Villette (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Charlotte Bronte [9]
After a period of collapse and recovery at Mrs. Bretton’s home outside Villette, Lucy begins to try on the possibility of becoming a visible presence. As part of her developing courtship with Dr. John, she is taken outside of the confines of the school and the domestic space of the Bretton household to the theater and to an art gallery. In one scene Lucy critiques an overtly sexual painting of Cleopatra along with a chaste series of images depicting “La vie d’une femme.” A few chapters later, she has the opportunity to witness the great actress Vashti perform. (Vashti is modeled after the French diva Rachel, whom Brontë saw perform during the period when she was writing Villette.) These moments are meditations on the possibilities for representing the complexity of women using various artistic forms.
Both the spaces of the art gallery and the theater provide an opportunity for Lucy to look and to be looked at. There is something vaguely dangerous about her proximity to the revealing portrait of Cleopatra, which she finds to be “an enormous piece of claptrap” (p. 227). At the same time, the depictions of women in the more acceptable paintings are equally repulsive to her: “All these four ‘Anges’ were grim and gray as burglars, and cold and vapid as ghosts. What women to live with! insincere, ill-humoured, bloodless, brainless nonentitites! As bad in their way as the indolent gipsy-giantess, the Cleopatra, in hers” (pp. 229-230). While musing on these extreme portrayals of femininity, Lucy is startled by Paul Emmanuel, who scolds her for looking at the sensual image of Cleopatra. They exchange biting remarks on the museum bench while Dr. John emerges from the other room. Lucy watches, waits for him to look at the painting, and then leaves Paul to join her preferred suitor. Clearly, in the art gallery Lucy is caught between her two suitors, but she is also suspended in the liminal realm between having come of age and being too old for love, the past and the present, the excessive visibility of the sexual female and the depressing invisibility of the ghostly, grim, and proper woman.
Perhaps testing the limits of her own attractiveness, Lucy decides to wear a pink dress to the theater and personifies the costume as an alien alter ego: “A pink dress! I knew it not. It knew not me!” (p. 235). Catching a glimpse of herself in the mirror, she almost doesn’t recognize the person in the glass: “Thus for the first, and perhaps only time in my life, I enjoyed the ‘giftie’ of seeing myself as others see me. No need to dwell on the result. It brought a jar of discord, a pang of regret” (p. 238). Several chapters later, Lucy’s amazed response to the bold actress Vashti is another cautionary reaction to putting one’s body and one’s desires on stage. Lucy narrates, “I found upon her something neither of woman nor of man: in each of her eyes sat a devil.... Hate and Murder and Madness incarnate, she stood” (p. 291). At the same time, Vashti’s courageous performance is something that Lucy cannot help but admire. “The strong magnetism of genius drew my heart out of its wonted orbit.... I had seen acting before, but never anything like this: never anything which astonished Hope and hushed Desire; which outstripped Impulse and paled Conception” (p. 293). When Dr. John dismisses Vashti’s talents, Lucy laments, “For what belonged to storm, what was wild and intense, dangerous, sudden, and flaming, he had no sympathy, and held with it no communion” (p. 293). In other words, “He judged her as a woman, not an artist” (p. 294). It is the beginning of the end of their relationship.
Brontë’s ambivalence about being a female public celebrity is embedded in Lucy’s double responses to Vashti. While Lucy sees Vashti as a true artist, an immensely powerful and all-consuming presence, she still must distance herself from the actress’s unmitigated representation of emotion. The connection between Vashti’s art and her