What Matters in Jane Austen?_Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved

by John Mullan

  NINETEEN

  When Does Jane Austen Speak Directly to the Reader?

  I leave it to my reader’s sagacity . . .

  Northanger Abbey, II. xv

  In Jane Austen’s unfinished novel Sanditon the reader gets a jolt from its heroine’s pleasure in being admired by a handsome young gentleman. Charlotte Heywood, from whose point of view the story is being told, becomes aware of the attentions of Sir Edward Denham on their first meeting. ‘He . . . talked much—& very much to Charlotte, by whom he chanced to be placed . . . she thought him agreable, & did not quarrel with the suspicion of his finding her equally so’ (Ch. 7). The jolt is not from the heroine’s susceptibility to admiration, it is from the interjection that follows, which removes us entirely from her thoughts. ‘I make no apologies for my Heroine’s vanity.—If there are young Ladies in the World at her time of Life, more dull of Fancy & more careless of pleasing, I know them not, & never wish to know them.’ There are other nineteenth-century novelists like Thackeray or Trollope who regularly intervene in the first person to comment on their own characters and plots, but in Austen it is unusual and surprising. What is she up to? Is she worried that we will think Charlotte flirtatious? Does she really need to fend off criticism of her heroine?

  Jane Austen is not supposed to do this sort of thing. ‘She is impersonal; she is inscrutable,’ wrote Virginia Woolf.1 Or, as a more recent admirer has put it, ‘Here was a truly out-of-body voice, so stirringly free of what it abhorred as “particularity” or “singularity” that it seemed to come from no enunciator at all.’2 We cannot of course know if the authorial comment in Sanditon would have been preserved in the completed novel, but it is not unprecedented. There is a rather similar example in Mansfield Park. Fanny Price is in Portsmouth, where, to her distress, she has been visited by Henry Crawford. Despite having refused his proposal of marriage, she finds that he is still thrusting his attentions on her. She is walking with him and her sister Susan down the High Street in the town when they meet her father. This is ‘pain upon pain, confusion upon confusion’, for though Fanny has wanted Mr Crawford’s declared affection for her ‘to be cured’, she cannot bear that it happen this way – by means of his seeing and having to converse with the no doubt drunken Mr Price. Such are Fanny’s unspoken thoughts. But then Austen cannot resist adding an explanation of their contradictoriness: ‘. . . and I believe, there is scarcely a young lady in the united kingdoms, who would not rather put up with the misfortune of being sought by a clever, agreeable man, than have him driven away by the vulgarity of her nearest relations’ (III. x). The intervention suddenly shifts Fanny’s ordeal away from us and even lets us suspect a little self-regard in her attitude towards Mr Crawford. Surprisingly, Austen appears to be laughing at her supposedly irreproachable heroine. It is especially pointed because it is a small example of the lesson that Fanny is made to learn – that most of those situations she fancies undesirable could be a good deal worse.

  ‘I’ says the narrator, and we have every reason to hear the author speaking (‘my Heroine’ she says in that passage from Sanditon). In Sense and Sensibility, she speaks as ‘I’ just once, oddly, near the end of the second volume. ‘I come now to the relation of a misfortune, which about this time befell Mrs. John Dashwood’ (II. xiv). She is narrating something relatively trivial: the mistake made by an acquaintance who assumes wrongly that the Dashwood sisters are her guests in London and therefore includes them in the invitation to a musical party. ‘Misfortune’ is sardonic, being the word that Mrs John Dashwood might privately use about having her sisters-in-law accompany her. Austen’s disdain for this woman has reached its ultimate expression in this wry intervention.

  In all Austen’s novels but Northanger Abbey, the authorial use of the first-person pronoun is extraordinarily rare and pointed. In three novels we find it in the concluding chapter. At the opening of the final chapter of Pride and Prejudice, we hear of Mrs Bennet’s happiness in having married off her two eldest daughters. The second sentence then regrets not being able to reform this wonderfully silly woman as part of the novel’s happy ending. ‘I wish I could say, for the sake of her family, that the accomplishment of her earnest desire in the establishment of so many of her children, produced so happy an effect as to make her a sensible, amiable, well-informed woman for the rest of her life’ (III. xix). It is a dazzling little reality effect, as the author finally appears in her own book to tell us that one of her characters is simply incorrigible. Even Austen cannot chasten her. The author relinquishes her power and Mrs Bennet, with her own particular life force, will go on being as she is.

  Austen liked this way of signing off, and employed it again in her next novel, Mansfield Park. Its final chapter again uses the authorial pronoun in the second sentence: ‘Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore everybody, not greatly in fault themselves, to tolerable comfort, and to have done with all the rest’ (III. xvii). At the end of the previous chapter Edmund and Fanny have been talking of Miss Crawford and Edmund’s lingering ‘disappointment’ in her. He will never, he is sure, be able to forget her. The author, however, has no intention of letting him sink into despondency, and must soon stir him into love for Fanny. Fanny herself does not know that Edmund is destined to be her husband, but at least she is back at Mansfield Park, with the Crawfords and Mrs Norris banished and the remaining Bertrams grateful for her presence. ‘My Fanny, indeed, at this very time, I have the satisfaction of knowing, must have been happy in spite of everything.’ ‘I have the satisfaction of knowing . . .’: it is a winningly audacious way of tackling the narrative’s failure, as yet, to supply final satisfaction: the proper culmination of its love story. It is a tease – she may be satisfied, but the reader is not – as if the author were briefly considering not contriving the consummated pairing of Fanny and Edmund.

  ‘My Fanny’. Fanny is the only heroine to whom Austen refers with this familiarity. Catherine Morland, it is true, is five times called ‘my heroine’ by the narrator, but only the deceitfully intimate Isabella Thorpe (twice) and her own mother call her ‘my Catherine’. ‘My Fanny’ is extraordinary, reminding us of the special form of intimate address used by Mr Knightley after he and Emma have plighted their troth, ‘my Emma’. It denotes both affection and privilege. At the very moment at which we hear the author speak in her own person we hear her expression of fondness for this particular heroine. It is an endearment that Edmund himself has used, just once. Arriving in Portsmouth in high emotion after the elopements of both his sisters he clasps Fanny and exclaims, ‘My Fanny—my only sister—my only comfort now’ (III. xv). The outburst of love immediately becomes, at the speed of that first dash, merely fraternal. Austen’s tease about her ‘satisfaction’ in knowing Fanny’s happiness registers her reader’s perplexity as to how this fraternal love for Fanny can become something else. How long will it take?

  I purposely abstain from dates on this occasion, that every one may be at liberty to fix their own, aware that the cure of unconquerable passions, and the transfer of unchanging attachments, must vary much as to time in different people.—I only entreat everybody to believe that exactly at the time when it was quite natural that it should be so, and not a week earlier, Edmund did cease to care about Miss Crawford, and became as anxious to marry Fanny, as Fanny herself could desire. (II. xvii)

  ‘I only entreat everybody to believe . . .’: as in Pride and Prejudice, the author steps in to let her characters get away from her, turning her real challenge (how can she make us believe this?) into a witty trick.

  It is no accident, then, that there is so much of the author in the last chapter of Mansfield Park, nudging us into accepting what the novel is not going to show. In Persuasion, the author again speaks in the first person in the final chapter, though here it is for the only time in the whole novel. She accosts us to assure us that when two young people are determined to marry, ‘they are pretty sure by perseverance to carry the
ir point’ (II. xii). ‘This may be bad morality to conclude with, but I believe it to be truth.’ Again, the author speaks directly in order to signal a withdrawal from the lives she has invented, and this time, as many a contemporary reader would have noticed, with a reversal of the logic of many a successful novel. From Richardson’s Clarissa onwards, love in English fiction existed to be hampered by foolish parents or misinformed guardians. In a characteristic moment of liberation from the formulae of courtship novels, our author refuses to believe that people cannot get married if they want to. As she does so, she implies that other novelists are more concerned with ‘morality’ than probability. All three of these interventions have a flavour of repudiation, with the author finally stepping on to the stage in order to refuse to follow some established narrative pattern.

  Jane Austen never speaks in the first person in Emma; she cannot insert herself alongside her despotic protagonist. In Northanger Abbey, however, Austen is there all the time. One of the reasons why this novel feels so different from her others is that we are so constantly reminded of the author’s presence, arranging and commenting and speaking as herself. Naturally Northanger Abbey has the last-chapter sign-off in the first person of her other novels.

  The anxiety, which in this state of their attachment must be the portion of Henry and Catherine, and of all who loved either, as to its final event, can hardly extend, I fear, to the bosom of my readers, who will see in the tell-tale compression of the pages before them, that we are all hastening together to perfect felicity. (II. xvi)

  It is a fearless reference to the fact that the reader knows from the physical reality of the very few remaining pages that a happy matrimonial ending is not far away. Suddenly there is the author, who has arranged the novel as an object that we have in our hands. Yet this is but the clinching use of a rhetorical device that has been used in the preceding chapters. Austen speaks in the first person for the first time in Northanger Abbey at the end of the third chapter, where she consigns her heroine to bed and wonders whether she might have dreamed of Henry Tilney, whom she has just met.

  I hope it was no more than in a slight slumber, or a morning doze at most; for if it be true, as a celebrated writer has maintained, that no young lady can be justified in falling in love before the gentleman’s love is declared,* it must be very improper that a young lady should dream of a gentleman before the gentleman is first known to have dreamt of her. (I. iii)

  A footnote (*) refers the reader to an essay by Samuel Richardson for The Rambler, in which he declares ‘That a young lady should be in love, and the love of the young gentleman undeclared, is an heterodoxy which prudence, and even policy, must not allow.’3 Austen intrudes to mock the teaching of this famous novelist that amorous fancies can be subject to some code of propriety.

  This ‘I’ is the same author we hear, though less often, in the later novels, an author who wants to free her reader from any absurd expectations learned from other novels and other novelists. The number of times Austen speaks with the first-person pronoun in Northanger Abbey (fourteen) is a consequence of the author’s dedication to debunking the formulae of other novels, but also vindicating the powers of fiction. So the next first-person intervention is to set off on her famous (but how ironical?) defence of the genre. ‘Yes, novels; for I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel-writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding . . . I cannot approve of it’ (I. v) Austen’s mockery of the conventions of fiction also pushes her to speak after the small disaster of Catherine going off with John Thorpe instead of the Tilneys. ‘And now I may dismiss my heroine to the sleepless couch, which is the true heroine’s portion; to a pillow strewed with thorns and wet with tears. And lucky may she think herself, if she get another good night’s rest in the course of the next three months’ (I. xi). Or here, when Catherine is brutally dismissed from his house by General Tilney, to travel back to Salisbury on her own:

  the author must share in the glory she so liberally bestows. But my affair is widely different; I bring back my heroine to her home in solitude and disgrace; and no sweet elation of spirits can lead me into minuteness. A heroine in a hack post-chaise is such a blow upon sentiment, as no attempt at grandeur or pathos can withstand. (II. xiv)

  She names herself as ‘the author’, something that she never does again in any novel. Most mischievous of all is the delighted explanation of Henry’s love for Catherine when she is telling us of their final engagement. ‘I must confess that his affection originated in nothing better than gratitude, or, in other words, that a persuasion of her partiality for him had been the only cause of giving her a serious thought’ (II. xv). ‘I must confess . . .’: as if the author were disappointed at the ignoble workings of his affections. ‘It is a new circumstance in romance, I acknowledge, and dreadfully derogatory of an heroine’s dignity.’ In fact, she is repudiating the psychology of love usually served up in novels.

  So in Northanger Abbey, ‘the reader’ is present too, addressed three times directly (but not in any other of Austen’s completed novels). ‘Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday have now passed in review before the reader; the events of each day, its hopes and fears, mortifications and pleasures, have been separately stated, and the pangs of Sunday only now remain to be described, and close the week’ (I. xiii). In this novel as never again, the author is joined with the reader in an amused monitoring of her ingenuous heroine. The author’s presence is needed because Catherine is so unworldly, and it assures us that she will not really come to harm. She must even be protected from her own self-condemnation. Listening to the Tilneys’ educated talk of the picturesque on a walk above Bath, Catherine is ‘heartily ashamed’ of her ignorance of what makes for a good view (I. xiv). ‘A misplaced shame,’ the author immediately tells us. ‘Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant . . . A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing any thing, should conceal it as well as she can.’ This ends in a jaundiced worldliness that any biographer would imagine speaks from the author’s own experience. Austen’s reflections on her unworldly heroine give a singular tone to the narratorial irony of Northanger Abbey. When Catherine is first hooked by Isabella Thorpe, she forgets her interest in Henry Tilney in the excitement of her new ‘amity’, and the narrator comments: ‘Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love’ (I. iv). This judgement comes from outside the narrative and can easily be thought of as the wry voice of the author. Catherine has not yet discovered what anyone could properly call ‘love’, and the ‘friendship’ of Isabella is entirely a cloak for self-interest, so this slice of sententiousness is the author’s faux wisdom. Similarly, when she comments on her heroine’s interest in clothes – ‘She cannot be justified in it. Dress is at all time a frivolous distinction’ (I. x) – it is with the confidence that her reader will hear the author’s scorn for such moralism.

  Sometimes Jane Austen cannot resist . . .

  Austen could not always remain aloof from her creations. She knew very well the impulse to make a mocking comment on people’s behaviour, and gave this impulse to her most fallible heroine, Emma Woodhouse. Thus the line preceding Emma’s worst act, the mortification of Miss Bates at Box Hill: ‘Emma could not resist’ (III. vii). Sometimes Jane Austen cannot resist either. Take the introduction in Emma of Frank Churchill’s plans to arrange a ball in Highbury.

  It may be possible to do without dancing entirely. Instances have been known of young people passing many, many months successively, without being at any ball of any description, and no material injury accrue either to body or mind;—but when a beginning is made—when the felicities of rapid motion have once been, though slightly, felt—it must be a very heavy set that does not ask for more. (II. xi)

  This is larded with irony, but parades itself as commentary from personal experience. Even in later novels, she sometimes cannot resist, usua
lly when awakening the reader to the difference between fact and wishfulness. In Mansfield Park, when the Bertrams and the Crawfords go riding in the hot weather, ‘there were shady lanes wherever they wanted to go’. There is not a pause before Austen adds, ‘A young party is always provided with a shady lane’ (I. vii). She could not resist the remark. All that supposed shade was the excuse for the young people to do what they wanted to do anyway. When Austen describes Miss Goddard’s school in Emma, she really cannot resist having a stab at modern girls’ schools ‘which professed, in long sentences of refined nonsense, to combine liberal acquirements with elegant morality upon new principles and new systems—and where young ladies for enormous pay might be screwed out of health and into vanity’ (I. iii). Where does this come from? We are being told of something that does not occur to any of the characters in the novel. Is it sharp social commentary, or a bee in the authorial bonnet?