What Matters in Jane Austen?_Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved
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In her last completed novel, the devil in Austen produces comments that have taken readers aback down the years. As Captain Wentworth sits on the sofa with Mrs Musgrove in order kindly to condole with her over the death of her scapegrace son, Austen fails to imitate his ‘self-command’. She cannot resist reflecting on how ridiculous a fat person’s grief can seem.
Personal size and mental sorrow have certainly no necessary proportions. A large bulky figure has as good a right to be in deep affliction, as the most graceful set of limbs in the world. But, fair or not fair, there are unbecoming conjunctions, which reason will patronize in vain—which taste cannot tolerate—which ridicule will seize. (I. viii)
Ridicule, in the person of the author herself, has certainly seized this opportunity in a manner that many have often found ‘not fair’. The author who occasionally intervenes in Persuasion cannot help laughing at what we might think sad. She steps aside from the drama on the Cobb just after Louisa Musgrove’s fall to comment on the growing crowd collected ‘to enjoy the sight of a dead young lady, nay, two dead young ladies, for it proved twice as fine as the first report’ (I. xii). What the characters think of as tragedy is suddenly, from the author’s perspective, a comedy. In this melancholy novel, a satirical author sometimes cannot stop herself from intervening. When Lady Russell calls at Uppercross at Christmas, the house is full of loud, cheerful children and she is relieved when she departs for Bath. But the author must tell us that Lady Russell’s ears are not always so sensitive. ‘Every body has their taste in noises as well as in other matters; and sounds are quite innoxious, or most distressing, by their sort rather than their quantity’ (II. ii). She cannot abide the infant tumult at the Musgroves’, but her spirits rise at the din of Bath when she enters the town in her carriage.
The literary admirer of Jane Austen does not want to know her views from her novels, for they are most apparent when her interpolated comments seem unsettlingly unironical. When, in Mansfield Park, Henry Crawford is not punished by the world as harshly as the former Mrs Rushworth, Austen explicitly acknowledges and regrets this inequality. ‘That punishment, the public punishment of disgrace, should in a just measure attend his share of the offence is, we know, not one of the barriers which society gives to virtue. In this world the penalty is less equal than could be wished’ (III. xvii). That ‘we’ is both the author and the reader, recognising together that a woman is for ever tainted by such an ‘offence’, while a man may go on in the world. It is in Sense and Sensibility, however, that we find a vein of authorial opinion that is diluted out of her subsequent novels. Take our introduction to the Steele sisters, who win over Lady Middleton by their rapturous attentions to her children. ‘Fortunately for those who pay their court through such foibles, a fond mother, though, in pursuit of praise for her children, the most rapacious of human beings, is likewise the most credulous; her demands are exorbitant; but she will swallow anything’ (I. xxi). This is amusing enough, but it is the dry observation of an author. The balanced and paradoxical form of her sentences in this novel seem to entice her to sententiousness.Take this, on Mrs John Dashwood’s having Elinor and Marianne as companions in some of her London social forays:
Mrs. John Dashwood was obliged to submit not only to the exceedingly great inconvenience of sending her carriage for the Miss Dashwoods, but, what was still worse, must be subject to all the unpleasantness of appearing to treat them with attention: and who could tell that they might not expect to go out with her a second time? The power of disappointing them, it was true, must always be hers. But that was not enough; for when people are determined on a mode of conduct which they know to be wrong, they feel injured by the expectation of any thing better from them. (II. xiv)
That last sentence is just what we might expect from a well-meaning novelist of the period. Here is Maria Edgeworth in Patronage, published just three years after Sense and Sensibility, explaining why Caroline Percy’s suitor Mr Barclay has not made more of an effort to persuade her to listen to his declarations of affection for her.
Love . . . let poets and lovers say what they will to the contrary, can no more subsist without hope than flame can exist without fuel. In all the cases cited to prove the contrary, we suspect that there has been some inaccuracy in the experiment, and that by mistake, a little, a very little hope has been admitted.4
The obligation of a serious author is to offer us insights into the paradoxes of human behaviour. Here is Mary Brunton in her novel Self-Control, published a year before Sense and Sensibility, telling us that the rakish Colonel Hargrave is likely to fall short of even the very modest reformation (no more seducing servant girls) he plans in order to win pious Laura Montreville.
It might be supposed, that when the scale of duty which we trace is low, we should be more likely to reach the little eminence at which we aspire; but experience shews us, that they who poorly circumscribe the Christian race, stop as much short of their humble design, as does he of nobler purpose, whose glorious goal is perfection.5
In Sense and Sensibility, Austen still has some of this wisdom-giving manner of her contemporaries, but she has another reason for authorial intervention that is unique to this novel: Marianne Dashwood. Austen finds the character so provoking that she sometimes cannot resist diagnosis and judgement. This is particularly clear in the wake of Willoughby’s sudden departure, when Marianne retreats into an agonised display of wounded sensibility. ‘She was without any power, because she was without any desire of command over herself’ (I. xv). The analysis is not in Elinor’s thoughts; it is the author passing judgement on Marianne’s display of distress. This is Austen informing us of what we might not otherwise correctly perceive. The impression is confirmed by the next chapter, which begins with a description of Marianne’s incessant weeping and her refusal to sleep or eat or even speak. She gives her mother and sisters pain, but will not be consoled by them. The author is pushed to an exclamation. ‘Her sensibility was potent enough!’ (I. xvi) We can hear all the author’s scorn for the display of ‘sensibility’ in the sarcasm with which this demands to be read.
The exclamation mark indicates that the author, exasperated or disbelieving, has just had to speak. At the end of the opening chapter of Mansfield Park, Mrs Price, a little mystified at the Bertrams’ decision to adopt one of her girls rather than one of her boys, has written to excuse Fanny’s delicacy with the hope that she might be better for a ‘change of air’. Austen is stopped by the truth behind the platitude. ‘Poor woman! she probably thought change of air might agree with many of her children’ (I. i). It is an odd device, by which the author has a good guess at the thoughts of a character she has herself invented. It is used with delicious sarcasm in Persuasion when Sir Walter Elliot fishes for compliments from Elizabeth and Mrs Clay by saying that women look at him and Colonel Wallis in the street in Bath because Colonel Wallis is ‘a fine military figure’ (II. iii). ‘Modest Sir Walter!’ exclaims someone who can only be the author. The opposite is surely true: Sir Walter is fully expecting to be told that his looks, not his companion’s, are the cause of fluttering female attention. The character’s vanity is so overwhelming that it has provoked even the author to derision. Similarly when Lady Russell, a ‘good woman’ who often excites ridicule from her creator, decides that Sir Walter’s move to Bath is an excellent thing, Austen is nettled into an outburst. ‘How quick come the reasons for approving what we like!’ (I. ii). So they do. Yet the general aphorism has a special dramatic force. The author is driven to speak by the self-serving reasoning of her own character. She is struck by Lady Russell’s behaviour, as if she were observing her rather than creating her. The author speaks for the best reason that an author can have: to credit her character with a life all of her own.
TWENTY
How Experimental a Novelist Is Jane Austen?
Mr. Collins, to be sure, was neither sensible nor agreeable; his society was irksome, and his attachment to her must be imaginary. But still he would be her husband.
> Pride and Prejudice, I. xxii
Jane Austen knew that her novels were different. You can see it in her ‘Plan of a Novel, according to hints from various quarters’, which she wrote in around 1816, not long after publishing Emma. Based on the ‘hints’ (by which she means requests) of particular relations and acquaintances, it is also a list of ingredients learned from the very many novels that she had read. There was no doubt what would be expected of a female protagonist: ‘Heroine a faultless Character herself—, perfectly good, with much tenderness & sentiment, & not the least Wit . . . All the Good will be unexceptionable in every respect—and there will be no foibles or weaknessses but with the Wicked, who will be completely depraved & infamous.’1 Her own notes indicate that her niece Fanny Knight, whom she elsewhere recorded ‘could not bear Emma herself’, had wanted a faultless protagonist, and that family friend Mary Cooke had preferred a heroine without wit. No more Elizabeth Bennets. The notion that a heroine should be faultless, which now sounds psychologically so improbable, would have been entirely familiar to a keen novel-reader of the period. It went back to the hugely influential fiction of Samuel Richardson, who, according to Henry Austen, was his sister’s own favourite. When he revised his great novel Clarissa in response to what he thought were misreadings of the novel, Richardson upbraided critics who had suggested that his heroine was at fault in her conduct towards either her family or her would-be seducer, Lovelace. ‘As far as she could be perfect, considering the people she had to deal with and those with whom she was inseparably connected, she is perfect.’2
‘Pictures of perfection as you know make me sick & wicked,’ Austen wrote in a letter to Fanny Knight just a few months before her death (Letters, 155). Fanny had set a suitor, James Wildman, to read her aunt’s novels (without telling him the identity of their author) and he had evidently objected that her female characters were not exemplary. ‘I particularly respect him for wishing to think well of all young Ladies; it shews an amiable & a delicate Mind.’ So ‘faultless’ is a word for heavy irony. In Austen’s novels it is first used of a woman in Mansfield Park, and incredibly it is applied to Maria Bertram. ‘Maria was indeed the pride and delight of them all—perfectly faultless—an angel’ (I. iv). As a fragment of narration it seems extraordinary, but in context we see that it reflects Mrs Norris’s opinion, and probably her words: not just ‘faultless’, but ‘perfectly faultless’. The phrase dooms her. In Emma, it is Mr Knightley’s word for Emma, immediately after she has accepted his proposal. ‘He had ridden home through the rain; and had walked up directly after dinner, to see how this sweetest and best of all creatures, faultless in spite of all her faults, bore the discovery’ (III. xiii). Even at his most enamoured, Mr Knightley knows that it is a lover’s paradox. For has he not qualified to be her husband by being ‘one of the few people who could see faults in Emma Woodhouse, and the only one who ever told her of them’ (I. i)?
Austen’s interest in her heroines’ faults and errors was in itself something extraordinary in fiction. Yet the novelty went beyond this. She also developed techniques for showing the contradictoriness or even obscurity of her protagonist’s motivations. Here is a typical heroine of a late eighteenth-century novel by probably the most accomplished woman novelist before Austen. It is from the opening chapter of Fanny Burney’s Cecilia (1782).
But though thus largely indebted to fortune, to nature she had yet greater obligations: her form was elegant, her heart was liberal; her countenance announced the intelligence of her mind, her complexion varied with every emotion of her soul, and her eyes, the heralds of her speech, now beamed with understanding and now glistened with sensibility.3
From ‘her countenance . . .’ onwards it is impossible to imagine Austen writing any of this. This heroine’s outward and inner self are, in a sense, the same. She looks as she is. Her every feeling is apparently legible. And because she has to possess in fullest measure the qualities of a heroine – ‘understanding’ and ‘sensibility’ – we get all that beaming and glistening. Cecilia has much to endure before she manages to marry the man she loves, but, like most heroines before Austen, she never has to endure discovering that she has been fooled by her own feelings. Austen gave her readers an entirely new sense of a person’s inner life, but through new kinds of narrative rather than new insights into human nature.
Nothing is more important in fiction than the means by which a novel renders a character’s thoughts.
The managing of the attraction between Elizabeth and Mr Darcy, for instance, is a triumph of technique as much as of psychological subtlety. Elizabeth Bennet is an unprecedented creation not just because of her wit and ‘archness’, but because Austen is able to give us a sense of her self-ignorance. At the ball at Netherfield she is disappointed by Wickham’s absence and dances first with Mr Collins and then with one of the officers.
When those dances were over, she returned to Charlotte Lucas, and was in conversation with her, when she found herself suddenly addressed by Mr. Darcy who took her so much by surprise in his application for her hand, that, without knowing what she did, she accepted him. He walked away again immediately, and she was left to fret over her own want of presence of mind. (I. xviii)
‘Without knowing what she did’. It is the most innocent of phrases, but read one way directs us to perhaps the most important fact about Pride and Prejudice for most readers: the strong current of attraction between two characters who are superficially at odds. Elizabeth does something despite herself and by accepting the character’s own version of what has happened – fretting over ‘her own want of presence of mind’ – the narrator encourages the reader to imagine another explanation. She does the same thing with Mr Darcy.
He wisely resolved to be particularly careful that no sign of admiration should now escape him, nothing that could elevate her with the hope of influencing his felicity; sensible that if such an idea had been suggested, his behaviour during the last day must have material weight in confirming or crushing it. (I. xii)
That ‘wisely’ is exquisite. You could call it Austen’s irony, as she commends the self-control that will eventually turn out to have been a self-delusion. But it is also something like Mr Darcy’s self-commendation, for the sentence clearly adopts his own stiff and self-important turn of phrase: ‘nothing that could elevate her with the hope of influencing his felicity’.
‘Till this moment, I never knew myself,’ Elizabeth famously cries when she has read Mr Darcy’s letter and reflects on her own folly at having believed everything Wickham told her (II. xiii). Austen’s most powerful innovation was to realise this lack of self-knowledge in the very voice of the narration. In Emma she concentrates this effect as never before, narrating almost entirely from her heroine’s point of view and bending reality to match her preconceptions. We hear Emma, as we heard Mr Darcy, commending her own judgement. As Harriet Smith’s visits to Hartfield become ‘a settled thing’, Emma congratulates herself: ‘. . . in every respect as she saw more of her, she approved her, and was confirmed in all her kind designs’ (I. iv). That ‘kind’ is Emma’s complacent thought about her own motivations; the approval is not so much for Harriet as for herself. Emma’s self-delusions are not the subject of the narration, they are its very substance. Here she is with Frank Churchill, who has been summoned back to Yorkshire, and who she thinks is on the verge of a marriage proposal.
He was silent. She believed he was looking at her; probably reflecting on what she had said, and trying to understand the manner. She heard him sigh. It was natural for him to feel that he had cause to sigh. He could not believe her to be encouraging him. A few awkward moments passed, and he sat down again . . . (II. xii)
We pass easily from what Emma supposes, to what she hears, to what seems to be fact. The cause of his sighing is not at all what she thinks. The drama of the moment is all in her imagination: he is, we later discover, considering telling her of his engagement to Jane Fairfax. Yet the narration behaves as if ruled by her consciousness.