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Book Review: Villette
Apr. 24th, 2025 10:01 amI finished rereading Villette *mumblecough* quite some time ago, and I’ve procrastinated on writing a review for so long that I’ve developed a bit of a mental block about it, as one sometimes does when one really loves a book.
The problem is that there are just so many angles from which a review could approach the book. Do I talk about Ginevra, Lucy Snowe’s not-actually-friend because Lucy doesn’t actually like her, but she lets Ginevra hang around because Ginevra’s so pretty, and Ginevra duly continues to hang around because she likes for Lucy to give her a sound moral drubbing now and then? Not that she ever listens to Lucy! Not that she’s going to stop flirting with every man she meets and hoping against hope that one day she’ll break a heart so hard that the man in question will jump off a bridge! But nonetheless she keeps coming back.
Do I talk about M. Paul Emanuel, Lucy’s fellow teacher at the pensionnat and eventual love interest? The worst man in the world, who is constantly telling Lucy to behave herself properly (Lucy is already so restrained that other characters call her “as inoffensive as a shadow”), and yet I love him? I ship them? I think it’s because he’s the only one who sees that Lucy, despite her outward reserve, is in fact a volcano.
I think someone should write an in-depth exploration of Lucy wrestling with Catholicism, and particularly about the fact that Lucy is a Protestant and M. Paul a Catholic and they both find each other’s moral/religious systems at best tragically misguided and at worst repugnant, but also recognize in each other the best possible outcome of that moral system. However, I don’t know enough about 19th-century Catholicism (or the 19th century Church of England, to be honest) to do this justice.
However, I do think it’s much more complicated and interesting than just “anti-Catholicism,” which suggests that Lucy is expressing a reflexive prejudice rather than a well-considered (negative) opinion of the ethical judgments expressed by a particular religion in a particular time and place…. which is also colored by the reflexive prejudices she learned as a child.
Or there’s Lucy Snowe herself, our heroine, super depressed, past master of the art of shooting herself in the foot, yearning for connection but also crustily pushing connection away at every opportunity. (Which is of course part of the appeal of Ginevra to Lucy: Ginevra might not be the companion Lucy would choose, but she WON’T be pushed away.)
Lucy is always giving herself pep talks about how she’s going to be alone forever and the best she can expect is to scrape along earning her daily bread at a profession (teaching) that she doesn’t particularly care for. Whenever something nice happens, she tells herself sternly that it will probably never be repeated, so don’t enjoy it too much. At one point the guy she insists she definitely doesn’t have a crush on starts writing her letters, and she writes an initial warmly emotional response, then rips it up (!) and writes what she considers a correct and cool epistle, which I can only assume convinced him of her entire indifference.
And of course it is possible that his letters were only ever friendly letters and he was never going to fall in love with her even if she gave him a crumb or two of encouragement, but also my God. Never was there a crab so dedicated to dragging itself back into the crab bucket.
But I love Lucy’s crabbiness. Self-defeating characters can be a slog to read about, and I’m sure some people have this reaction to Lucy. But I love that she’s so cranky and annoyed with everything, and I love the way that she writes about it, (no one can put a sentence together like Charlotte Bronte), and I love her sudden bursts of exertion and pushing out and trying blindly to find something better for herself, fighting for happiness even as she insists that “happiness is not a potato” and can’t be cultivated, it just has to descend on you like manna from heaven.
And I love that she is a volcano, a placid exterior concealing a seething mass of passions that might just at some point erupt.
The problem is that there are just so many angles from which a review could approach the book. Do I talk about Ginevra, Lucy Snowe’s not-actually-friend because Lucy doesn’t actually like her, but she lets Ginevra hang around because Ginevra’s so pretty, and Ginevra duly continues to hang around because she likes for Lucy to give her a sound moral drubbing now and then? Not that she ever listens to Lucy! Not that she’s going to stop flirting with every man she meets and hoping against hope that one day she’ll break a heart so hard that the man in question will jump off a bridge! But nonetheless she keeps coming back.
Do I talk about M. Paul Emanuel, Lucy’s fellow teacher at the pensionnat and eventual love interest? The worst man in the world, who is constantly telling Lucy to behave herself properly (Lucy is already so restrained that other characters call her “as inoffensive as a shadow”), and yet I love him? I ship them? I think it’s because he’s the only one who sees that Lucy, despite her outward reserve, is in fact a volcano.
I think someone should write an in-depth exploration of Lucy wrestling with Catholicism, and particularly about the fact that Lucy is a Protestant and M. Paul a Catholic and they both find each other’s moral/religious systems at best tragically misguided and at worst repugnant, but also recognize in each other the best possible outcome of that moral system. However, I don’t know enough about 19th-century Catholicism (or the 19th century Church of England, to be honest) to do this justice.
However, I do think it’s much more complicated and interesting than just “anti-Catholicism,” which suggests that Lucy is expressing a reflexive prejudice rather than a well-considered (negative) opinion of the ethical judgments expressed by a particular religion in a particular time and place…. which is also colored by the reflexive prejudices she learned as a child.
Or there’s Lucy Snowe herself, our heroine, super depressed, past master of the art of shooting herself in the foot, yearning for connection but also crustily pushing connection away at every opportunity. (Which is of course part of the appeal of Ginevra to Lucy: Ginevra might not be the companion Lucy would choose, but she WON’T be pushed away.)
Lucy is always giving herself pep talks about how she’s going to be alone forever and the best she can expect is to scrape along earning her daily bread at a profession (teaching) that she doesn’t particularly care for. Whenever something nice happens, she tells herself sternly that it will probably never be repeated, so don’t enjoy it too much. At one point the guy she insists she definitely doesn’t have a crush on starts writing her letters, and she writes an initial warmly emotional response, then rips it up (!) and writes what she considers a correct and cool epistle, which I can only assume convinced him of her entire indifference.
And of course it is possible that his letters were only ever friendly letters and he was never going to fall in love with her even if she gave him a crumb or two of encouragement, but also my God. Never was there a crab so dedicated to dragging itself back into the crab bucket.
But I love Lucy’s crabbiness. Self-defeating characters can be a slog to read about, and I’m sure some people have this reaction to Lucy. But I love that she’s so cranky and annoyed with everything, and I love the way that she writes about it, (no one can put a sentence together like Charlotte Bronte), and I love her sudden bursts of exertion and pushing out and trying blindly to find something better for herself, fighting for happiness even as she insists that “happiness is not a potato” and can’t be cultivated, it just has to descend on you like manna from heaven.
And I love that she is a volcano, a placid exterior concealing a seething mass of passions that might just at some point erupt.
