D.B White’s Reviews > Villette > Status Update

All those ghastly Protestant themes, the melodramatic imagery and the long, pedantic, self-righteous inner monologues of Lucy Snowe and for what? A story so trite and uninteresting, characters so flat and constrained…I’ll read it till the end, and I’m sorry to those who enjoyed it, but I don’t see what you are seeing.

Okay, so far I’m getting most of what is happening in the story…Some of those long excursions into Lucy’s mind have me completely lost as to whether she is being poetic or speaking about actual events, but I’ve so far had the will to reread most of the passages that are unclear. Lucy is very human, a bit of a jerk and she can be so annoying and depressing. There is some encouraging character development tho

I’m at the chapter called « Villette » and I have so many regrets about this book choice…So far, I can’t stand its tawdry, obnoxiously meek main character…I mean, one has to give it a chance, Jane Eyre was such a masterpiece and had some similar elements, but so far yuck…

Alright, I cheated and found out that Lucy Snowe is a bit of an unreliable witness, but I’ve come across no other spoilers…She describes Polly so harshly that I had to look up whether Polly had some sort of stigmatized visible disability for that time period.Poor Polly is only six and my hunch is that Miss Snowe is jealous of Graham’s affection for her which is also weird and inappropriate because he’s 16…