APS TOGETHER
Day 3
Villette by Charlotte BrontëChapters IV–V
November 17, 2022 by Yiyun Li
This is why I place Villette above many novels, including Jane Eyre. Nothing in life—love, loss, travail, triumph—is idealized. Reality never fits into a neat narrative arc.
Though I forced myself to realize evils, I think I was too prosaic to idealize.
Eight years pass in two pages in Chapter IV, just as Jane Eyre at Lowood: “I remained an inmate of its walls, after its regeneration, for eight years: six as pupil, and two as teacher.” A master class from Brontë in not lingering or dramatizing.
A rare parenthesis: the narrator places her age at the time of the narrative closer to the dying Miss Marchmont. (Brontë had lost all five siblings by now.)
(I speak of a time gone by: my hair… now… white, under a white cap, like snow beneath snow.)
