Self Of Joys In Life: The Complexity Of Lucy In Villette

Choosing to Deprive the Self of Joys in Life: The Complexity of Lucy Snowe in Villette In Villette, Brontë gives readers the account of protagonist Lucy Snowe, a complicated and, at times, emotionless woman who is forced to express herself while holding on to virtue and her Protestant convictions. In their critical observation of Lucy’s character as a whole, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, who wrote The Madwoman in the Attic, comment about Lucy being a woman, “from first to last. . .without”. But, Lucy is more than a woman without; she is someone who chooses to be without love and friends because of a painful past never explained. Besides her withheld past, Brontë uses societal female models such as Polly, Ginevra, Vashti and the paintings at the museum to comment on the …show more content…
By focusing on these women and characters Lucy records such as Paul Emanuel and Madame Beck, Brontë gives opportunities for growth, but consequences to follow when true happiness is about to be reached. In her complexity as a character in her own written account, Lucy Snowe is a woman who chooses to deprive herself of anything good out of life out of an abundance of caution with passion, until her reliance and encounters with the lives of other characters forces her to confront and accept her humanity, and find joy even when tragedy strikes again. To argue, even though the entire novel is written from Lucy’s point of view, Bronte’s focus is really on all of the characters that inhabit Villette, how they differ in their passions and why passion is suppressed within Lucy. In observation of the