"Quietly devastating" is one of those elegant journalistic clichés that pop up regularly in book and movie reviews to applaud a particular kind of stylistic understatement. It's like the hyperliterate and depressing counterpart to "feel-good comedy of the year"--a phrase that seems made for blurbing a certain form of recognizably literary literature. Regardless of how well-worn the phrase is, I can't think of any more apt way to summarize Villette, Charlotte Brontë's beloved final novel.
Like Jane Eyre, Villette is a coming-of-age story told in the first person by a plain-looking young woman struggling for financial independence. And like Jane Eyre, it is slowly absorbing. For the most part, though, plain Jane is a straightforward narrator, whereas Villette's Lucy Snowe gradually reveals to the reader that she is a puzzle, and intentionally so. Rather than describing difficult passages in her life, she wanders off into elaborate metaphors, like the famous shipwreck image that she uses in place of an actual explanation for why she leaves England for Belgium:
For many days and nights neither sun nor stars appeared; we cast with our hands the tackling out of the ship; a heavy tempest lay on us; all hope that we should be saved was taken away. In fine, the ship was lost, the crew perished.We never find out what exactly happened here, and it's the first of many times that Lucy Snowe obscures or dodges events happening in her life. Eventually the disruption of these narrative cover-ups becomes more predictable and almost pleasurable: there is a sense of getting to know Lucy Snowe, and guessing what kind of information she may be withholding from us.
If all that sounds pretty psychologically sophisticated for a novel from 1853, I think that's because it is--and it's probably why Villette has come up several times in recent conversations with professors about the greatest novels of all time. The delight in learning to second-guess a fictional speaker is something that seems more common in Victorian poetry (think the dramatic monologue, e.g.Tennyson's "Ulysses"--even if a lot of people do read it straight--and of course R. Browning) than in the period's novels. In Villette, though, narratorial unreliability becomes more of an endearing quirk than a damning "gotcha"--we get close to Lucy Snowe by learning how she tries to put distance between herself and us. The pleasure of that growing intimacy, and the final turns by which it's shattered, make the conclusion almost unbearable. There isn't much in the way of redemption here, but there is a lot in the way of power. This really is one of the greats. Highly recommended.
