My topic is Villette by Charlotte Brontë
My focus is Lucy Snowe’s depression and obsession in relation to Brontë’s life
My purpose in writing is to inform/ persuade
My tone is academic and formal
Mental illness is something that most people deal with in their lifetime. Lucy Snowe in Villette by Charlotte Brontë is a prime example of coping with mental illness throughout life. Mental illness is different for everyone, but for Lucy Snowe, her mental illness reappears whenever she is alone. The first time the reader sees Lucy fall ill is after Mrs. Marchmont dies and she is once again left alone. The next time Lucy falls ill is, when she is in Villette and her school is on a long holiday. She faints after just giving confession. However, Lucy Snowe also shares similarities with the person who created her, Charlotte Brontë. Specifically, Lucy Snowe and her creator are both thoroughly obsessed with the fear of being alone and doing everything they can to avoid it. Whenever both are alone, they fall into depression which reinforces both Lucy Snowe and Charlotte Brontë’s obsession with never being alone. Lucy becomes a quick study of how to change her experience of obsession from one of trauma to one of empowerment. Lucy Snowe repeatedly falls into depression throughout Villette however, in order to keep the people in her life from seeing her repeated depression, Lucy obsessively reflects her melancholic feelings onto other people; the same thing happens in Charlotte Brontë’s life.
In ‘“A Great Break In The Common Course of Confession”: Narrating Loss in Charlotte Brontë’s ‘Villette’” by Gretchen Braun goes through why Lucy is so afraid of being alone; ‘”To be homesick, one must have a home, which I have not’: Snowe’s poignant assertion of her personal dilemma touches Villette’s core artistic problem, as well as Lucy’s social and psychic one.” (189). Lucy has lost everything – family, property, and, accordingly, social standing – which prevents her from describing it in terms that might gain real sympathy within her social milieu. Not only does the intensity of her grief render her inarticulate, but her losses have diminished her social and economic worth almost to the point of invisibility. Any effort she might make to communicate her experience and gain empathy is severely compromised by her position as a penniless woman, at the bare edge of (though not entirely excluded from) social intelligibility and empathetic range. Braun argues,
We find, emerging from a culture enthralled with, and perhaps in thrall to, domesticity, a novel whose female protagonist and narrator no longer has a family as the as the action of the story begins, who lacks the means, in terms of inheritance, to establish a new family through marriage, and who cannot even lay claim to the most basic requirement for security, namely, a stable habitation(189).
Villette is, at its elusive center, a narrative of psychic and social placelessness and dislocation.
There are a multitude of times that Lucy Snowe falls into her depression, the biggest bout of her illness begins during the schools long holiday. Left virtually alone in the Pensionnat during the long school holiday, Lucy quickly spirals into a fit of anxious depression:
[A]t the commencement of those eight weeks, I hardly knew how I was to live to the end. My spirits had long been gradually sinking; now that the prop of employment was withdrawn, they went down fast. Even to look forward was not to hope: the dumb future spoke no comfort, offered no promise, gave no inducement to bear present evil in reliance on future good. A sorrowful indifference to existence often pressed on me –a despairing resignation to reach betimes the end of all things earthly (193).
Such suicidal depression results from Lucy’s nagging idea of being forgotten by those she loves. Waking and sleeping, she is obsessed with the idea: “Amidst the horrors of [one] dream I think the worst lay here. Methought the well-loved dead, who had loved me well in life, met me elsewhere, alienated: galled was my inmost spirit with an unutterable sense of despair about the future” (p. 197). Obsessed with finding companionship, she begins to wander the streets of Villette and arrives at a Catholic church where she collapses. The biggest fear that Lucy constantly struggles with is that of being alone, whenever she is alone she falls into a depression; her fainting is just the beginning of the biggest depression Lucy experiences throughout the novel.
In ‘“Must I Render an Account?”: Genre and Self-Narration in Charlotte Brontë’s “Villette”’ by Emily W. Heady argues that Lucy’s confession is, on one level, an error brought on by the movement toward disclosure and publicity inherent in both and realism-the next step in a long line of narrative maneuver that require her to move interior matter outside, to tell her secrets, and her hidden self into visible spaces. However, Lucy’s confession is instructive to her in a way that the episodes with the letters and the nun are not for it forces Lucy to understand just how much she loses in allowing her inner life, her secret self, to be made public. “Lucy’s confession happens at nearly the mid-point of the novel, when she is in her most Gothic mode. After a long psychosomatic illness brought on by weeks of solitude in the dormitory, Lucy finds herself convinced that God is testing her (in a way that seems oddly Gothic)” (Heady 351). Rather than realizing her illness, Lucy would rather say that God is just testing her faith. This is just another way for Lucy to run away from her illness and blame it on the fact that she is alone. The largest battle with Lucy’s illness that she faces is during a long vacation where she is left alone at the school and has to face her fear of loneliness.
After John finds Lucy in the church, he brings her to his mother’s chateau to convalesce. During her stay, Lucy strikes up a meaningful friendship with both John and his mother, which significantly helps her obsession with not being alone. When it is time for Lucy to return to the Pensionnat, John promises that “[they] will not forget [her].” Furthermore, he proposes to write to Lucy “any cheerful nonsense that comes into [his] head” (285). When Lucy, as if guarding against any potential for disappointment, asks him not to write, presuming that he will not have time, John claims that he “will find or make time,” words that strongly implant themselves in Lucy’s mind (285). In “‘Villette’’s Compulsory Education”’ by Jon Hodge argues that, “…brings into stark relief her fears of something far more anxiogenic than simply being abandoned. In a scenario of abandonment, the person deserted may feel forgotten, but most likely the person who leaves does not literally forget the person left. Yet, this improbability is precisely what Lucy fears” (907). John promises to write to her and for a little while, he keeps that promise but, eventually he casts her away when Paulina Home reappears in their lives.
The nun instills such a fear in Lucy Snowe that it might even overcome her fear of loneliness. When, a fortnight later, Lucy spies a letter in the portresse’s hand, she explains that “the shape of a letter similar to that had haunted my brain in its very core for seven days past” (298). That evening, “bent as resolutely as ever on finding solitude somewhere,” she retires to the garret where her pleasure of reading her missive is interrupted by a ghostly image of a nun (305). Horror-struck, Lucy runs downstairs to gather witnesses, and when they all return to the garret, she notices that both the nun and the letter are missing. So, when Lucy finds the nun holding her letter, the very object of her obsession, she tells everyone so that she may have her letters back. Dr. John is very wary upon hearing of the nun. In “Illegible Minds: Charlotte Brontë’s Early Writings And The Psychology Of Moral Management in “Jane Eyre” and “Villette”’ by Beth Tressler argues, Dr. John believes the appearance of the nun to Lucy makes visible Lucy’s hidden mental malady. The contemporaneous medical community is largely represented in the person of Dr. John. Shuttleworth writes, “Dr. John directs onto Lucy the gaze of medical authority, calmly confident of his ability to define inner experience from outer signs” (220). Dr. John tells Lucy that he does not look on her as a friend or relation, but “I look on you now from a professional point of view, and I read, perhaps all you would conceal – in your eye, which is curiously vivid and restless; in your cheek, which the blood has forsaken; in your hand, which you cannot steady” (Brontë 248). Dr. John assesses her external symptoms, which, in his mind, enable him to penetrate and know all that Lucy conceals. Her restless eye, her pale cheek, and her shaking hands lay bare Lucy’s interiority, making her, he thinks, entirely legible to his gaze. Yet the progression of the novel and the development of Lucy contest Dr. John’s valuation of externality, revealing how Lucy’s self remains beyond his scrutinizing eye.
Villette is always compared to Charlotte Brontë’s own life because both Lucy Snowe and Brontë were obsessed with finding love and avoiding being alone. In “Triangulation, Desire, and Discontent in ‘The Life of Charlotte Brontë’” by Linda H. Peterson argues that there was much in The Life of Charlotte Brontë by Elizabeth Gaskell that was left out. For example, “In writing the Life, Gaskell seeks to diminish the view that Brontë, like her heroines, was obsessed with love. She systematically does so by minimizing the romantic aspect of the correspondence between Brontë and Nussey–excising phrases or sentences from the letters that reveal an interest in courtship and love” (909). After her sisters passing, Brontë also frequently struggled with depression and loneliness; Lucy Snowe also struggles with the same issues when she is not in frequent contact with someone. Villette is an expression of Brontë’s own life, with Charlotte Brontë and Lucy Snowe being the same person/ character.
In Villette by Charlotte Brontë, Lucy Snowe struggles with depression which causes her to become obsessed with the thought of finding anything to make her feel less alone in the world. Whenever Lucy Snowe is left alone, for any period of time, she falls back into depression. Her largest battle with her depression was when the school went on a long holiday and she was left there alone. Fortunately, after giving a confession, she runs into an old friend, Dr. John who helps nurse her back to health. When they eventually have to part ways, he promises to write her letters– letters she becomes obsessed with. These letters offer her something much more than just correspondence, they show her that in that moment, she is not alone; she has someone to care for her. Lucy Snowe and her creator, Charlotte Brontë, frequently struggled with the same issues- depression and loneliness.
Works Cited
BRAUN, GRETCHEN. “‘A GREAT BREAK IN THE COMMON COURSE OF CONFESSION’: NARRATING LOSS IN CHARLOTTE BRONTË’S ‘VILLETTE.’” ELH, vol. 78, no. 1, 2011, pp. 189–212. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41236539. Accessed 12 Mar. 2020.
Brontë, Charlotte. Villette. Edited by Sally Minogue. Wordsworth Classics, 1999.
Gaskell, Elizabeth. The Life of Charlotte Brontë. Edited by Elisabeth Jay, Penguin, 1998.
Heady, Emily W. “‘Must I Render an Account?”: Genre and Self-Narration in Charlotte Brontë’s ‘Villette.’” Journal of Narrative Theory, vol. 36, no. 3, 2006, pp. 341–364. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30224655. Accessed 12 Mar. 2020.
Hodge, Jon. “‘Villette’’s Compulsory Education.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, vol. 45, no. 4, 2005, pp. 899–916. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3844620. Accessed 12 Mar. 2020.
Peterson, Linda H. “Triangulation, Desire, and Discontent in ‘The Life of Charlotte Brontë.’” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, vol. 47, no. 4, 2007, pp. 901–920. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4625146. Accessed 11 Mar. 2020.
TRESSLER, BETH. “ILLEGIBLE MINDS: CHARLOTTE BRONTË’S EARLY WRITINGS AND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MORAL MANAGEMENT IN ‘JANE EYRE’ AND ‘VILLETTE.’” Studies in the Novel, vol. 47, no. 1, 2015, pp. 1–19. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43233927. Accessed 12 Mar. 2020.
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