Jane, Shirley & Lucy Snow (28 August 2024)

I haven’t written anything on Villette since reading it in May and June, as I have come to realize that I misunderstood it.  From what I’ve read about it (which isn’t a whole lot, as yet, as friends and I read Tolkien all summer!) Villette is an early novel with an unreliable narrator.  I didn’t ‘get’ that on my first read; perhaps because I was looking for some of the same themes that I’d traced through Jane Eyre and Shirley.  I quickly realized, though, that this fourth and last of Charlotte Bronté’s novels was taking a different approach, and I tried to follow – and be open to – that approach – whatever it was – through to the end.

Reflecting on Villette recently, I am engaged in a comparison and experiencing the contrast between it and the two previous novels.  I have not read The Professor, so I don’t know how it would fit into this analysis (if anyone wishes to share their thoughts on this with me, I’d be glad of the input), but the three stories I have read all deal – each in its own way – with self-realization and the journey toward it.

Jane’s journey is the most successful.  Through a kind of Eros & Psyche cataclysm in the middle of the story – the rupturing of the relationship between Rochester and Jane on their wedding day; via the revelation of Bertha Mason – Jane leaves Thornfield and heads off on a journey in which she continues her process of self-realization.  Unlike the Eros and Psyche myth – where Eros flies from Psyche after the revelation of his true identity – it is Jane who flees from Rochester after the revelation of his secret; the “madwoman in the attic” – his wife.

Jane Eyre ends, after Jane’s journey brings her finally to Ferndean (a very faery name!), in a plausibly hopeful and positive place.  Rochester is redeemed through fire, being maimed in his attempt to save Bertha from the flames she had first ignited in the governesses (Jane's) bedroom, and which then spread to the rest of the house, and Jane has come into her own, as a self-possessed, powerful woman, capable of loving the maimed man (a Beauty and the Beast theme, I always think?).  There is hope that their future may be a good (enough) one.

Shirley then follows the lives of four characters who, in the end, get paired off (Robert and Caroline; Shirley and Louis) and whose future might seem worthy of a similar hope until – as I suggested in my blog “The End of Shirley” – you analyze their final station in life in the last chapter.

All through this novel, the characters are moving amidst the motifs of faery and haunted places.  The faeryfolk would seem to be present, if not actual actors in the story.  I don’t think one actually appears to any of the characters – just as they never do in Jane Eyre either – but there is a faery ambience that touches the story (as I explored in my third blog on the novel).  The characters themselves – especially Caroline and Shirley – are likened to faeries, just as Jane is in the previous story.

So, as I read Shirley I was following what seemed the ley-lines of self-realization for various characters; especially Shirley and Caroline and to a lesser extent perhaps Louis and Robert.  But these ley-lines all seemed to dissipate into a situation of rather banal and the all-to-be-expected conventions of ‘progress’ and ‘industry’ by the end.  I kept asking myself, after finishing the novel, “what happened to cause these characters to fall back into such an ordinary conformity to the normative social and cultural mores?”  (I also explored this in “The End of Shirey”)

The self-realization that I was seeing unfolding in the course of the novel appears to fail at the end.  It may well take these two couples – Robert & Caroline and Shirley & Louis – years to come into a genuine state of self-realization.  I could imagine a second novel -- Shirley II – which would follow how these characters lived and finally broke with the conventions and conformities into which they had fallen, after which they reached a mature self-realization—and then engaged in life without such conformity and obedience to conventions of the time.  I think that could be a very interesting novel!

Then, reading Villette, I had yet another experience altogether; one in which – I would argue – the journey of self-realization fails utterly.  Though I have to read the novel again – and possibly again and again – I’m fairly confident in saying that Lucy Snow never gets over what it was that seems to have undermined her when she was young – after leaving the house where she was visiting with her godmother in Bretton; which is where she met two of the other significant characters in the narrative—Graham and Polly – for the first time.

After whatever happened in her late teens, Lucy set out to establish herself in life.  Pessimistic about her options, she became the live-in companion to an elderly women named Ms Marchmont.  I thought as I read this scenario that it might inspire revelations of Lucy’s personal tragedy and perhaps be the beginning of a process of revaluation for her?  But it doesn’t happen.  Not even after that iconic, poignant experience one night during a raging storm, when the elderly woman is stirred to deep memory of a night when she was young and witnessed the death of her fiancé one Christmas Eve.  I was quite moved by the story; pondering the depths of its implications for the experiencer and how it may have charted a course for her life which over time brought her to the present moment; telling the story of that night to her young companion!

Something about Lucy’s reaction to this story led me to think that perhaps whatever tragedy had occurred to her was of a similar nature?  Yet there is no textual evidence of this.  Lucy remains reticent and does not tell the reader – for she is the first-person narrator of the story – anything about what happened in those years between the months spent in Bretton and when the story resumes.  There is little healing of Lucy’s soul; no ultimate release from the effect of whatever it was that actually happened to her.

The novel keeps putting Lucy Snow into situations where I would have expected – or at least hoped – that there might come some healing for her.  But it never comes to fruition.  All of the experiences at the school in Labassecour (i.e., a fictionalized version of Belgium), her reunion with Graham (now Dr John Graham Bretton) and Polly (who is now Paulina Mary Home de Bassompierre via her father’s inheritance), her experiences at a Catholic church one night and via a growing friendship with M Paul Emmanuel—do not in the end provide sufficient transformative energies to liberate Lucy from whatever has wrecked her soul-journey.

At the end, having lost M Paul to shipwreck, Lucy seems to me ‘disconnected;’ going through life and doing what is expected—and in this state I don’t see any hope of release from what binds her.  While she seems to have had a good stint as a teacher, she has never confided in or shared with anyone – expect, perhaps, to the priest she goes to confession with, one night, on an impulse during one of her wanderings in the city, though we as the reader do not know what she said to him! – and remains an un-self-realized self at the end.

So over the course of these three novels I see the journey toward self-realization moving from (1) a reasonable fulfillment, portending a possible good life together for Jane and Rochester, to (2) potentially failed self-realizations where the four main characters are concerned, though the journey they have each undergone seemed propitious of some better end, to (3) at least at the end of the novel, a state of failed self-realization for Lucy Snow.

How all this will be nuanced by a re-reading of Villette and possible re-readings of Jane Eyre and Shirley, I may only discover in the process of those readings.

Reflections on Charlotte Brontë’s Novels (24 January 2024)

Inspired by Judith Williams’ Perception and Expression in the Novels of Charlotte Brontë (1988)

Every once in a while you come across a book that is so insightful – that so lights up the mind and heart – that it is worth musing over, over and over again.  This has been the case with this book by Judith Williams, which deals with Charlotte Brontë’s four published novels:  The Professor, Jane Eyre, Shirley and Villette.  I received the book as a Yule gift, having asked for it because I’d re-read Jane Eyre last October, finding in that novel so many spiritual and existential themes that I was intrigued to go deeper.  And this book certainly full-filled that desire!

I was immediately refreshed by the author’s perspective, which seems grounded in an ‘archetypal’ and mythical approach to the human psyche.  The analysis of the four novels, I would say, is spiritual as much as psychological, touching on mythic themes and following the journey of the main characters as a quest for wholeness.  She suggests that, as such a quest, the way in which Charlotte’s characters are moving is from Innocence to Experience, ala William Blake’s paradigm.

I am also engaged with how Williams deals with gender and its fluidity; and how Charlotte allows for it in her stories—without condemnation—showing that the masculine and feminine aspects of personality can each be positive or negative, arguing that it is in balancing the two that we become whole—and therein approach wisdom.

Ultimately for Williams, to be a balanced persona – to be in touch with our ‘inner world’ as well as the ‘outer world;’ i.e., to be able to manifest feminine as well as masculine power – is to be spiritually androgynous!  A spiritual androgyne, she says, is someone who has brought together the two poles of inner and outer life and can thereby draw and source their own power from within and without.  The androgyne has both ways of seeing, naming and uttering.  That is, experiencing and understanding and communicating.  I think she is saying that one’s androgyne – a state of being-in-becoming attainable via the spiritual journey-pilgrimage-quest – is the guardian of a gateway into deeper and more mysterious knowledge.  Williams says, “like Tiresias, he/she is an oracle who taps deep sources of knowledge.”  And with regard to Brontë’s novels: “Almost all characters who have any spiritual power, for good or ill, in these novels are androgynous at some point, and all the protagonists must become androgynous to some degree.” (3) 

I think immediately of Rochester’s presenting himself to the party at Thornfield as a female fortune-teller; dressed for the part—and fooling his guests with his charade, even Jane.  But there is never an indication in the text that either the characters or the author thought Rochester ‘should not have been dressing up as a woman.’  I find this interesting in terms of current discussions of gender and sexuality.

Williams introduces at the beginning of the Introduction a hermeneutical triad of “Seeing—Naming—Uttering” that really struck me as having wide applicability.  I find this triad to be a good cypher for describing our existential situation in-the-midst-of-life, as well as the mechanism by and through which we try and articulate our experience, our needs, our wants and for understanding our very being-in-the-world.  It is a praxis in which we are all engaged at some level, virtually all the time.  She says:

“To see something is to admit it into the awareness; to name is to recognize it; and to utter it is to bring it forth, as the etymology implies.   …  The struggle is to perceive not only with the eye and the rational understanding but also with the imagination and with sympathy, and involves, finally, in Villette, a need to express the experience in the form of a work of art—Lucy’s narrative.” (1-2)

 I think this not only speaks to our everyday praxis, but also to one’s praxis as a Poet_ or any kind of Artist!  To express – e.g., “utter” something in verse or prose, dance, music or painting – is always a response to “naming” it.  If one cannot name it – if what I am referring to – whether an interior experience or an external one is too numinous, mysterious or unfamiliar or simply obscured in some way – then there follows a seeking for the ‘right’ or ‘best’ words, idioms, symbols, metaphors, and so forth.  In order to name something, however, I have to “see” it in the broad sense in which Williams describes that engagement as perception.  The thing “seen” might be a thought or emotion, a memory or a vision – internal realities – or something in the outer worlds in which I move, subsist and through which I wend my way to the Home in the Heart where I dwell whenever I get centered; at the Meath of the Self—when ‘life allows’ me to get there.

I recollect a dimension of realized depth here, in this hermeneutical praxis, in which I have long been immersed, even if often at the subconscious level.  It seems so ‘obvious,’ but because of that I often lose sight of it; and then the words are shown to be again; as in this book—and I go “ah_ yes!”

As Williams intimates with regard to the main character in Villette, the quest – spiritual, mystical and imaginative we are all on – tends, at some level, toward expression in works of Art.  This is the ultimate end of the triad of seeing—naming—uttering.  I do not mean, by saying this, that ordinary, day to day, practically necessary acts of seeing—naming—uttering are not important, meaningful and useful.  They are!  I only feel led to urge that there are things which transcend that everyday realm, and that those are the experiences we “utter” – that is, express – though Art, if we are able, in any one of its many forms.

          I have been reading Perception and Expression mainly for going deeper into Jane Eyre, as I have not read Shirely or Villette since the late 1980’s (though I am now planning to delve into those texts again this Spring because of this insightful book!) and when I came to this passage about stages and shrines, I rested – at a full-stop – in meditation for a few minutes!

“One of the most frequent images in [Jane Eyre] is the curtained enclosure, and in expanded form the room or the house, an image whose quintessential form is the shrine or the stage, and the pattern formed by this motif correlates with Jane’s spiritual quest: since shrines and stages are both places of ritual enactment wherein truth is both hidden and revealed, this image is especially appropriate to a learning process that is only half conscious.” (20)

I’ve always intuited a relationship between stage and shrine, but this text has shown it to me in a way that can now be more specifically “named,” then “uttered”—if I can find the words.

Shrines are alternately mysterious and mundane places.  They stand forth from the landscape in which they are situated as physical presences, just as all ‘places’ do, largely accoutered with what are seemingly ordinary artifacts.  Candles, stone and/or wood artifices (a table, perhaps), natural objects, but then things which are somewhat more than ordinary: Sacred art, tools of rituals performed there, lighting – candlelight and electric lights – all of which can take one out of the ordinary.  And of course, what goes on at shrines signifies and ‘reveals’ truths about whatever the shrine signifies; what or for whom it was constructed.  You might walk past or through a shrine and ‘see’ only the ordinary.  On another occasion, it is a setting in which the mysterious and transcendent may become apparent, presencing to our consciousness in ways unforeseen and unpredictable.  And the danger of this experience is in thinking you’ve “seen it all” and “named it all” and that your “utterances” are therefore the summation of the mysterious, numinous experience you have been a party to.  Not so_ such experiences have hidden as well as revealed truth to them.

The same can be said for a stage.  You might be visiting a theatre when no play or performance is being put on.  The stage is bare, it alludes to nothing out-of-the-ordinary.  Again, many of the artifacts associated with the stage may seem more or less familiar.  As with a shrine, however, other artifacts will ‘point’ to something ‘more.’  A piece of a set may allude to a fictional world within a play.  Props left on the stage will be seen as also alluding to the presence of a story.  Once the stage is brought to life – with actors, sets and lighting – it will reveal truths bodied-forth by the stories that are being re-presented.  But there is always the hidden and unseen as well in any enactment of a story.  This is what leads those who “see” the presentation to ask questions, to wonder about various aspects of the action, the spoken words, perhaps the use of music and lighting.  The un-presented truths may also be at a depth ‘beneath’ the literal level of the story enacted, and therefore ‘hidden’ until concerted reflection acts on them—though perhaps not even then!  Behind and beyond any story are truths much harder to “name” much less “utter.”  The Mystery in everything that-is, is enveloped in what is present_ though there is always more to see, name and utter.

This comparison of shrine and stage is especially appropriate to Jane Eyre, and – as Williams suggests – in Charlotte Brontë’s other novels as well.  It has always struck me that Thornfield is a theatre; which becomes literally manifest in the night of charades Rochester puts on for his guests; the Ingrams and their social group, as well as – and perhaps specifically for – Jane, whose intentions he is attempting to ‘divine’ as the fortune teller.  Generally, and not just in the charade chapters, Williams says:

“Thornfield as a whole is a theatre of riddles and Rochester its stage manager; from start to finish, charades both literal and figurative are enacted there.”  (29)

It is also a “shrine of truth,” which both reveals and hides truths.

         Overall this has been an incredible read, for me, and if you are interested in Jane Eyre and Charolotte Brontë’s other novels as well, I would recommend it.  It was a strange find; and I’m glad I have had the pleasure of engagement with it.