Villette 21-26, "Happiness is not a potato"

   I hope I was supposed to read to chapter 26, because I did. There's a lot going on in these chapters; we get a fairly long treatise on the stigma surrounding mental illness (and this is still a problem! crazy), we get the return of Polly and her papa, we get (well, at least I get) convinced that Dr John is not a good match for Lucy Snowe and is indeed weirdly attracted to teenage girls, we get M Paul yelling at everyone until they cry and then getting flustered about it, we get some really lovely descriptions of weather, AND we get MORE ragging on Cleopatra, to which I take offense (more on this later, because I cannot resist).

   Ginevra Fanshawe has taken to calling Lucy Snowe "Timon", which I am sure meant something different but this is the picture I have in my head:

one of the best comedic editing moments known to man

   "I had great pleasure in reading a few books, but not many: preferring always those on whose style or sentiment the writer's individual nature was plainly stamped; flagging inevitably over characterless books, however clever and meritorious"

   I get the feeling that CB is throwing some very specific shade here. Somebody has been saying something about her books and she is full of indignation. You sure showed 'em, Char.

if you haven't seen Double Indemnity you need to RIGHT NOW

   "M Paul was not at all a good little man, thought he had good points" IS LOVE IN THE AIR (for real this time)???? Poor Lucy is so thoroughly upset over Dr John and she can sense his regard for Polly (which, I maintain, is creepy. Dr John you are a 30 year old man, stop chasing after teenagers) and she buried the letters and she cries a lot and I just want everything to turn out okay for Lucy Snowe but I am sort of feeling like it won't because Charlotte Bronte herself was so sad and so fed up with the world. Oh Charlotte Bronte, if only I could go back in time and be your friend and give you a hug and feed you tea and talk about how much we love interesting weather.

"what is love? baby don't hurt me" - Lucy Snowe

   I'm not one for knee-jerk Freudian interpretations but I have been reading a lot of academic film criticism lately and omgosh Dr John has an Oedipus complex and he has it bad. Also if we go further along this line, Ginevra would probably represent the id and Polly would be the superego. Polly is all about control and bearing, and Ginevra is all about pleasure and flirting and being plump. They'd be the id and superego to Dr John's ego, but who knows about Lucy Snowe herself. Okay, enough of this, even I am rolling my eyes.

   AND NOW for some Cleopatra talk (will this become a weekly feature? Only time will tell). I feel pretty strongly about historical Egyptian ladies so feel free to skip this bit if that's not your thing. Lucy Snowe sometimes talks about being uneducated, and it really comes through here, even though she is always dropping historical and literary references elsewhere. Cleopatra was far from the indolent and lazy person that LS has built up in her head, and far from the love-lorn and weak characterization that I think she sometimes gets nowadays. Cleopatra was dealt a pretty bad hand and did really well with it. When LS was talking about Cleopatra lacking any strength of purpose, I remembered another of my favourite paintings of Cleopatra. Nota bene:

you should probably click on this to see it larger

   Here we have Cleopatra testing poisons on condemned prisoners to see which ones will deliver the most painless death. She had realized that if things went wrong they would go completely wrong, and was preparing for her eventual demise. It may or may not be a true story, much like the story of the asp, but just look at her. OMGosh, Lucy Snowe. You would have SO MUCH respect for Cleopatra if you actually knew about her. As it turns out, asp venom does not always prove fatal and when it does it's pretty agonizing, so Cleopatra probably used a combo of poisons including hemlock, of Socrates-suicide fame. THE MORE YOU KNOW.