Brennan and Fiction: the Victorians were a little trashy.

Right now I'm reading Villette, which is one of the novels Charlotte Brontë wrote that no one cares about. It takes place in a French girls' school and so far just seems to be a super gothic take on a very common style of Victorian girls' school novel, where everyone has fun little intrigues and is very attractive and they solve some kind of mystery like Nancy Drew. Instead, Brontë deals with the reality of a girls' school as a viper's nest full of evil teenage bitches embroiled in extensive networks of spies, informants and saboteurs, which is basically how I remember my high school years. (Think of this as the 19th century's Mean Girls; I really like the author's own line about 'the wide difference that lies between the novelist's and the poet's ideal "jeune fille" and the said "jeune fille" as she really is.')

What's interesting about Villette is that it's told from the perspective of a narrator about whom we know quite little and who repeatedly describes herself as calm, collected, uninteresting, dispassionate, and basically totally normal. We don't read the story (or at least, we don't start out reading the story) for Lucy Snowe, the drifting governess and domestic servant through whose perspective we have access to characters with feelings. Snowe is constantly under siege from other's affects, and I'm struck reading the novel how much modern authors emphasize observation of others rather than the direct reception of their affects.

"In an unguarded moment, I chanced to say that, of the two errors; I considered falsehood worse than an occasional lapse in church-attendance. The poor girls were tutored to report in Catholic ears whatever the Protestant teacher said. An edifying consequence ensued. Something--an unseen, an indefinite, a nameless--something stole between myself and these my best pupils: the bouquets continued to be offered, but conversation thence forth became impracticable. As I paced the alleys or sat in the berceau, a girl never came to my right hand but a teacher, as if by magic, appeared at my left. Also, wonderful to relate, Madame's shoes of silence brought her continually to my back, as quick, as noiseless nd unexpected, as some wandering zephyr."

This is still readable as a simple bounded communication where Miss Snowe's students observed her and began to treat her differently; but she herself repeatedly notes her reception or refusal of others' affects. She maintains control of her class by refusing their affect of mirth or the one it could trigger in her, anger. By remaining cool and dignified she earns the respect of a few key girls in the front of the room, after which most of the others stop trying to torment her and set to work in a totally different frame of mind. Only one girl continues to try to annoy Miss Snowe, and when Miss Snowe pushes her into a book-closet and locks it for being disruptive, a frisson of approval travels around the room:

"It so happened that this girl, Dolores by name, and a Catalonian by race, was the sort of character at once dreaded and hated by all her associates; the act of summary justice above noted proved popular: there was not one present but, in her heart, liked to see it done.

They were stilled for a moment; then a smile--not a laugh--passed from desk to desk: then--when I had gravely and tranquilly resturned to the estrade, courteously requested silence, and commenced a dictation as if nothing at all had happened--the pens travelled peacefully over the pages, and the remainder of the lesson passed in order and indusutry."

Still, what strikes me most are the passages where Snowe receives others' affects, because this is essentially what she's in the book to do, being a vaguely impoverished 30-something Englishwoman who will not talk about her own past, even in a first-person narrative. In this passage she deals with Madame, the principal of the school:

"Dîtes donc," said Madame sternly, "vous sentez vous réellement trop faible?"

I might have said "Yes," and gone back to nursery obscurity, and there, perhaps, mouldred for the rest of my life; but looking up at Madame, I saw in her countenance a something that made me think twice ere I decided. At that instant she did not wear a woman's aspect, but rather a man's. Power of a particular kind strongly limned itself in all her traits, and that power was not my kind of power: neither sympathy, nor congeniality, nor submission, were the emotions it awakened. I stood--not soothed, nor won, nor overwhelmed. It seemed as if a challenge of strength between opposing gifts was given, and I suddenly felt all the dishonor of my diffidence--all the pusillanimity of my slackness to aspire."

I might be the only one who really digs Victorian literature, but whatever. As I was reading and noticing this stuff about Snowe, I was reminded of another placeholder heroine -- Bella from Twilight. I've never read the series (couldn't stop obsessing over the grammar errors; also killed The Da Vinci Code for me), but based on what I've heard and read about it, Bella has no real personality. She has feelings, but only in response to other people's feelings, and she's kind of left intentionally blank so that we can step into her shoes and stare soulfully at some sparkly vampires, or feel what it might be like to do that.

I think these kind of empty, placeholder-type characters create the opportunity for us to feel the imaginary affects directed at the individual. We have a good impression of what Bella senses, if not always what she thinks about it. We feel her requisite, normal feelings, like confusion and annoyance with her dad; but we receive powerful affects from the supernatural boyfriends in her life, and I've been told much of the novel's appeal is this, its ability to make you feel what Bella is feeling, to feel the affects attributed to her and to belong to the transmission system described in the novel.

I also just finished Anna Karenina, and I experienced something very like that when I was reading. Tolstoy is a verrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrry wordy guy and he writes epics the likes of which Stephen King can only dream about, but he goes into insane intimate detail about the affects and effects of affects for his characters. Karenina's storyline in the novel is basically just about the contorted, confused feelings of a woman trying to leave her husband, the effects of these feelings on her lover, and the effects of his feelings about her feelings on Anna. The novel is third-person and follows several different tracks, but the reader is invited into the innermost mind of each character, even secondary characters, so that we can feel each affect and see the way they interact in a larger view.

Obviously the mechanics are on different levels, but in terms of the transmission of affect, I think Anna Karenina and Villette are doing for me what Twilight does for many people -- it gives me the ability to feel what a character feels, and to partially enter that character's world. Victorian gothic literature is just a little more acceptable, apparently because the people who complain about the sexual content and coercive affects in Twilight don't read very much. Villette is much more about the competition, manipulation and personal political intrigue between young women, but Anna Karenina is just as vaguely suggestive as Twilight, and when it was published, Anna's adventures served much the same purpose that Bella's do now. Morality had to be served by Anna's suicide at the end of the novel, but otherwise, both works seemed designed in large part to transmit imaginary affects into the reader.