Villette by Charlotte Brontë

 

Oppression. Repression. Depression. 

The first certainly contributes to the second, and both contribute to the third in the character of the protagonist of Villette, Lucy Snowe. This is a meticulous account of a woman who is depressed and introverted (both terms that were probably not current when Brontë was writing this novel). Perhaps traumatized (another word probably not much used in this way until Freud's time ) by her parents' deaths, Lucy builds walls around herself, denies even to herself the passionate and very human desire she feels. She stays behind the walls she has constructed as the man who has engendered this passion first develops an attraction to an air-headed society girl, and then to a more admirable young woman with whom he is happy. She finally finds happiness herself with a man who, not least because of his misogyny and ardent Catholicism (Lucy is an ardent Protestant), is often unpleasant and with whom Lucy is often at odds. The novel ends, though, with that happiness in question, a question that Lucy, true to the reserve which characterizes her, leaves unanswered.

Villette, perhaps because of its psychological depth, the obsession with one character's mind, hardly seems Victorian. As this novel is often thought to be to some extent autobiographical, the auto-fictioneers of our time would do well to take a lesson from the Charotte Brontë of Villette.