Fiction Book Club - Villette 9pm March 9th

[Unrulysun]

Can we think of some questions to start us off too?

At the moment (p40) I'm interested in why Lucy tells us so little about herself and in that awful relationship between the child and the boy :(

Oh, that was good old British anti-Catholicism, from a parson's daughter! Laid on too heavy for modern tastes. And making Paul and Father Silas browbeat her to try and convert her, and she the immovable Protestant heroine. I didn't like that aspect of the book even if it was a bit amusing.

I dunno re the lesbianism bit. The Victorians didn't really recognize it, and what happened between women wouldn't mean the same as we'd see. And of all the people Lucy despised, Ginevra was number 1!

And Ginevra is the one who Lucy (acting the role of the man) treats badly - finding her vaccuous and vain, commenting repeatedly on her weight, telling her off. I know she's a PITA but it seems like Lucy's acting out what men do to women?

Talking of things that I find shocking now - the bit where she reveals to the Count that she's a teacher. You can't believe the shame and terror she has about her working for a living.

Yes, there is definitely envy there. They are both women of similar age and position but Ginevra has all the luck, beauty, opportunities while Lucy suffers.

Thinking more about Lucy in contrast to Dr Graham--of course she does end up with the best kind of professional career that a 19th century woman could have. Running her own school and her own business. But whereas Dr Graham gets an education and becomes a doctor, Lucy has to pick things up as she goes along, and she ends up owing a lot to Paul.

Someone above called her "educated" but really she was a middle class girl from a poor family (in fact no family, we're just left with hints at tragedy). It's made very clear that she makes the most of what she has, and fools Paul's university friends, but once they come to grill her, she proves not to know much.

Yes SGM I think that's there too definitely she hates that Ginevra's superficial charms are more valuable than her character and intellect but I think under that there's something else. Teitetua I know what you mean about Victorians not seeing that in the text but I think if it's there it's there iyswim?

There are two points in the book where she completely satirises the reader and subverts her narrative by more-or-less explicitly saying 'this is what you expect but I am not going to give it to you'. One is near the beginning when she tells us that she is going to leave out a chunk of her adolescence and we can think what we like about it; the other is at the end when she fails to determine an outcome. What is she doing here? I speculated a contempt for her reader but perhaps that is wrong, and there must in any case be more of an explanation.

She is drawing attention to the artifice of a novel in her genre. And one of the ways that that becomes valuable is that the book seems to need to culminate in the fruition of a romance that her readers, her society, can't allow protestant heroine and 'ridiculous foreigner' Catholic clown. He is practically Poirot. The conventions of the form in which she is writing or at least the conventions of its readers -- can't allow that romance. As indeed it was disallowed in her own life.

So the book is necessarily fractured, thwarted -- something that is laid out for our consideration in her playful violation of the book's structual requirements.

I think the fact that Bronte put Lucy in a man's role in a play wooing Ginevra would suggest that she had thought about something of that nature - in an implicit way...I like the fact that they are so acutely conscious of Graham's presence in the audience?

When I write the screenplay I will heavily bring that out.

What do we think of Graham - she does admit that she over-idealises him. His relationship with the child-woman Paulina is weird - but that may be because of our projections from a 21st century POV.

Co-dependent SGM?

Yes, and Lucy reveres proper women like Mrs. Bretton & Madame Beck - who control their destinies - even if they are not truly liberated. She admires women who are manless I suppose and don't depend on a husband and lover for happiness.

Yes SC it's interesting how little the structure adheres to anything resembling a first person narrator Victorian novel isn't it? We hardly get anything about her from the beginning and then, as you say, she basically tells us 'you want this? You can't have it'

The anti Catholic thing goes hand in hand in Victorian Gothic with spooky nuns. Catholics are dangerous idolators who have incense and crucifixes where they ought to have some nice flowers and a well scrubbed floor.

Yes unruly. And I can't remember the details am I right in thinking that she reveals quite late in the book that at a far earlier stage she had recognised Dr John, but just not told us. That is one of the oddest things I have come across in a novel: such a betrayal of the perspective that we thought we had -- the perspective of learning with the protagonist about the events of the narrative. She is really breaking the rules there.

I really felt that she was playing games with me and it was so odd. It made me feel almost as despised by her as Ginevra is despised by her. I don't understand it really.

Are we saying it's a feminist text? Even of its time? I didn't feel that.

The gothic is wonderfully done. Almost every feeling of desolation and unworth etc that she has is presented at various points in a personified way -- as a personal spirit in her madness. In a way that is superstitious like the spooky nun. The nun is revealed as jokes and misunderstandings, but this good little protestant has a legion of idols within her.

Yes SC! Completely! 'oh yes, didn't I mention that I recognised him all along?' and that's so deliberate because she changes his name! yes I felt completely betrayed by that tbh!

It certainly lays out the material, and worse the exhausting psychological, consequences of being a woman. Feminist in that sense? And more feminist than Jane Eyre because it is an achievement of autonomy, rather than Eyre's attainment of a kind of compensation for oppression, achieved by alliance with a man?

Jane Eyre often seems to me to be profoundly anti-feminist -- a portrayal of the degrading psychological effects of oppression, rather than a portrayal of the obligation and capacity to transcend these.

I think it is a feminist text - it's about the experience of women who even though their horizons are a lot wider than most women living at the time still live limited and circumscribed existences and how men's lives are much bigger and more valued.

I think it's about the contortions and compromises an intelligent woman has to make in order to survive in a patriarchal world and the toll it exacts on their physical, mental and 'moral' health.