes to walk in the Garden; down one “alley” and then another—oft enjoying the hearing of chapel bells in the distance. It seems a place of spiritual peace and twilight beauty. And while this may give the Garden an Edenic aspect; it is full of greenery, trees and bushes—it also harbors a Tree that is connected, not with life in its fullness, but with a mysterious past; whether verifiable or not—and a ghost.
To one of these “peaceful alleys” Lucy finds herself drawn with strong attraction. It is in this one that Lucy finds for herself a place of solitude and quiet. It is along one side of the Garden and is called The Forbidden Alley. There she has cleaned off a bench to which she oft repairs at twilight to sit in silence and enjoy the transition into night. It is called “The Forbidden Alley,” because access to it is denied to all students. Because it follows along the wall of the boy’s school, which is next-door to the pensionnat, it is perhaps a place of ‘temptation’ to Madame Beck’s students. Lucy tells us that “any girl setting foot there would have rendered herself liable to as severe a penalty as the mild rules of Madame Beck’s permit.” (¶ 7). Yet Lucy is drawn to it, by its “gloom” and its “seclusion.” Here there is a reference to a temptation in relation to this Garden, yet it has nothing to do with the Old Methuselah Tree. Rather, it is connected with this Alley; which Lucy describes as “straight and narrow.” (¶ 8).
Calling it “strait and narrow” is another one of Brontë’s ambiguous metaphors. It could simply be a literal description of the physicality of the Alley. However, the phrase has resonance with one of Jesus’ parabolic statements in the Gospel of Matthew: “Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life.” Looked at through this lens, in what way might this Alley lead to ‘life” for Lucy? She says of the Alley that “the seclusion, the very gloom of the walk attracted me.” (¶8). Lucy is associated throughout her story with twilight, dusk and the night. For her, life seems to become more fully known and come to fruition in the dark of Night or in the crusts of the night—dawn and dusk. She goes down the ‘strait and narrow’ path to solitude and a break from the routines of the day. In this very simple yet important way, it promotes life. Taking a break from one’s routines and re-collecting oneself in true solitude is supportive of physical as well as spiritual health. Yet the relationship Lucy has with the Alley is more nuanced than even this might suggest.
Lucy at first hesitates to use the Alley, because of the injunction against visiting it, and though she initially hesitates to venture into it, she is “tempted” to transgress the injunction against it, beginning to freely frequent the Alley. She describes her experience and thoughts as she gave-in to this temptation, saying:
For a long time the fear of seeming singular scared me away; but by degrees, as people became accustomed to me and my habits, and to such shades of peculiarity as were engrained in my nature—shades, certainly not striking enough to interest, and perhaps not prominent enough to offend, but born in and with me, and no more to be parted with than my identity—by slow degrees I became a frequenter of this strait and narrow path.
Lucy knows herself to be ‘different;’ to be an individual with habits that can be understood as peculiar, though not enough to “offend.” She typically keeps to herself. She owns her peculiarity; it characterizes her personality and is integral to her identity as one who experiences, observes and reflects; more than ‘participates’ in the ordinary rounds of social life. This would seem to indicate that Lucy has a degree of self-knowledge at this point in her life, knowing herself in this way, willing to act on the trust that she is at least well known enough, by this point – by teachers, students and staff – to be able to act on a desire uniquely hers. Overcoming perhaps a self-consciousness and a fear of being ‘set apart’ even more than she usually feels – and perhaps is – she begins to frequent the Alley. She then becomes a “gardener”[3] of the Alley in the Garden:
I made myself gardener of some tintless flowers that grew between its closely-ranked shrubs; I cleared away the relics of past autumns, choking up a rustic seat at the far end. Borrowing of Goton, the cuisinière [head cook?], a pail of water and a scrubbing-brush, I made this seat clean. Madame saw me at work and smiled approbation: whether sincerely or not I don’t know; but she _seemed_ sincere. (¶ 8)
“Tintless flowers” makes me think of nocturnals; flowers that bloom in the evening or morning – even at night (e.g., Evening Primrose and Moonflower) – but not in the bright sunshine of mid-day. These are, in a way, like Lucy herself—who seems to become enlivened at dusk or in the night. In darkness – both literally and metaphorically – she seems to be at-home. In her often reticent and self-cloaking way she is in some ways ‘dark’ to us as readers as well.
As it happens, Lucy is not forbidden to visit the Forbidden Alley. In fact, she is given permission by Madame Beck to do so! (¶s 9-11). Once Madame Beck observed Lucy inhabiting the Alley, recognizing Lucy’s attraction to it, she gives her permission to inhabit it any time she wants. She permits Lucy to make of it her own secluded place. Lucy says, “she kindly recommended me to confine myself to it as much as I chose.” (¶ 11) I immediately noticed the use of the word “confine” here. Charlotte Brontë thought of nunneries as places where women are shut-away from life; confined to a small, desolate space – a “cell” – for the remainder of their mortal lives, wherein all their talents and gifts would be wasted.[4] While not a fair characterization of monastic life in general, it does throw a certain negative light on the pensionnat being likened to a convent and Lucy to a “nun.” If she is “confined” to the Alley, however, like a nun in her cell, it is a willing self-confinement; like a person who has freely chosen a monastic vocation. This, of course, is in concert with references to Lucy as nun-like and the school as ‘like’ a nunnery.
Of the teachers Lucy then tells us that they could visit the “alley” with “impunity,” but did not often take advantage of this license, as the Alley was not simply narrow, but:
“… the neglected shrubs were grown very thick and close on each side, weaving overhead a roof of branch and leaf which the sun’s rays penetrated but in rare chequers, …” (¶ 9)
Because of this, “this alley was seldom entered even during day, and after dusk was carefully shunned.” This Alley is a wild place; generally untended until Lucy’s chosen residency there—one offering seclusion, being over-arched by branches and leaves—perhaps making it too ‘close’ for others; claustrophobic perhaps? – or too ‘cut off’ from general interactions with other people? It says much about Lucy that she is drawn to such seclusion; as well as to the gloom of it. It is inferred that the other teachers probably prefer more open, well-tended spaces in which to spend their free time. Perhaps a more ‘gardened’ and ‘social’ garden? This is fortunate for Lucy, however, for she loves a place apart from the rest of the activity in the world around her. It is in such a place – from that particular vantage – that we can oft gain insight into our lives. And it is interesting that she is drawn to this particular space more than any others in the school.
It is here in this Garden, at her station on the bench at the end of the Alley that Lucy has one of her moments of remembrance and self-transcendence. She experiences another of her ‘auditions’ – in the sense of a spiritual or mystical voice – such as seem to punctuate her life at significant moments. The audition she experiences here – whether imagined or in a state of psychological receptivity to Mystery in our being-in-becoming – is one in which both Solitude and the Moon spoke to her.
Lucy tells us she was this evening keeping “tryst with the rising Moon.” (¶3). In this secluded place, “tryst” would usually imply a romantic rendezvous; a common theme in Romanticist prose and poetry. I she rendezvousing with the Moon? With the Night? With Solitude? _These seem to me mystical possibilities; or at poetic references—knee-deep in the spirit of Romanticism. She had been about to leave and re-enter the school, when the Moon stilled her, saying:
“One moment longer,” and “stay with us: all is truly quiet now; for another quarter of an hour your presence will not be missed: the day’s heat and bustle have tired you; enjoy these precious minutes.” (¶6).
This is a spiritual invitation to rest and peace. Notice that the audition says “stay with us,” clearly including Solitude with the Moon as the speakers urging her to stay. Lucy obeys and tarries a while longer in the Alley.
While this event can be understood as a manifestation of her “inner voice” – her ‘conscience;’ perhaps like the daimon of Socratic fame – which earlier spoke to her out of the Aurora Borealis, urging her “go to Villette” [Ch VII ¶10], the audition may also be read as having a preternatural or mystical dimension. While Lucy is here using a ‘poetic fancy,’ employing a metaphor to poetically adorn a simple intention to remain in the Garden – as readers may rightly assume it to be – I hear in it Lucy’s receptivity to ‘divine’ or at least ‘mysterious’ leadings and guidance, here via a heavenly body – The Moon – oft personified in myth as a goddess, and Solitude; a word which personifies her existential desire to be truly alone—i.e., not ‘lonely’ but set-aside from other relations for a time and open into self-reflection.
On this particular night, she is tarrying in the Garden at the behest of the Moon and Solitude, and makes her way into the Alley; there experiencing the transition of twilight into night. Her attraction to gloom may be symbol a kind of environment in which things are not altogether clear; they are hidden in mist or shrouded in fog – as Lucy so often is to us, her readers. _And as she may be to herself. The Alley being “strait and narrow” might then also suggest that in such a place Lucy finds life; perhaps she comes to herself most often in Solitude and under the veiling of the physical senses that a Moonlit night provides. In the dark, we are more wont – if spiritually, creatively and psychologically attuned to it – to turn inward; to center ourselves in ourselves. I think this to be what Lucy is in part experiencing as “life” in this “strait and narrow” Alley.
It is here in the Alley that the “casket” of the chapter title is thrown down from a window high up in the Boy’s School, the dormitory wall of which flanks the Garden, rising right alongside the Forbidden Alley. The “casket” referred to here is not a vehicle of burial but a small box containing something valuable to the owner or recipient. This casket is a possible source of temptation; for girls of the school at least, and one in particular—though perhaps not for Lucy herself. On the night that this happened, the crescent moon was up, and the stars were out. These two astral visitants, Lucy says, “were no strangers where all else was strange,” averring that she had known them in her childhood. It also alludes to the Moonlit Alley as “strange,” a theme which sets it outside normalized conditions. _“All else” being her environs as she waits there in the Moonlight for_ she did not know what. Is she also telling the reader, here, that she is more familiar with the Moon and Stars than she is with her life-in-the-world around her? Possibly? Inspired by the Moon and Solitude, she recollects a moment earlier in her life, when:
I had seen that golden sign with the dark globe in its curve leaning back on azure, beside an old thorn at the top of an old field, in Old England, in long past days, just as it now leaned back beside a stately spire in this continental capital. (¶16)
“Wherever one goes in the country one does not have far to look to see some lone thorn bush growing in a field. The thorn is locally reputed to be under fairy protection. …” (45)
“The lone thorn growing in the middle of a rough and stony field, or on a sharp hillside, is much more likely to be “protected” and in use by the little people than is one in an ordinary, well-tended farming field.” (48)
Being at the top of the old field, it can also be said to be on a heath; a place of meeting with the faeryfolk—as well as being a reference to the ‘hills’ under which the faeryfolk were thought to live. As such, this Crescent Moon is remembered as being seen near an Old Faery Tree, which is also said to have been “in Old England, in long days past.” Note the three uses of the word “old;” often a signifier of something mysterious or sacred in the offing—not just being literally aged. “Old England” (¶ 13) may reference a time when the faeryfolk were still living openly in Albion. It might also reference the mystical land of the ancestors; who had knowledge of magic, faërie[5] and mysteries such as we have become ignorant of in our secular modern worlds.
This is one of several faery scenes in Lucy’s narrative. The crescent moon with that ‘dark orb’ – the shadowed portion of the rest of the Moon’s face – is sometimes thought of as a doorway into Faërie; the Faery Otherworld or Faery Consciousness. To feel drawn to pass through the dark orb of the Moon with only the crescent visible, I was once told, is to accept an invitation into fairyland. Is it any wonder, then, that Lucy is suddenly lifted-up into a memory of her childhood under the light of the crescent Moon and the Stars, there in this Garden, then having a vivid recollection; sitting in the minimal light of the crescent moon in the “Forbidden Alley,” exclaiming:
Oh, my childhood! I had feelings: passive as I lived, little as I spoke, cold as I looked, when I thought of past days, I _could_ feel. About the present, it was better to be stoical; about the future—such a future as mine—to be dead. And in catalepsy and a dead trance, I studiously held the quick of my nature. (¶ 14)
She is stirred into a more vivid experiential state by this recollection of the Thorn Tree on the Heath.[6] She says “I could feel,” suggesting that, perhaps, much of the time she does not feel much in the present; or at least not as intensely? _That is certainly borne-out in the story she is telling us. She is usually ‘cold’ Lucy Snowe. This is one of those moments in Lucy’s narrative where she admits to being withdrawn emotionally from the outside life in which she subsists. Could this state be tied to that ‘something’ which happened to her – in late adolescence? – causing a break from engagement with others that has not been repaired or restored? Yet at times she emerges from her self-confinement, allowing a more passionate ‘Lucy’ to break through. A hopeful or propitious sign, perhaps?
This potent memory then opens toward another more recent event; a storm—which inspires Lucy to give us a vivid depiction of that passionate, even wilding, side of her character. She tells us—
One night a thunder-storm broke; a sort of hurricane shook us in our beds: the Catholics rose in panic and prayed to their saints. As for me, the tempest took hold of me with tyranny: I was roughly roused and obliged to live. I got up and dressed myself, and creeping outside the casement close by my bed, sat on its ledge, with my feet on the roof of a lower adjoining building. It was wet, it was wild, it was pitch-dark. … too resistless was the delight of staying with the wild hour, black and full of thunder, pealing out such an ode as language never delivered to man—too terribly glorious, the spectacle of clouds, split and pierced by white and blinding bolts. (¶ 15)
How different Lucy is here; allowing herself to express a ‘version’ of herself that is always being ‘lulled’ and ‘quieted’ – it comes to presence; rendering her more alive. Here, Lucy is suddenly a willing acolyte to the storm; emerging from her bedroom to sit on the casement of the window and feel the rain and wind. Note the descriptors: “wet,” “wild” and “pitch-dark.” She was so enraptured in the natural phenomena of the storm that she could not bring herself to return to her room! She felt compelled by the passion arising in her to stay out in the storm. There is delight in the “wild hour,” which was “black” and full of pealing thunder; the music of which she calls an “ode”—yet one beyond what language could describe! The storm has an animating effect upon her, though she soon attempted to difuse and quell it. She tells us:
I did long, achingly, then and for four and twenty hours afterwards, for something to fetch me out of my present existence, and lead me upwards and onwards. This longing, and all of a similar kind, it was necessary to knock on the head; which I did, figuratively, after the manner of Jael to Sisera, driving a nail through their temples. Unlike Sisera, they did not die: they were but transiently stunned, and at intervals would turn on the nail with a rebellious wrench: then did the temples bleed, and the brain thrill to its core. (¶ 16)
She longs to be liberated from her “present existence.” Is this a desire for a different life or a release from life itself? “Upwards and onwards” could well suggest a spiritual pilgrim’s desire for release from the bonds of the ordinary that hold one down and keep one from approaching sanctification via the Journey and the Dream.[7] However, it could also suggest an ‘ascent’ into ‘Heaven’ after death. In the aftermath of the “Long Vacation,” Lucy confesses to the reader that she did not relish returning to her physical corpus after her swoon on the steps of the Beguine Church; something which happened during another violent storm! Here again, ambiguities augment and nuance the story we are being told.
This experience of the storm; being out in the storm, on a windowsill—may at least be read as a desire to be freed of the life she is living at the pensionnat. She ruminates on more than one occasion during her story about seeking and getting a new situation; a school of her own, even—always with the assertion that she is desiring independence. Here the storm liberates her. How different this is from her experience of other storms – such as the one in Chapter IV on the night of Miss Marchmont’s epiphany and then her death, or even Lucy’s reaction, however briefly dealt with, to the storm that took the life of M Paul Emmanuel!
The allusion to Sisera and Jael comes from the biblical book of Judges (chapters 4-5) wherein Sisera – a chieftain of the Canaanites – reposes in the tent of Jael, who murders him by driving a spike into his skull. The visceral image Lucy draws here for us puts her in the role of Jael to Sisera as representing these longings for release or liberation. Her attempt to silence these intimations, however, is not as successful as Jael’s. Her Sisera would not stay unconscious; but would – in a gross image – twist on the nail driven through them![8] The temples are perhaps also Lucy’s, as is the brain thrilled to its core. She is both Sisera and Jael in this metaphor. Her Sisera wants to live and be liberated. Her Jael is more like the retreating, quiet, puritan-like, solitude-seeking self to which she returns over and over again in the course of her narrative.
This whole experience in the Alley, under the influence of the Moon and Stars, is one of several that show Lucy as having a mythic folk-connection to Nature; couched in a naturalistic mysticism—as do both Jane and Shirley in the previous two novels—and as being ‘led’ to some degree by elements in this connection to a new situation in her life; escaping from the ‘desert’ she was in back in England, arriving in a place of new possibilities; new opportunities. She indicated in the chapters describing the city of Villette and her life at the school, that she was studying and widening her horizons. She was coming into a fuller realization of herself. She was thrust into a teaching position by Madane Beck in an emergency (the instructor had not shown up for his classes), but quickly comes to grips with this new responsibility; takes it in hand—and becomes a respected and capable teacher. Her experiences with natural phenomena and in Nature complement and ground this practical, personal journey she is on_ adventuring toward self-realization.
She had had “feelings” in childhood. Where did they go, and why had they left her? In her present state she is stoical and as to the future says it would be better that she were dead! If this is an observation from her current standpoint; at the point where she is relating her story to us – having lost M. Paul Emmanuel and living like a ‘cloistered nun’ in her school where she teaches—it may give us one picture of how she feels about where she has ended up! Though her avowal of “success” and having become a “genial flame” by that point in her life does stand in contra-distinction to such a dour sense of her existential state toward the end of her life.[9] Sitting there, writing this story, does she – in the future moment – believe that she would be better off dead? Or is she expressing how she actually felt at the time of the events of this chapter? If the latter, there is at least some hope that her realized future present – at the time of her while writing her story – is less dread? It could, however, be both.
“Catalepsy” and “dead trance” would seem to be cognates; a poetic ‘doubling’ or metaphor that lends depth and dimension to what is being communicated. It describes, first, a condition of rigidity of body and second, an immobilizing of the mind; of consciousness. Somehow, Lucy moves from the description of lived emotions; past days in which she could feel something—into a state of passivity and immovability, wherein she took hold of her ‘nature.’ That is, she returned once again to the quiet, sedate person she so often professes to want to be, if not to be in actuality. What would happen if she were to experience a true liberation? Has she, by the end of her story?
This tension between the vivid experiencing of emotions and memories, often in a heightened state, and the switch-back to self-seclusion and control – manifests a number of times throughout the novel. Just imagine this young woman, usually passive and quiet, self-controlled, suddenly becoming enlivened; nearly ecstatic—now sitting out in the dark on a window ledge, wet with the storm, enjoying the beauty and sublimity of Nature’s power! Then compare this with the Lucy we usually encounter; a lover of quiet solitude, perhaps in an emotional state of withdrawal from the world!? They are the same Lucy, for at the opening of the description of this storm, she admits:
…certain accidents of the weather, for instance, were almost dreaded by me, because they woke the being I was always lulling, and stirred up a craving cry I could not satisfy.
A crucial key, here, to Lucy’s identity is no doubt the phrase “because they woke the being I was always lulling.” We see this in those moments when she becomes excited by something and then turns around and suppresses – even denigrates – her joy. Nevertheless, she did long, she says, for a day after this storm, for something to lift her out of her “present existence,” taking her “onward and upward.” (¶18)
Having set the scene – in the Garden and in the Forbidden Alley – Lucy then begins to relate the story of the “casket” of the chapter title [¶16]. This is not, as today, a reference to a coffin, but to a small box, which in this instance is made of ivory and contains a note for an intended recipient. It is thrown out of a window high up in the wall of the boy’s school that borders the Garden along one side, below which is the Forbidden Alley. While the event of the casket is significant for the stories of the main characters, Lucy’s experiences under the influence of the Moon and Stars in the Alley draw upon memory-experiences that enlighten us – and remind her – of who Lucy Snowe is, by way of alluding to who she was, earlier in her life.
This picture of her, however, is still backgrounded by whatever it was that crippled her – emotionally and psychologically – and undermined her livelihood in that eight-year period between the Bretton chapters and the Miss Marchmont chapter. This backgrounding could be the ‘picture’ of her we are actually seeing in the narrative, and which is ‘showing through’ at certain points in Lucy’s story—especially during storms!
Themes connected with the Garden—Tree—Alley
In this chapter we have found the Forbidden Alley to be a place wherein Lucy experiences moments of self-revelation. Lucy’s initial ‘temptation’ to enter the Alley leads not to any existential Fall or punishment, but to epiphanies of the self by way of being inspired into significant recollection. She is aided in this process by Solitude, the Moon and the Stars which may be interpretated either as the workings of her conscience via her Creative Imagination or be references to a kind of mystical – even divine – assistance. The Methuselah Tree – with the ‘nun buried beneath it’ – stands at the very vortex of these experiences; as it is right there near the bench to which Lucy repairs at the end of the Alley.[10] When sitting there she is at a poetic if not merely physical “center” of the Garden—Tree—Alley complex. If I think about the Tree as the guardian of the one interred beneath it, and Lucy as a visitant; could the Tree also be seen as her guardian as well? Soon, the significance of the Tree in this complex will become clearer, as it will be given charge of something very valuable to Lucy.
Until then_
Finis
[1] Methuselah was the son of Enoch and the father a Lamech in the genealogical myth-history between Adam and Noah.
[2] “Salut” – is, as I have found, an informal French greeting comparable to “hi” and “bye” used among friends and those with whom one is close. It seems to be contrasted with “adieu,” which is more formal.
As I do not know French, all translations in these blogs have come from Google Translate and other online sources. If you find me mis-translating a French word or phrase, or not presenting its fullest or most significant meaning for this text, please enlighten me. Thank you. - MW
[3] This process of cleaning up the Alley and the bench at the end reminds me of the spiritual praxis of “Pathing—Sojourning—Gardening”—that I distilled from many of the things I had learned about Pagan spirituality and in particular the quest and wandering motif in Celtic myths and stories. In this praxis, one seeks out a place of solitude or spiritual power, sojourns in it for a time until one gets to know its character, and then ‘gardens’ it. To ‘garden’ a natural place, according to this praxis, is to carefully clear ‘debris’ and perhaps slightly re-arrange some of the physical artifacts present in it, not changing the spiritual or psychic qualities of the place! – to make it a more potent place of spiritual energy. In effect, a personal or communal Nemeton. This is what I find Lucy to be creating for herself in this gardening of the Alley, though I am sure Charlotte did not intend such a reading.
[4] For an example of this see Charlotte’s description of the fate of Eliza Reed in Jane Eyre during her visit to Gateshead after the death of Mrs Reed.
[5] Faërie – refers both to the world of the Faeryfolk – the “Otherworld,” “Fairyland,” etc. and to “Faery Consciousness,’ that way of thinking and feeling resulting from having entered into Faërie or encountered Faeries in extra-ordinary moments in the normal rounds of our lives. It can be experienced in the reading of story or poem infusing with Faery symbolism, motifs and themes, as well as in the listening to music that has been ‘Faery touched’ or looking at great art with Faërian themes.
[6] One implication of this reference to the Old Thorn on the Heath – in which she is recollecting herself under the Moon’s influence – is that she may have become ‘faery touched,” though there is nothing in the text to suggest this, and so I’ve put this in an endnote rather than in the analysis. I mention it only because of what she is given to remember – having passions in her childhood – as this might well be attributed to the touch of faërie, which tends to awaken and enliven a person to their truer being-in-becoming. - MW
[7] “The Journey and the Dream” refers to the two poles of the spiritual life as understood and practiced by St Francis of Assisi. We are on a Journey; the Dream giving us our devout direction. I’m not saying Charlotte Brontë intended this metaphor, but it often characterizes the lives of spiritual seekers, whether religious or not; it is an existential descriptor of our being-here-in-the-world and what we can make of our lives. - MW
[8] If that is not a gothic image, I don’t know what is. Yet I’ve read that Villette is the ‘least gothic’ of all of Charlotte’s novels. While not perhaps as Gothic as Jane Eyre, an analysis of this novel’s Gothic elements would be quite revealing. – MW
[10] See Chapter XXVI “The Burial,” ¶ 27.
