Contrasting Places In Lucy Honeychurch's Room With A View

Setting explores the main idea of disempowerment and isolation and aptly allows the audience to contrast it with the life of the main character. From the story, we are told that the setting is in a newsagency shop in a country town near a harbour. We are also told that the country town has a smelly harbour breeze. By using the country town as the setting, the author has placed us as readers to imagine isolation and places being far away, making it easier to convey ideas of the story. The isolation of the country town illustrates the life of the main character. She is isolated and stuck in the shop and town where she has no power to leave due to her parents. For example, “Once a day the big Greyhound rolled past going north to the city” and “Sometimes she would bicycle out to the edge of town and look along the highways”. Using the word city, the author is creating an atmosphere of adventure and the highway creates a sense of belonging. Through setting, the author is able to covey the main idea of isolation and disempowerment effectively and letting us as readers connect the relationship between the setting and the main character’s life.

Lucy lectures Eliza on her “coquettish” ways and suggests that she be cautious in her attempt to rebel (7). However, Eliza does not heed Lucy’s advice and continues her quest for her ideal husband.

story. By showing three different perspectives the reader is able to have a better idea of

The setting is very important in both stories in that it defines not only the plot, but the characters themselves.

After a few months elsewhere in Italy, Lucy returned home with a man named Cecil she had met and was now engaged to marry. To her dismay, she saw very quickly what

For example, the difference of the men and the women can be cited in the opening of the novel. Men have a different viewpoint on life than women do. When it comes to dreams, men see them at a distance and they will achieve it or have hope for it until the day they die. Women see dreams differently. They take the memories that they have a use for and they can make a dream out it.

Contrasting places have been used in many works of literature throughout history to strengthen the meaning of stories. The use of two different settings within one story often represents opposed forces or ideas, and allows readers to get a better grasp of the meaning behind the

A Tale of Two Cities follows an up and down plot structure that creates contrast. Following Charles Darnay and Lucie

Lucy gets the closest to directly confronting the issue of ignorance when she says “it cannot be concealed,” for she addresses the habit of hiding problems as to not seem weak. Admitting something had a lasting effect was looked down upon and so people often let problems fester in silence. Lucy is no different in her desire to bury her feelings and start anew, and Brontë uses Lucy’s conformity to

Surveillance is a continuous close observation of a person. Surveillance plays a key part in the book, Villette by Charlotte Bronte. In Villette, Bronte is focusing on a specific character, Lucy Snowe. Throughout the book Lucy is telling us about her life story while surveillance appears throughout. The focus of this paper is on how surveillance changes over the course of Lucy’s life. Lucy’s opinion of surveillance changes over time because of her age, the people who come in and out of her life, and when she realizes she is the one being watched by different characters.

Villette is a narrative that seems constantly at war with itself, fraught with tensions of reason versus feeling, nature versus art and reality versus imagination, as I will attempt to illustrate. Lucy is anything but a one dimensional character and it throughout the novel, her emotional growth is charted. The important elements in the narrative seem to resist a one-sided reading. Read in context, perhaps Bronte recognizes that in the Victorian world, tensions of the aforementioned impinge upon and are all shaped by one another.[1]

She “had been made to memorize it, verse after verse, and then had recited the whole poem to an auditorium full of parents, teachers, and [her] fellow pupils” (Page 18), even though she would not see such a flower until becoming almost twenty years old. Lucy sees the daffodils Mariah shows her as reminder of her colonial education. Upon close examination, one notices a parallel between the interactions between Lucy and her mother, and Lucy’s colonized country and its colonizer or “mother country,” England. The presence of her mother haunts Lucy’s mind while she is in America. She cannot seem to escape the traits she has inherited from her mother. Although Lucy’s mother seems to allow some kind of separation by allowing Lucy to travel to America, she has no intention of making it permanent and completely letting go of Lucy. She consistently writes her letters. Similarly the legacy of colonialism is almost impossible to escape from. It has woven itself with the ways of the country and the people of the country and it takes great effort to escape. Lucy struggles to reconcile what she has internalized from her mother with what she discovers about herself:

The two settings both take place in France during the Franco-Prussian war. They are each contain the characters within a semi closed environment allowing the actions of the characters to be enclosed within each microcosm. While many other settings would suffice, these two are both common and small areas with almost forced social interaction. This allows many of the characters to interact with each other on a more personal level.

Without language the self is  mutilated and silenced and, as Tanner notes in his introduction to Villette, "to be wordless is to be powerless". By having Jane and Lucy narrate their  own stories Bronte allows them to create self, to free themselves from the  repression of silence and to be powerful. The implications of this are obvious  if the same principal were to be applied to other novels -  how different would Great Expectations be if Estella rather than Pip narrated the action or  if Thackeray's narrator in Vanity Fair were to be replaced with Becky  Sharp? This, however, is not to deny that both Lucy and Jane are flawed  narrators. Jane's story is essentially an intellectually detached adult's view  but this does not stop the "undeveloped [and] imperfect" child view manifesting  itself in her story. Jane is also profoundly middle class - she is convinced  that everything foreign is intrinsically unhealthy and immoral as shown in her  desire to make Adele "English" and in her fear of the Indian climate. If Jane  expresses some features of an unreliable narrator then Lucy is seriously flawed.  Initially she appears precise, lucid and detached. However in her description of  the events between Paulina and her father her tone is not in keeping with the  pathos of the situation. If the red room at

Charlotte routinely subjected Lucy to negative feelings and began to kill Lucy’s youthful spirit. As the novel progresses, Lucy becomes more aware of this, starting when she notices how Charlotte loved to eat up gossip as if “[nibbling] after blood” (320). A page later the narrator tells the reader that “it might be possible to be nice to [Charlotte]; it was impossible to love her” (321). Lucy could never really love Charlotte because Charlotte always tried to control her with the pessimistic views she learned as an old bachelorette. If she could never experience marriage, how dare Lucy be subjected to it, especially at the hands – or rather the lips – of George Emerson. The tension in Italy comes to a pretty dramatic head as Charlotte decides it best for the pair to hightail it out of Florence on account of George’s sneak attack kiss.