Lucy Snowe: Narrator of the non-narratable
The second half of the first paragraph of Chapter Four of
Villette is a clear statement for the designation of narratable and non-narratable in Lucy Snowe’s narrative. In permitting the reader to assume the beginning of a conventional female history, Lucy clearly conjures in the readers’ mind the conventions of feminine narrative, then, with her query ‘why not I with the rest?’ determines to illustrate what a woman in revolt can do. Lucy invokes the images of a woman’s life, married and single, as ‘slumbering’, ‘still’, ‘closed’, ‘buried’, ‘prayer’. Indeed, these images are the expected demeanour of the ideal Victorian lady, slumbering in the safety of her father’s or her husband’s house if not in prayer in the house of her heavenly father, to be still and passive in the world and allow herself to be looked upon, judged and then passed as a dependent from male to male, to be sexually closed to everyone except her husband, her ambitions and desires to be buried under the ambitions and desires of the males she is dependant upon.
Our heroine, Lucy Snowe, is on the margins of her society, she has not the luxury of a benevolent patriarch to be dependant upon, nor has she been judged conventionally desirable enough to be married off. Instead, Lucy, when awoken from her childhood stasis by Paulina Home, becomes an active watcher of the world and stages an outwardly passive but inwardly passionate rebellion against her nature and circumstances as prescribed by society. Lucy’s revolt against the realities she is born into as a woman are almost pornographically rendered in
Villette through a filtering narrative that manages to discuss the areas of feminine experience deemed non-narratable by patriarchal society.
Lucy veils her pornographic narrative in the very essence of respectability, that of the stories of the many different, but socially acceptable stereotypes of women. Lucy, as the observer of life, therefore narrates the history of an ingénue, who marries well and is kept still and quiet; a spinster, living a solitary life after freezing her life; a coquette, who marries foolishly yet romantically; a lonely businesswoman, who can only spy on those she desires; two widows, one who lives wholly through her son and one who is supported by the goodwill of one she denied her granddaughter to; and a betrayed fiancé, fleeing to god and death rather than disgrace. These filters, by their very conformity to the expectations of society, illustrate Lucy’s lack of conformity and confirm that Lucy, with her passionate need to rebel, would be as miserable conforming as she is in the loneliness of not conforming. While the reader may find each of Lucy’s filters familiar and acceptable, Lucy has mixed reactions to the validity of the lives of her filters, for they frame her understanding and expression of the taboo experiences of feminine existence.
In the young Paulina, Lucy recognises the burial of the desires of the young girl to be replaced with the service rendered so blindly to the beloved Mr Home and adored Graham. Both girls, while in the Bretton household, are in love with Graham, and Paulina, having already lost her mother, is in need of comfort. Lucy, as a child who had been slumbering in childhood, is awakened by Paulina’s need and begins to watch her as she struggles to express her love for Graham. Lucy at this stage of her life will not admit to her desire for Graham and remains aloof from him.
As the grown Paulina and Lucy are thrown together with Graham again in Labassecour, Lucy, with her sharpened powers of observation, can see the growing adult love of Paulina for Graham and is conscious of the emotions Paulina will be going through, as she has experienced and buried them herself. Lucy neither openly shown her love for Graham nor suppressed her nature to gain his approval, so it is Paulina who is destined to marry Graham, so earning by her unselfish surrendering of herself both as a child and as an adult, the ultimate reward of an advantageous marriage to a man of status which in turn makes her almost invisible to society.
In the fact that Paulina has the social security of a marriage that merely asks in return a subservient self-distortion that renders her still and quiet in a life devoted to her husband, Paulina promises to turn into the image of her mother-in-law. Paulina’s ability to submit herself totally to the men in her life highlights Lucy’s strong independent streak, Paulina’s eligibility for marriage and high regard from society males as a result of her abasement to them proves Lucy’s ineligibility resulting from her independence and integrity. Paulina’s sub-plot identifies the essential fact that marriage, for women, was in direct opposition to their sense of self.
Ginevra Fanshawe is the coquette who, while never actually carving a place in Lucy’s heart, nevertheless becomes somewhat of a romantic heroine for the lonely, single woman resigned to a loveless existence. Ginevra uses the coy promises of her sexuality to encourage many men to pursue their suits while managing to preserve that reputation of sexual purity so important to finding her a future husband. In a world where the marriageable high-status men belonged to the young and beautiful girls with the right family connections, Ginevra quickly exposes Lucy as old, plain and a nobody, for if female power lay in the ability to attract the male gaze, then indeed Lucy was powerless by a combination of her physical attributes and her carefully cultivated shadowy existence.
Yet when Lucy begins associating with the Brettons and suddenly acquires connections and interacts socially, Ginevra, Lucy and society as a whole, are forced to re-evaluated Lucy as more than a nonentity, although Lucy’s own private views were that she was destined to surrender the self-sacrificing marital home for the self-serving classroom. Ginevra’s presence in Rue Fossette also contributes to the psychological torture of Lucy’s suppressed sexuality, for she often applied monikers of spinsterhood to Lucy, and it is Ginevra’s lover, disguised as the ghostly nun of the convent, who haunts Lucy with the spectre of eternal virginity.
Ginevra manages to live up to the stereotypical romantic ideas of love with her elopement on the night when Lucy finally has to accept that her last chance at happiness with M Paul has been dashed. Her accounts of her marriage to Lucy in her letters, however, show how the sexuality that she used to lure her suitors is shutdown completely in her marriage, a parallel with Lucy’s suppressed sexuality which would need to be unleashed to obtain a husband then fast leashed again. The fear of rampant female sexuality always surfaces when Lucy manifests her androgynous tendencies, of which her virtuoso performance with Ginevra in the fete was a most stunning moment.
Madame Beck is a lonely businesswoman engaged in enforcing the destructive modes of feminine conditioning by surveillance and is reduced to spying on the men she desires because she cannot hope to gain their regard. Lucy’s relationship with Madame Beck is based on the fact that she admires Madame’s methods while they will find nothing because Lucy not desirable and has nothing, but resents them when Lucy finally is allowed something of value and a feeling of desirability; the letters from Graham and the active regard of M Paul. Madame Beck desires both Graham and M Paul and while she cannot exert any power over Graham, M Paul, as her kinsman, can be actively thwarted in his desire for Lucy, on both selfish and religious grounds. Madame Beck is representative of the repression of a society that rules by surveillance and interference, actively repressing the ability for women to gain happiness and continuing the mores of feminine conduct, she is also a representative of the oppression of Catholic beliefs of the essential control of women’s sexuality and spiritual subordination.
Madame Walravens is similarly a representative of the myths that can constrain women when living and enshrine them along with patriarchal notions of femininity when they die. Madame Walravens lives by the earnings of the man who worships the thought of her granddaughter, who is buried a martyr for feminine stereotypes for she could neither defy her family nor betray her lover. Contrast this with the opinion that Lucy holds that she will die an old maid and it would be her fault entirely, for she will not compromise on her opinions of her self.
Lucy’s godmother, Louisa Bretton, is the perfect widowed mother. She lives through her son and accords him all the deference, service and prayers that were expected of her towards her husband. She marries her husband and is reliant on his support before his death and his foreplanning after his death, when catastrophe strikes the Bretton’s finances, Mrs Bretton will not and cannot support herself so Graham must take up a profession and prosper; prosper he does and Mrs Bretton has been saved the ignominy of gainful employment, for it is always preferable for women to be dependent than independent. Lucy is able to support herself her whole life, and even with M Paul’s generous donation of her first school, she is able, by her own hard work, improves on what she is given. Lucy, while having to accept charity from a woman who has not earned this money herself, manages to prove that independence, while hard, can be honourable.
Miss Marchmont, although a small part of the story, is a combination of all of Lucy’s filters. She was, like Paulina and Ginevra, eligible enough to be engaged to be married; but her fiancé died in an accident and she froze that moment in time and lived almost as in a slumber, closed herself off to all further thoughts towards marriage, as did Justine-Marie. If she had had a child to live and pray for as Mrs Bretton did, or a profession to enter to keep her occupied and contained as for Madame Beck, then perhaps she would have survived: she did not and she lived a life alike to being buried alive. It is Miss Marchmont that, on the eve of her death, finally spoke of the suffering of her life as a woman that moves Lucy to ponder the importance of finally speaking of one’s life. On her deathbed, Miss Marchmont embodies the best of the feminine nature, yet Lucy Snowe takes from that experience the need to narrate the taboo of the feminine nature through criticising the best of feminine nature.
Lucy Snowe is not an object to attract the male gaze nor is she a feminine robot to watch; instead, she gazes at the world, including the males in it, and observes the pain of the women conforming to the feminine mores. She is the ‘other’ that will not conform to the stereotypes of women required in her society. Yet Lucy is not punished by society nor fate for her subversive narrative of a life lived in revolt. Instead, she abases herself briefly to a man that has pursued her relentlessly and against the judgment of his peers, and is then, we presume, freed of his influence to continue her heretic ways.
Do Lucy Snowe’s systematic criticisms and rejection of the feminine mores mean she is a pretender to a masculine nature or renders her sexless? Should she be eligible, in the eyes of the society she has gone to great lengths not to conform to, to be promised marriage and given happiness, however limited? Is the ambiguous ending of the story the only one possible because a typical happy ending would not have been acceptable for the type of woman she was, yet is this ending too generous for a rebel at heart.
Villette is essentially the telling of the non-narratable, Lucy is the antithesis of acceptable womanhood observing the society that should be observing her, criticising that same and eventually moving towards an ending that is fulfilling instead of punishing her for her nonconformity. Lucy’s description of her unmentionable eight years irrevocably designates the conventional views of women as the non-narratable and the taboo as the substance of her heretic narrative. In this sense, Villette is almost pornographic in it’s addressing of the taboos of feminine awareness.
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