Page 92 of Just Like the Brontë Sisters

Chapter 60: Skylar

I told Gavin I’d trust him to handle things.

What else could I do? He was right that if I wanted a chance of getting accepted into a good literature program for next year, I had to do my best right now. But the last thing I wanted was to worry about a Brontë novel, not when my life had become a Brontë novel. My situation felt even more hopeless than Lucy Snowe’s. She was the protagonist of Villette, the book I was to focus on for my exam. Lucy had nothing; she was without nerve, without good looks, without family, without money. Her life was a breathing suffocation and she’d never be free, not until she could stop internalizing each rejection that came from all the men she knew.

Now I sat at my desk, wracking my brain for something worth writing.

Critics say that Villette was the writer’s final effort to be at peace with her own loneliness and thwarted romance. They say that Charlotte threw her heart into creating literature as a substitute for love and perhaps there is justification to psycho-analyze the author. However, Villette is not simply a novel written by a female; it’s a work that captures what it means to be a female: all the burdens and expectations that society puts on women, and all the burdens and expectations that women put on themselves.

I paused my typing and rubbed my forehead, searching for examples. Surely the burdens and expectations for women in 1800s England weren’t all that different from 21st century United States. I could feel myself on the brink of making an epic connection between feminist theory and literary history, of perhaps pinning down the sexist societal norms that still exist today. In fiction, a male’s character arc is about the search for adventure, or for answers to life’s big questions. But a female character is only ever on a quest for love, and often she’ll find a bad man who leads her to take poison, to drown herself, or to throw herself in front of a train. My fingers itched to type about the injustice of it all, that if an attractive woman character stays single, she must be evil and doomed to die a horrific death. Conversely, the ugly single women might get a longer lifespan, but she’ll still be pigeonholed as the protagonist of a “feminist” novel.

Ugh. My computer screen remained blank. I had to figure out how to put all of this into coherent thoughts, and I had to relate it, specifically, to Charlotte Brontë and Villette. I think I could have done it. I know I would have tried, but then my phone buzzed. There was a text.

And it was from Mitch.