Status Anxiety

by Botton, Alain De

  The novel’s author takes a little longer than Mrs. Norris to make up her mind as to who is deficient, and in what capacity. For a decade or more, Austen follows Fanny patiently down the corridors and into the reception rooms of Mansfield Park; listens to her mutterings in her bedroom and on her walks around the gardens; reads her letters; eavesdrops on her observations about her adoptive family; watches the movements of her eyes and mouth; and peers into her soul. In the process, she picks up on a rare, quiet virtue of her heroine’s.

  Unlike Julia and Maria, Fanny does not concern herself with whether every young man she meets has a large house and a title. She is offended by her cousin Tom’s indifferent cruelty and arrogance and flinches from her aunt’s financial considerations of her neighbours. The Bertrams themselves, meanwhile, so highly ranked within the conventional county status hierarchy, are more troublingly placed in that other, even more exacting status system, the novelist’s hierarchy of preference. Maria and her suitor, Mr. Rush-worth, may have horses, houses and inheritances, but Jane Austen sees how they go about falling in love, and she cannot forgive them for it:

  “Mr. Rushworth was from the first struck with the beauty of Miss Bertram, and being inclined to marry, soon fancied himself in love. Being now in her twenty-first year, Maria Bertram was beginning to think matrimony a duty; and as a marriage with Mr. Rushworth would give her the enjoyment of a larger income than her father’s, as well as ensure her a house in town, it became her evident duty to marry Mr. Rushworth if she could.”

  Who’s Who or Debrett’s Guide to the Top Families of England might have held Maria and Mr. Rushworth in high esteem. After such a paragraph, Austen cannot—nor will she let her readers. The novelist exchanges the standard lens through which people are viewed in society, a lens that magnifies wealth and power, for a moral lens whose focal point is subtler qualities of character. Seen through this lens, the high and mighty may become small, and forgotten and retiring figures loom large. Within the world of the novel, virtue is shown to be distributed without regard to material wealth. The rich and well-mannered are not ipso facto good, nor the poor and unschooled necessarily bad. Goodness may be inherent in the lame, ugly child, the destitute porter, the hunchback in the attic or the girl ignorant of the most basic facts of geography. Certainly Fanny possesses no elegant dresses, has no money and can’t speak French, but by the end of Mansfield Park, she has been revealed as the one member of her extended family endowed with a noble soul, while all the others, despite their titles and accomplishments, have fallen into moral confusion. Sir Thomas Bertram has allowed snobbery to ruin the education of his children, his daughters have married for money and paid an emotional price for that decision, and his wife has let her heart turn to stone. The hierarchical system of Mansfield Park has been turned on its head.

  Austen does not, of course, make explicit her concept of true hierarchy, boxing our ears with a preacher’s bluntness; she instead enlists our sympathies and marshals our abhorrence for its opposite with the skill and humour of a great novelist. She does not tell us why her moral priorities are important; she shows us why within the context of a story that also manages to make us laugh and that takes such a strong hold on our imagination that we want to finish supper early so we may read on. As we reach the end of Mansfield Park, we are invited to go back into our own world—the world from which Austen has drawn us aside—and respond to its inhabitants as she has taught us to do, detecting and recoiling from greed, arrogance and pride and seeking out the good in ourselves and in others.

  Austen once modestly and famously described her art as “the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour,” but her novels are suffused with greater ambitions. Each one attempts, by examining what she called “three or four families in a country village,” to criticise and so alter our lives.

  2.

  Austen was not alone in her aspirations. Almost every great novel of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries stages an assault on, or at the very least harbours scepticism regarding, the accepted social hierarchy, and each offers some sort of redefinition of precedence according to moral worth rather than financial assets or bloodlines. Only on rare occasions are the heroes and heroines of fiction the type of people to whom Debrett’s or Who’s Who would give priority. In the pages of these works, the first become something like the last, and the last something like the first. For example, in Balzac’s Le Père Goriot (1834), it is not Madame de Nucingen, with her gilded house, who solicits our sympathies, but the toothless old Goriot, eking out his days in a putrid boardinghouse. Similarly, in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895), it is not the Oxford dons whom we respect, but the impoverished, ill-schooled stonemason who repairs the gargoyles of the university’s colleges.

  Standing witness to hidden lives, novels may act as conceptual counterweights to dominant hierarchical realities. They can reveal that the maid now busying herself with lunch is a creature of rare sensitivity and moral greatness, while the baron who laughs raucously and owns a silver mine has a heart both withered and acrid.

  If we are inclined to forget the lesson, it may be in part because what is best in other people seldom has a chance to express itself in the sort of external achievements that attract and hold our ordinary, vagabond attention. George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872) begins with a discussion of this human tendency to admire only the most obvious exploits, as the author draws an unlikely comparison between her heroine and Saint Theresa of Avila (1512–82). Thanks to good luck and circumstance, because she came from a wealthy and well-connected family, Saint Theresa was able (Eliot reminds us) to embody her goodness and creativity in concrete acts. She founded seventeen convents; communicated with some of the most devout individuals of her day; wrote an autobiography and a number of treatises on prayer and vision; and became not only one of the principal saints of the Roman Catholic Church but perhaps its greatest mystic. By the time of her death, Theresa could claim a status equal to her virtue. In that, she was singularly blessed, Eliot suggests, citing the legions of people in the world who, though no less intelligent or creative than the Spanish saint, nonetheless fail ever to externalise their finer qualities in useful actions. Through a combination of their own errors and unhelpful social conditions, these less fortunate mortals are thereby condemned to a status that bears scant relation to their inner worth. According to the novelist, “Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life; only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with a meanness of opportunity.” It is the life of one such woman, Dorothea Brooke, living in an English town in the first half of the nineteenth century, that Middlemarch sets out to recount, the novel as a whole offering a critique of the world’s habit of neglecting what Eliot calls “spiritual grandeur” whenever it is unlinked to “long-recognised deeds.”

  Dorothea may well possess many of the same virtues as Saint Theresa, but they are not apparent to a world attentive only to the symbols of status. Because she first marries a sickly clergyman and then, little more than a year after his death, gives up her estate to wed her late husband’s cousin (who has no property and is not well-born), society insists that she cannot be a “good woman,” and everyone in the village gossips about her and shuns her company. “Certainly those determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful,” Eliot herself concedes. “They were the mixed result of a young and noble impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state.” But then, in some of the most quietly stirring lines in all of nineteenth-century English fiction, Eliot asks us to look beyond

  Status in Life vs. Status in Novels

  NOVEL

  HIGH STATUS

  HIGH STATUS

  IN NOVEL,LOW STATUSIN LIFE

  IN LIFE,LOW STATUSIN NOVEL

  Joseph Andrews

  (1742) Henry Fielding

  Joseph AndrewsParson Adams

  Lady BoobyParson Trulliber
>
  Vanity Fair

  (1848) William Thackeray

  William DobbinAmelia Sedley

  Becky SharpJos SedleyGeorge Osborne Sir Pitt Crawley Rawdon Crawley

  Bleak House

  (1853)Charles Dickens

  Esther SummersonJoBucket

  The DedlocksMr. ChadbandMrs. Jellyby Richard Carstone

  The Woman in White

  (1860)Wilkie Collins

  Anne CatherickMarian Halcombe

  Sir Percival GlydeCount FoscoFrederick Fairlie

  The Way We Live Now

  (1875)Anthony Trollope

  Paul MontagueMr. BrehgertJohn Crumb

  Augustus MelmotteMarie MelmotteSir Felix Carbury Dolly Longestaffe Georgiana Longestaffe Lord Nidderdale

  Dorothea’s socially unacceptable marriages and her lack of achievements in order to recognise that, in its domestic and circumscribed way, her character is indeed no less saintly than Theresa’s must have been: “Her finely-touched spirit had its fine issues, even though they were not widely visible. Her full nature spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs.”

  Lines that may be stretched to define a whole conception of the novel: an artistic medium to help us understand and appreciate the value of every hidden life that rests in an unvisited tomb. “If art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally,” knew George Eliot.

  In Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000), we meet Samad, a middle-aged Bangladeshi employed as a waiter in an Indian restaurant in London. He is treated roughly by his superiors, works until three in the morning and has to wait upon coarse customers who magnanimously reward him with fifteen-pence tips. Samad dreams of somehow recovering his dignity, of escaping the material and psychological consequences of his status. He longs to alert others to the riches that lie buried within him, unsuspected by patrons who barely look up when he takes their orders (“Go Bye Ello Sag, please” and “Chicken Jail Fret See wiv Chips, fanks”). He imagines wearing a sign around his neck, a white placard that would read, in letters large enough for the whole world to see:

  I AM NOT A WAITER. I HAVE BEEN A STUDENT, A SCIEN-TIST,A SOLDIER, MY WIFE IS CALLED ALSANA, WE LIVE IN EAST LONDON BUT WE WOULD LIKE TO MOVE NORTH.I AM A MUSLIM BUT ALLAH HAS FORSAKEN ME OR I HAVE FORSAKEN ALLAH, I’M NOT SURE. I HAVE A FRIEND— ARCHIE—AND OTHERS. I AM FORTY-NINE BUT WOMEN STILL TURN IN THE STREET. SOMETIMES.

  He never does acquire such a placard, but he gets the next best thing: a novelist who supplies him with a voice. The entire novel in which Samad appears is in a sense a giant placard that will help to make it just that much harder for its readers ever again to order Chicken Jail Fret See in such a casually indifferent, casually dehumanizing manner.

  The best novels expand and extend our sympathies. Taken together, they may in fact stand as one long procession of signs that tell the world:

  I AM NOT JUST A WAITER, A DIVORCEE, AN ADULTERER, A THIEF, AN UNEDUCATED MAN, A PECULIAR CHILD, A MURDERER, A CONVICT, A FAILURE AT SCHOOL OR A SHY PERSON WITH NOTHING TO SAY FOR HERSELF.

  3.

  Paintings, too, can challenge society’s normal understanding of who or what matters.

  Jean-Baptiste Chardin painted his Meal for a Convalescent in circa 1738. A modestly dressed woman stands in a sparsely furnished room, peeling an egg for a sick person we cannot see. It is an ordinary moment in the life of an ordinary person. Why paint such a thing? For much of Chardin’s career, critics persisted in asking that question. It irked them that this gifted artist devoted all his attention to loaves of bread, broken plates, knives and forks, apples and pears and working- or lower-middle-class characters going about their business in humble kitchens and living rooms.

  These were certainly not the sorts of subjects that a great artist was supposed to paint, according to the canons laid down by the French Academy of Fine Arts. Upon the academy’s founding by Louis XIV, in 1648, its officers had ranked the different pictorial genres in a hierarchy of importance. At the very top was history painting, with its canvases expressing the nobility of ancient Greece and Rome or illustrating biblical morality tales. Second came portraiture, especially of kings and queens. Third was landscape, distantly followed by what was dismissively described as “genre painting,” depicting scenes from the domestic lives of commoners. This artistic hierarchy corresponded directly with the social hierarchy of the world beyond the artists’ studios, where a king sitting on a horse and surveying his estates was deemed naturally superior to a plainly dressed woman peeling an egg.

  Jean-Baptiste Chardin, Meal for a Convalescent, c. 1738

  But within Chardin’s art lies an implicit subversion of any vision of life that could dismiss as valueless a woman’s domestic labours or even a piece of old pottery catching the afternoon sun (“Chardin has taught us that a pear can be as full of life as a woman, that a jug is as beautiful as a precious stone,” observed Marcel Proust).

  The history of painting provides Chardin with a tiny coterie of fellow spirits, and us with a handful of great correctives to our customary notions of importance. One of the more notable, for our purposes, was the Welsh painter Thomas Jones, who worked in Italy, first in Rome and then in Naples, between 1776 and 1783. It was in Naples, in early April 1782, that Jones completed what may be two of the finest oils on paper in the whole of Western art, Rooftops, Naples (which hangs in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford) and Buildings in Naples (in the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff).

  The views captured by Jones remain a familiar feature of many Mediterranean cities and towns, where houses are pressed together along narrow streets and give out onto the naked flanks of neighbouring buildings. On a warm afternoon, the streets tend to be quiet and the windows half shuttered. One may glimpse the outline of a woman moving inside a sitting room or the dark mass of a man asleep on a bed. Occasionally one may hear the cry of a child or the rustle made by an old woman as she hangs laundry on a terrace with a rusting handrail.

  Jones shows us how the intense southern light falls on walls of chipped and weathered stucco, bringing out every indentation and fracture, the painted surface evoking the passage of time as effectively as the rough, worn hands of a fisherman. Soon April will give way to May, and then the blank, dead heat of summer to furious winter storms, which themselves, after an apparent eternity, will once again cede their place to tentative spring sunshine. Jones’s stone and stucco are close kin to clay and plaster and to the fragments of pitted rock that stud so many Mediterranean hillsides. The confusion of buildings in these works affords us an impression of a town in which a multiplicity of lives is unfolding in every window—lives no less complicated than those portrayed in the great novels, lives of passion and boredom, playfulness and despair.

  Thomas Jones, Rooftops, Naples, 1782

  How seldom do we notice rooftops; how easily are our eyes drawn instead to the more flamboyant attractions of a Roman temple or Renaissance church. But Jones has held up the ignored scene for our contemplation and rendered its latent beauty visible, so that never again will southern rooftops count for nothing in our understanding of happiness.

  The nineteenth-century Dane Christen Købke was another who strove, through his painting, to subvert conventional notions of what should be considered valuable. Between 1832 and 1838, he tirelessly explored the suburbs, streets and gardens of his native Copenhagen. He painted a couple of cows ruminating in a field on a summer afternoon, and caught two men and their wives disembarking from a small sailing boat on the shore of a lake. (It is evening, but darkness seems in no hurry to settle over the land; an echo of daylight hovers for an apparent eternity in the vast sky, presaging a gentle night on which windows may be left open, and a lucky few will sleep outside on
blankets spread across the grass.) He reproduced the view from the roof of Frederiksborg Castle, looking out onto a neat patchwork of fields, gardens and farms, an image of an ordered community content to enjoy the snatched pleasures of daily life.

  Thomas Jones, Buildings in Naples, 1782

  Christen K0bke, View from the Embankment of Lake Sortedam, 1838

  Christen KØbke, The Roof of Frederiksborg Castle, 1834-1835

  Collectively, these works by Købke, Jones and Chardin appear to suggest that if such commonplaces as the sky on a summer’s evening, a pitted wall heated by the sun and the face of an unknown woman as she peels an egg for a sick person are truly among the loveliest sights we may hope ever to lay our eyes on, then perhaps we are honour-bound to question the value of much that we have been taught to respect and aspire to.

  It may seem far-fetched to hang a quasipolitical programme on a jug placed on a sideboard, or on a cow grazing in a pasture, but the moral of a work by one of these three painters may reach dauntingly far beyond the limited meaning we are generally prepared to attribute to a piece of painted cloth or paper. Like Jane Austen and George Eliot, the great artists of everyday life may help us to correct many of our snobbish preconceptions regarding what there is to esteem and honour in the world.

  Christen K0bke, A View in the Neighbourhood of the Lime Kiln, 1834—1835