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By Root 1774 0

the novel sets up a series of images and scenes for the reader, a framework of clues that will be crucially important to understanding events later in the narrative. Polly and Graham will reappear in adult guises, but their childhood selves will be present in their interactions and desires. Because we know so little about Lucy’s feelings at this point in the novel, we do not have the same kind of material to use in mapping her development. Her past remains ambiguous, and we are forced to rely on the narrative of the present as it unfolds to follow Lucy’s interior journey. Here Brontë juxtaposes two models of reading: One echoes the conventions of the nineteenth-century bildungsroman (the novel of education), in which the reader can chart the character’s journey from childhood to adulthood; the other foreshadows a modernist sensibility, one that portrays the heroine’s developing consciousness with all the fragmentary ambiguities of memory itself.

After a brief stint as a companion to the dying Mrs. Marchmont, who prophetically declares, “While I loved, and while I was loved, what an existence I enjoyed!” (p. 44), Lucy goes to London where she must take stock of her life thus far:

All at once my position rose on me like a ghost. Anomalous; desolate, almost blank of hope, it stood. What was I doing here alone in great London? What should I do on the morrow? What prospects had I in life? What friends had I on earth? Whence did I come? Whither should I go? What should I do? (pp. 51-52).

These questions seem appropriate to both the heroine and the author of the novel. Lucy has no idea where fate will take her and no prescribed path or journey. The author similarly must answer these questions in order to invent the trajectory of the novel. Lucy embarks on a journey to France, where the rest of the story will unfold. The sea voyage on a ship, aptly named The Vivid, continues the series of displacements that have characterized Lucy’s experiences from the beginning of the book. On the boat Lucy describes the beauty of the landscape in romantic natural imagery: “Deep was the pleasure I drank in with the sea-breeze; divine the delight I drew from the heaving channel-waves, from the sea-birds on their ridges, from the white sails on their dark distance, from the quiet, yet beclouded sky, overhanging all” (pp. 62-63). A few moments later she corrects her reverie, “Cancel the whole of that, if you please, reader—or rather let it stand, and draw thence a moral—an alliterative, text-hand copy—day-dreams are delusions of the demon. Becoming excessively sick, I faltered down into the cabin” (p. 63). These quirky moments are ways we learn about Lucy’s inner life and her battle between the seductive power of her imagination and the concrete realities of experience.

The tension between imagination and reason manifests itself in Lucy’s observations of Villette. From the mystic sensuality of Catholicism to the frivolity of young French women to the ancient mythic quality of the cobblestone streets, Lucy finds herself in an unknown world without a guide. Miraculously, a kind stranger (who will later be identified as none other than Graham, now Dr. John) directs her toward Madame Beck’s school for girls, where she eventually becomes a teacher. Madame Beck, first described as “a motherly, dumpy little woman, in a large shawl, a wrapping-gown, and a clean, trim night-cap” (p. 72), is a formidable woman who finds it difficult to trust the newly arrived anglaise. The school itself is a labyrinthine structure. The building comprises a series of public and private spaces, including secret passageways, a spooky attic, and a garden connected to a legendary story of a tragic nun. Both the interior and exterior of the school function as an elaborate gothic stage set.

We see Lucy on display, in classrooms, study halls, and dormitories, and off stage, hiding from the watchful eye of Madame Beck, in the alleyway attached to the garden, in the attic amid boxes and rats, and on the rooftop in the rain. Lucy’s determination to control when she is seen and how