William Deresiewicz
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likewise, evolving in snatches of half-formed and provisional formulations as their feelings search for expression. Nothing could be more like the poetic practice of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and often also of Byron, than this.59 The early novels know no half-formed thoughts, no feelings groping to understand themselves. Indeed, as we just saw with Elinor, thought in the early Austen tends to crowd out feeling, the diction and syntax of categorization asserting itself even at moments of intense passion, as if the only valid responses were rational ones.60 But observe Emma’s soliloquy as she tries to determine the exact degree of her love for Frank: ” `I do not find myself making use of the word sacrifice … I do suspect that he is not really necessary to my happiness. So much the better. I certainly will not persuade myself to feel more than I do. I am quite enough in love. I should be sorry to be more … He is undoubtedly very much in love—everything denotes it—very much in love indeed!—and when he comes again, if his affection continue, I must be on my guard not to encourage it’ ” (217). This is thought evolving on the page as feeling seeks to discover itself—indeed, it is feeling itself evolving before our eyes through the effort of bringing itself to consciousness. To cite examples from Persuasion would be arbitrary, since much of the novel takes this form. One of the most prominent instances in Mansfield Park enables us to make a closer comparison between the early and late works, for it occurs in Edmund’s long, tormented letter to Fanny about his prospects with Mary, a letter analogous in important ways to that of Darcy to Elizabeth. In each case, a young man speaks his mind at a moment of intense feeling, and because he is writing, speaks it in a way that enables him to monitor his thoughts as they take shape on the page. After a short introduction, Darcy’s letter begins thus: “Two offenses of a very different nature, and by no means of equal magnitude, you last night laid to my charge” (162). The passage offers a fair sample of the forensic language in which the whole letter is couched as well as of the forensic structure by which it is governed. Feelings may be at stake, but feelings are not permitted to enter into the letter itself; Darcy even makes a point of assuring Elizabeth that “my investigations and decisions are not usually influenced by my hopes and fears” (163). Edmund’s letter could not be more different. To cite a passage from the middle of it: I cannot give her up, Fanny. She is the only woman in the world whom I could ever think of as a wife. If I did not believe that she had some regard for me, of course I should not say this, but I do believe it. I am convinced, that she is not without a decided preference. I have no jealEarly Phase Versus Major Phase 49
ousy of any individual. It is the influence of the fashionable world altogether that I am jealous of. It is the habits of wealth that I fear. Her ideas are not higher than her own fortune may warrant, but they are beyond what our incomes united could authorize. There is comfort, however, even here. I could better bear to lose her, because not rich enough, then because of my profession. (348) What we have here is not a structured argument, but a spontaneous outpouring of emotions: determination, desperation, hope, jealousy, fear, comfort. Indeed, very shortly after this, Edmund interrupts himself to say, “You have my thoughts exactly as they arise, my dear Fanny; perhaps they are some times contradictory, but it will not be a less faithful picture of my mind. Having once begun, it is a pleasure to me to tell you all I feel.” “Perhaps they are some times contradictory”—the mind is not, at bottom, a rational instrument. “You have my thoughts” as “[I] tell you all I feel”—it is, instead, constituted by emotion, with thought merely the form feeling assumes so that it may see itself. The resemblance to the Romantics could not, again, be greater, and the change from Austen’s early work could not be more complete.61 In the early phase, feeling is dictated by reason, even (or especially), as Darcy’s letter reminds us, in the most important instances. Elizabeth misjudges Darcy, therefore she hates him. Once her mind changes, her heart changes too. That is why this revolution in Austen’s conception of the mental life is a revolution in her conception of the moral life. The ethical doctrine at the center of her early novels is the idea that feeling can and ought to be shaped, controlled, and educated by thought, a doctrine to which the flawlessness of their plots, the mercilessness of their irony, and the supreme self-assurance of their narrators give the inevitability of a mathematical demonstration. The errors of the early heroines are errors of reason; that is why each of the early novels can pivot on a single moment of clarified understanding, a sudden recognition of wrong thinking that opens the way for right feeling. The heroine changes by changing her mind: once, decisively, and forever. But the late heroines, as we have seen, change continuously, and not by examining their judgments, but by discovering their feelings. The only sudden recognition the late novels give us is Emma’s, and what darts through her with the speed of an arrow has nothing to do with realizing that she has been thinking wrongly and everything to do with realizing that all along she has been feeling rightly, only she hasn’t known it. Elizabeth, Marianne, and Catherine must reform their minds; Emma must make her50 Early Phase Versus Major Phase
self “acquainted with her own heart” (335). And it is only then—right feeling opening the way for right thinking—that “[s]he saw it all with a clearness which had never blessed her before. How improperly had she been acting by Harriet! … What blindness, what madness, had led her on!” (335336). In Mansfield Park and Persuasion the way is opened to the lovers’ union in precisely the same fashion, only there it is the heroes who at last become acquainted with their hearts. Does this mean that the mature Austen believes, “Romantically,” that feeling, desire, is always right?62 Clearly not, in the sense that feeling must still be guided by principle. But it is true that none of the late heroines has to sacrifice her feelings or alter her desires, at least with respect to the man she loves.63 Other late characters clearly do have improper feelings and desires, but such matters no longer concern Austen much. The author of Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Northanger Abbey gave her opinion very decidedly for so young a person, but the mature Austen is no longer an artist of what ought to be, but of what is. She has become an explorer of emotions, an observer of fields of relational possibility, a connoisseur of process. Twelve years after Susan, she has turned her attention to the changing feelings of the mind. One final issue. With her new belief in change, Austen faced a crucial narratological problem. How to bring to closure narratives that embody the ever-evolving nature of all things human? The answer she found, as has been pointed out in various ways, was to not bring them to full closure, to resist closure.64 This resistance takes three forms: the creation of interpretive confusion about how properly to judge characters and actions; the leaving open of narrative possibilities subsequent to the end of the action proper and/or the acknowledgment that possibilities have been left unexplored within it; and the construction of endings that create readerly dissatisfaction, the sense of the right outcome not having been achieved.65 The first of these figures only in Mansfield Park and Emma and has already been well explored in the critical literature. From the beginning, Mansfield Park has inspired a sharply polarized debate about whether its heroine embodies Austen’s moral ideals or rather an infantile prudery that we are meant to criticize—a confusion related to the question of whom she and Edmund should marry and thus to those other two forms of resistance, as we will see in a moment. As for Emma, the interpretive confusion it generates may be represented by Trilling’s observation that “[w]e never know where to have it,” never know “what it is up to”—a fact we already glanced
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at in noting that the novel contains hardly a single character whose moral worth can be determined with certainty.66 The second form of resistance, the opening of alternative, unexplored narrative possibilities, is most obviously present in Mansfield Park, where Austen not only tells us, around the middle of the novel, that Henry’s suit would have been successful had Fanny’s heart not be
en elsewhere engaged, but also, at the novel’s end, that it would have been anyway, especially once Edmund had married Mary. This news comes in the very last chapter, as Austen spins out the subsequent fates of her characters, and represents a stunning last-minute bifurcation of the plot: had Henry not eloped with Maria, everything would have turned out differently. And that does mean everything, since—to return to the issue of interpretive confusion—such an outcome would have required us to judge everything in the novel in a very different light. Of course, even the way things did turn out is left somewhat open, Austen famously “abstain[ing] from dates” (387) so that we may each imagine for ourselves the length of time required for the transfer of Edmund’s affections from Mary to Fanny—a gesture of incompleteness explicitly related to the indeterminacies of emotional process. Persuasion achieves this kind of incompleteness by carrying its story up to the present, and in a sly narratological turn, leaving one of its possibilities to be worked out in the “future.” Mrs. Clay and William Walter Elliot have run off together, “[a]nd it is now a doubtful point whether his cunning or hers may finally carry the day; whether … he may not be wheedled and caressed at last into making her the wife of Sir William” (252). We have already glanced at a different kind of unexplored possibility in Persuasion: that the novel leads us to expect that Anne will expose William Walter Elliot’s scandalous behavior toward Mrs. Smith, only to drop that narrative line as quickly as it had developed it. This kind of resistance to closure, like the others, is most subtle in Emma, the most highly wrought and architecturally perfect of Austen’s late, indeed of all her novels. The first form it takes can be expressed by a question we looked at before, that of “what will become of [Emma].” As with none of her other heroines, Austen leaves us with the sense that even at the end of her novel, Emma still has a great deal of “becoming” to do—that this story is not the end of her story.67 It is a sense reinforced by the fact that she has yet to settle in her permanent home when the novel ends. Neither, for that matter, have Frank and Jane, nor has it all been decided whether Emma or Mrs. Elton will play the leading role in the future life of their community. Quite likely, they will continue to struggle over it, just as we imagine Emma and
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Knightley continuing to struggle over Emma’s behavior. But the novel’s most compelling unexplored possibility is Jane herself. Any number of critics have testified to what most readers surely feel, the continually evoked, never fulfilled longing to see Emma become better friends, dear friends, with this beautiful and mysterious and fascinating young woman—a longing surely related to our desire to become “dear friends” with her, intimate with her, to know something, finally, about her. She is the Austen reader’s great unrequited love. As for the final form of resistance to closure, the arousal of feelings of dissatisfaction as to the correct outcome not having been achieved, I need hardly dwell on it in the case of Mansfield Park.68 There is surely scarcely a reader who would not have preferred to see Fanny marry Henry and Edmund Mary, at least the first time through the novel. Not only did Austen clearly connive at this reaction, she seems to have shared it, at least in part. The bifurcated ending we just looked at suggests as much, that Austen’s own heart tugged her at least part of the way in the other direction, as does her very rare use of the word “I” in the earlier of the two passages I alluded to in that connection: “although there doubtless are such incomparable young ladies of eighteen … as are never to be persuaded into love against their judgment … I have no inclination to believe Fanny one of them” (193).69 In Persuasion, dissatisfaction of a different sort inheres in the sense that even if Anne and Wentworth have found each other, justice has scarcely otherwise been done, and that the world in which they will have to live is soured and bleak.70 I will return to this point in my chapter on the novel; suffice it to note for now that the future of Persuasion is one in which Sir Walter will remain unshaken in his icy pride and vanity until his death, at which point Kellynch will be inherited by William Walter Elliot—and possibly, Mrs. Clay. In Emma, we can hear the dark notes of the ending only if our ear has been properly tuned by the rest of the narrative. For who, at first glance, could see any reason for discontent in “the perfect happiness of the union” (396)? The only problem is that all three of those key words—“perfect,” “happiness,” and “union”—have been so ironized by the novel’s handling of them as to make it a matter of very grave doubt whether they are not rather to be avoided.71 The “union” of that last sentence echoes the language of the first, where “Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and a happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence” (7). This first union, as we have seen, is in fact the start of all her woe: the vanity of being handsome, the willfulness of being
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rich and therefore independent, and the blind certainty of being clever, each trait the worse for being “united” to the others. “Happiness” and its derivatives are words that—aside from also being compromised right from the beginning by that talk of Emma’s “happy disposition”—belong, above all, to Miss Bates and Mrs. Elton. “Happy,” for the first, is the slogan of her diminished, dependent existence. “And yet she was a happy woman,” we are told upon first meeting her (20), and again, that “[s]he is a standing lesson in how to be happy” (210). This may sound admirable, but what is it but a pitiable making-do that forces her to lower her expectations to the level of her circumstances, no matter how far her circumstances have sunk? For Mrs. Elton, “happiness” is the name of the misery and false gaiety she inflicts on herself and everyone around her, with her “apparatus of happiness” at Donwell Abbey (296) and her outing to Box Hill, where, after the arrangements have been made, “[n]othing was wanting but to be happy when they got there” (303). Of the kind of happiness capable of being produced by the joint efforts of these two, by Miss Bates’s abasement and Mrs. Elton’s schemes, we get a fine sample in this picture of Jane after she accepts the position as governess: “She is as low as possible,” says her aunt. “To look at her, nobody would think how delighted and happy she is to have secured a situation” (312). As for “perfect,” no word in the book is as insistently or emphatically undermined.72 Of the dozens of times it or its derivatives appear, almost none is without qualification or irony, the leading example being the conundrum devised by Mr. Weston, that moral imbecile, on the very heels of Emma’s cruelty to Miss Bates: “What two letters of the alphabet are there, that express perfection? … M. and A.—Em—ma” (306). To which Knightley gravely replies: “Perfection should not have come quite so soon” [emphasis in the original]. No—for a novelist of process, perfection can never come late enough. “[P]ictures of perfection,” Austen wrote at around this time, “make me sick & wicked.“73 Wicked indeed is the game Austen plays with us throughout the novel, flattering us with our ability to see past Emma’s blindness about Elton only the better to rub our noses in our own blindness about Frank, conjuring seductive appearances that continually giving way to hidden, hinted-at realities of a less pleasant nature. The logic of the novel’s language makes its final statement into just such another happy deception, one that leaves us with a story in which nothing gets settled, an apparently “perfect” work that terminates in nothing but loose ends, a novel that refuses to stop playing games with us. In short, like poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge, the novels of the
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major phase are committed to notions of the ambiguous and continually evolving nature of human consciousness and human relationships, as well as to the use of exploratory and opened-ended processes in their own artistic construction. Indeed, in the major phase, as I noted above, the center of Austen’s attention has shifted away from the courtship plot altogether. The narrative machinery that brings the lovers together, then separates them and bars their way to each other, which in the early novels occupies so much space, is in Mansfield Park
and Emma entirely absent and in Persuasion relatively incidental.74 The marriage plot now functions merely as the framework for deeper explorations from which the final unions emerge almost as epiphenomena. As my final three chapters will seek to explain, each of the novels of the major phase focuses its attention on one particular emotional structure or mode of relatedness that seized Austen’s imagination as essential to the story she wished to tell. Or rather, the story she wished to tell seems in each case to have been constructed, in part, so as to enable her to explore that particular structure or mode. Again and again we can feel her improvising with language and emotions alike, groping her way toward new recognitions and new powers. The precocious certainties of the early phase have given way to the maturer wisdom of doubt.
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c h a p t e r
t h r e e
Mansfield Park
Substitution
“[I]f one scheme of happiness fails, human nature turns to another.”