Villette follows the journey, psychological and geographical, of the young woman Lucy who travels to France in order to find work.
Contextually speaking, Lucy is part of the wider geographical, economic play that Victorian women were victims of – Lucy an unwilling player in her story. Her mental conflict that sets up rationality and reason against imagination is integral to the story and provides colour in the sometimes dense book.
When Lucy chooses to not be forthcoming with information, it reveals her to be loyal to the value of individualism, of privacy in thought. However, we are very much subject to her bouts of depression:
“My heart almost died within me… Looking forward to the commencement of those eight weeks, I hardly knew how I was to live to the end… My nervous system could hardly support what it had for many days and nights to undergo in that huge, empty house.”
What struck me with Villette is how cinematic the scene description is, how Lucy sees the “giant spire turn black” before her eyes as she sinks upon the steps of the church, falling “headlong down an abyss”. The descriptive journey of Lucy’s woes is symbolic with visual depth, a big hook for a book you could wrongly knock off as another “Victorian novel”.
The profundity of Lucy’s perception of the “stage empress” Vashti, during a theatre performance, lures you into the very palpable emotion that Lucy is going through. This moment appears as morbid curiosity in the contemporary society of the time and it is delectable to experience alongside her, almost as if forbidden.
“It was a marvellous sight… low, horrible, immoral.”
I would earnestly recommend Villette if you are after a Victorian novel that won’t bore you and would, rather, pull you into the narrative.
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