A Tale of Three Lucys: Wordsworth and Bronte in Kincaid's Antiguan Villette

Abstract

In one may perceive what effects her in a male-supremacist society has upon psyche of a woman. She is bitter and she is honest; a neurotic revolutionary full of conflict, backsliding, anger, terrible self-doubt, and an unconquerable determination to win through. She is a pair of eyes watching society; weighing, ridiculing, judging. A piece of furniture whom no one notices, sees everything and reports, cynically, compassionately, truthfully, analytically. (140) Though Kate Millett wrote these lines to describe Snowe of Charlotte Bronte's Villette, they immediately bring to mind another of more recent fame: Josephine Potter, nineteen-year-old heroine of eponymous novel by Jamaica Kincaid. This is more than just a coincidence of names since Kincaid has often alluded to her admiration for novels of Charlotte Bronte and influence they have had on her work (Garis 42; Cudjoe 398). However, though critics such as Diane Simmons have explored influence that Jane Eyre may have had on Kincaid's construction of Lucy, no attention has yet been given to Bronte's Villette, which offers close analogues to in its plot, characters, and major themes. Both novels feature a reserved, skeptical, voyeuristic, first-person narrator named Lucy, who becomes dissatisfied with her home country and moves to another to become a governess, only to become romantically involved with a man named Paul who sparks something unexpected beneath her usual reserve. More significantly, each explicitly struggles to define herself against repressive models of her society, particularly those of its art. The climactic moment of each novel comes when finally finds her tongue, writing text of her own rather than allowing it to be dictated to her, a process that echoes fictionally what Bronte and Kincaid have done in reality--the former by subverting William Wordsworth's Lucy poems to create her own Lucy, and latter by addressing Wordsworth and Bronte simultaneously. Just as young Annie John imagines her future travels through Bronte's biography, Kincaid tells Potter's story in part through model of Bronte's work. By rewriting one of favorite authors of her youth, Kincaid accomplishes structurally what her character accomplishes psychologically: to take text of colonizer, and make it her own. Though Snowe devotes initial pages of Villette to her observations of young Polly Home, action of novel truly begins with a mysterious disaster in Lucy's family. In a fashion we will come to see as typical of Lucy's narration, she evades giving reader details, speaking only of metaphoric wreck of a ship in which the crew perished, leaving her only survivor (42). After a brief stint as companion to a dying widow, Lucy's penury and dissatisfaction with her situation send her abruptly on great adventure of her life, a departure for Belgium (Labassecour in novel) without stopping to learn a word of French. She expects that with this journey, she who has never yet truly lived will finally taste life (58). When she arrives in city of Villette, however, her initial reaction is one of disorientation and fear. After an ominous stalking by two mustachioed men (78), loses her way among buildings that she can no longer identify through fog, seeing the huge outline of more than one overbearing pile, which might be palace or church--I could not tell (78). A look at first paragraph of Kincaid's provides several immediate points of comparison: It was my first day. I had come night before, a gray-black and cold night before--as it was expected to be in middle of January, though I didn't know that at time--and I could not see anything clearly on way in from airport, even though there were lights everywhere. As we drove along, someone would single out to me a famous building, an important street, a park, a bridge that when built was thought to be a spectacle. …