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Villette and the Life of the Mind

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Robert A. Colby
Robert A. Colby*
Affiliation:
Queens College, Flushing, N. Y.
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Extract

Missbronte has written a hideous, undelightful, convulsed, constricted novel … one of the most utterly disagreeable books I ever read,“ wrote Matthew Arnold to his friend Arthur Hugh Clough, shortly after the first publication of Villette. The novel struck Arnold mainly as a case of morbid religiosity. Only a month later another critic, George Henry Lewes, writing more from the point of view of the amateur psychologist, said of the very same novel: ”It is a work of astonishing power and passion. From its pages there issues an influence of truth as healthful as a mountain breeze.“ These are typical of the antithetical responses that Villette has always evoked.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 75 , Issue 4-Part1 , September 1960 , pp. 410 - 419
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1960

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References

1 21 March 1853. Letters to Arthur Hugh Clough, ed. Howard Lowry (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1932), i, 132.

2 “Ruth and Villette,” Westminster Review, LIX (April 1853), 485.

3 Aspects of the Novel (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1927), p. 118.

4 These opposed attitudes may actually be found side by side in discussions of Villette that appear in the recent fest-schrift volume From Jane Austen to Joseph Conrad, eds. Robert C. Rathburn and Martin Steinmann, Jr. (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1958). Melvin R. Watson in his essay “Form and Substance in the Brontë Novels” dismisses Villette as minor Brontë with “unmistakable signs of faulty craftsmanship, of mistaken focusing and emphasis, of poor proportioning” (pp. 115–117). However, the very next essay, Robert B. Heilman's “Charlotte Bronte's ‘New’ Gothic,” calls attention to its “original, intense exploration of feeling that increases the range and depth of fiction” (pp. 127–132).

5 George Smith identified himself and his mother as the prototypes of the Brettons in his reminiscent article “Charlotte Brontë,” Cornhill Magazine, n.s. ix (July-December 1900), 778–795. Further background details are supplied by Mrs. Humphry Ward in her introduction to the Haworth edition of Villette (London: Harper, 1902).

6 “Jane Eyre,” Novels of the Eighteen Forties (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1954), pp. 262–282. Robert A. Colby

7 See the Author's Preface to The Professor, with explanatory note by her husband, the Reverend Nicholls, included in the Everyman edition of the novel (London, 1910). The Professor was first published posthumously in 1857.

8 My references to both The Professor and Villette will be to the Shakespeare Head Edition of the Works of the Brontë Family (SHB), edited by Thomas J. Wise and John Alexander Symington (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1931).

9 6 November 1847 (SHB, Life and Letters, n, 152–153).

10 The Professor, Author's Preface Robert A. Colby

11 See her introduction to the Everyman edition of Villette (London, 1909). As it happens, one of the two discarded drafts of opening chapters is a narrative by Polly describing her sea voyage to England. However, the fact that this opening was discarded makes it obvious that Miss Brontë abandoned any plan she may have had for making Polly the heroine before, not during the composition of the novel. In the other fragment Polly is a more elfin and perverse child than she is in the novel as we know it. Both of these fragments are reprinted in the Bronte Society Publications, Part XLI, No. 6 of Vol. vii (1931).

12 The section of the novel from the brilliant psychological parley between Lucy and Monsieur Paul in “Monsieur's Fête” on to the end moves with an unflagging speed and intensity. This constituted the “third volume” to which the author gave special and concentrated attention, as indicated in her letter of 6 November 1852 to George Smith's editor W. S. Williams. (SHB, Life and Letters, iv, 17–18). Robert A. Colby

13 See below, p. 418.

14 See Wilfred M. Senseman, “Charlotte Bronte's Use of Physiognomy and Phrenology,” Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts and Letters, xxxviii (19S2), 475–486.

15 See n. 9.

16 See letter to George Henry Lewes, 17 October 1850 (SHB, Life and Letters, iii, 172–173).

17 Miss Brontë refers to Consuelo in her letter to George Henry Lewes of 12 January 1848. Since this article was accepted for publication I have had the opportunity to read the Master's Thesis of Margaret M. Brammer, “A Critical Study of Charlotte Bronte's The Professor” (Bedford Coll., Univ. of London, 1958), which points out in detail influences of Consuelo on The Professor, particularly some parallels between the characterizations of the title character and her music master Porpora and the depiction of Frances Henri and William Crimsworth in Miss Bronte's first novel. As far as this influence has been carried over to Villeite it seems to be mainly in a similarity between the stern, masterful yet tender maestro Porpora and Monsieur Paul, but in Consuelo the master and pupil are not lovers. Miss Brammer suggests that Consuelo may have helped to crystallize impressions already formed in Miss Bronte's mind through her association with Constantin Héger. I am indebted to Kathleen Tillotson of Bedford College for bringing this thesis to my attention.

18 John M. Ware, “Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and Charlotte Brontë,” MLN, XL (June 1925), 381–382.

19 This image undergoes another sea change in the poem “Reason” (“Unloved I love, unwept I weep”) where Miss Brontë describes herself as having crossed the water to remove herself from a futile love (SHB, viii, 239–240). Incidentally, among the books given to her by Constantin Héger that she especially prized was a set of the works of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre.

20 This and other Angrian vestiges are pointed out by Fanny Ratchford in her The Brontes' Web of Childhood (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1941), pp. 22–40.

21 See The Professor, Author's Preface.

22 Another analogy is the drugged potions given respectively by the Marchesa Vivaldi to Ellena and by Madame Beck to Lucy. That Miss Brontë was acquainted with The Italian is obvious from Ch. xxiii of Shirley where Caroline Helstone reads it over the shoulder of Rose Yorke. Robert A. Colby

23 The immediate germ, however, seems to have been her own poem beginning “The Autumn day its course has run,” written in Brussels, which ends with such a visitation (SHB, viir, 235–236).