Spurred by some thought-provoking discussions with Esther in my post of December 16 (if you're reading this, I trust you know why the date is important) I've decided to post a few thoughts on some of the essays in the volume A Truth Universally Acknowledged: 33 Great Authors on Why We Read Jane Austen. This is not a review, nor have I had the time or coherence to organize my thoughts on every essay into something readable. However, I hope that my thoughts can help provoke discussion on critical opinions of Austen and, as always, help us all in the wonderful habit of learning to love Austen more. (Thoughts on the essays are not listed in the order the essays appear in the book.)
The Foreword by Harold Bloom is short and highly laudatory, with some excellent comparisons of Austen to Shakespeare. The only sentence I question in it is, “Austen has no more a political or social agenda than she had a religious one.” I won't go far into this, because I don't see Austen as a radical political, or even religious reformer. But I do believe Austen meant her novels to instruct, as well as delight, and that they contain hidden gems of her views on political and religious situations in her day.
“From 'Why We Read Jane Austen'” by Lionel Trilling.
I must confess, this was the essay that bored me the most. It starts out decently, telling of the stampede of eager students begging to be accepted into a course he taught on Austen. But somehow its prose grew heavy, perhaps because he, like me, is a sesquipedalian who refuses to eschew obfuscation.
However, I plowed through it and found some interesting points. Trilling mentioned that “five years before” the Austen-revival (of the 70s?) William Blake had received devotion “as intense as that which was now being given to Jane Austen”. “It was not to be thought anomalous,” Trilling says, “that at one moment disgust with modern life should be expressed through devotion to a figure proposing impulse, excess, and the annihilation of authority, and then a scant five years later through devotion to the presiding genius of measure, decorum and irony.”
Is this the inevitable pendulum swing? Or did the new Janeites misunderstand Austen?
Another interesting point is how personal Austen is compared to many modern authors. True, most of us naturally read Austen with the humanist tradition of empathy and feel little difficulty understanding these characters of a past age. But Trilling goes into an extended explanation of why humanist empathy may give us a false understanding of concepts self-hood in another culture. I've often thought that my predilection for 19th Century novels is due to the similarities in my conservative Christian “culture” to some Victorian ideas. But it's important to be reminded that there are still differences between Jane Austen's culture and mine that should be explored.
“Austen Portrays A Small World With Humor and Detachment” by J. B. Priestley
Apparently the first time I read this essay it impressed me significantly, since I wrote that the whole of it was “quotable”. Esther expressed her surprise at my admiration for it, so I reread it and am now “all astonishment”. I certainly won't call it a bad essay. But on the second reading its points just seemed a little obvious. It makes a good point that Austen needed to leave the war out of her novels in order to make her “3 or 4 families in a country village” seem like the centre of the world. It compares snobbery in Austen's world/novels to snobbery in our own world, points to Austen's classical system of balance, compares Elizabeth Bennet to the heroines of Shakespeare's comedies and rejoices that Austen “never loses her head over anybody.”
Two statements were interesting, but questionable. “In real life the kind of people Jane Austen writes about, and the sort of existence they lead... would bore us to desperation...” I would say that's true, until you've become a Janeite and learned to look at the world like it might be Highbury. William Descerewiecz in A Jane Austen Education makes this very point in his Emma chapter, but it just occurred to me that Jane Austen and Lucy Maud Montgomery taught that to me years ago. They taught me to wear their glasses of humor and curiosity, so that I wouldn't be bored by the kind of uneventful, small-town lives that they made immortal tales out of.
The second interesting statement is a repetition of the oft repeated complaint that “Jane Austen has little idea how [men] talk and behave when they are away from the ladies.” Her men, Priestley believes, “are always seen against a feminine background.” If this means that we mainly see the male characters through the eyes of the female heroines, I'm not sure I can argue with this, though there is a brief scene between two men in MP and it's too easily forgotten that Jane Austen had many brothers, so probably knew men as well as any good, unmarried girl of the day did.
“What Became of Jane Austen?” by Kingsley Amis
Reading this “essay” made me want to throw the book across the room! Why this vituperative essay was included in a collection supposed to be in praise of Austen is a disturbing mystery to me. The author (in direct contrast to the wonderful view of C.S. Lewis) states that Austen had a “habit of censoriousness where there ought to be indulgence and indulgence where there ought to be censure.” While Amis recognizes Austen's craft in making the reprehensible Crawfords attractive characters, he cannot separate Austen from the judgments and psychology of Edmund and Fanny. To him, Austen has set up two sycophantic, boorish hypocrites as hero and heroine.
Probably anyone would admit that Edmund makes some very compromising mistakes. Personally I think Austen displays great acuity in showing how even principled persons, like Edmund, can reason themselves into doing what their better judgment deprecates. But lacking the moral-subtlety to understand the dangers of the play-acting, and calling it innocuous, Amis can only see this portrayal of Edmund's complex psychology as a “ridiculous belly flop”.
Amis wants Austen to be indulgent yet cannot have the charity to be interested in Fanny's inner life. I get the impression that his dislike for Fanny is because she is “poor and obscure”. Besides being bitterly vituperative, this essay makes many statements without backing them up credibly.
I just reread Esther's post on the MP chapter in Sarah Emsley's Jane Austen's Philosophy of the Virtues and I think it refutes the main thrust of this attack on Fanny quite effectively. Be sure to check it out here: http://thebowerofbelle.blogspot.com/2010/12/fanny-price-and-contemplative-life.html
“From 'Jane Austen: Mansfield Park'” by A. S. Batt and Ignes Sodre
I enjoyed the conversational form of this piece, although that did leave it a little raggedy at the edges. There is no overall theme, but the two authors toss ideas about MP back and forth, with obvious knowledge and respect for it. This essay is a good antidote to Kinsley Amis' travesty, as it hints at the influences of childhood on the complex psychology of several characters, but especially repressed and misunderstood Fanny. It provides a possible answer to the question of how and why Edmund grew up better than all his siblings, pointing out the book's theme of the effects of various methods of raising children.
“The Girls Who Don't Say 'Whoo!'” by Amy Heckerling
I've never watched Clueless and I'm not sure if I ever will, so I'm not sure why I even read this article by the film's scriptwriter. (I always find praise it's garnered in Persuasions articles a trifle surprising. Maybe I'm pedantic.) All I'll say is that calling Jane Fairfax “a bore” made me think Heckerling was a little too sympathetic with my beloved Emma to really understand the novel. Jane Fairfax became engaged to a handsome stranger in weeks, told nobody, stole moments with him while the ladies of Highbury looked at gloves, smiled as she listened to him deceive the uppity Miss Woodehouse by talking of “Irish melodies”... My point is, hard as it may be to like her (if like Emma and me, one wishes to be always first) Jane Fairfax has a secret life. She's going to be a governess – of course she's going to be involved in secrets. ;) (Oh, and she's been beautifully played by Olivia Williams. Enough said.)
“Let Others Deal With Misery” by Fay Weldon
This “essay”, written in letter-form, is another one concentrating on the “problems” of Mansfield Park. I lean toward the idea expressed in this that Jane Austen had a “wicked” side she was always trying to keep down and sometimes expressed in her writing. However, seeing MP as having everything “very, very careful” forgets the interesting fact that she laughed very often while writing it. The essay/letter brings up the problems of patriarchy – did Jane Austen believe that the absence of the patriarch Sir Thomas brought on all the disasters in the novel? “Mansfield Park throbs with the notion that what women need is the moral care and protection of men,” Weldon states. And yet it is Fanny, not Edmund or Sir Thomas, who has had almost unerring fore-sight and moral intuition.
But I love the final paragraph of the letter: “Well, perhaps we should look to fiction for moral instruction: we should not see it, as we have come to do, as a mirror to be held up to reality. Perhaps writing should not be seen as a profession, but as a sacred charge,and the writer of a bestseller not run gleefully to the bank, but bow his head beneath the weight of so much terrifying responsibility. To be able to influence, for good or bad, the minds of so many! … It is, oddly enough, readers and not writers who believe so passionately that writers should be free to write what they want. I do not think Jane Austen would have thought they should be: certainly no on the evidence of Mansfield Park, a book in which virtue is rewarded and bad behavior punished...”
“On Sense and Sensibility” by Ian Watt
This is an essay that everyone who has ever wondered about the meanings of "sense" and "sensibility" should read. Here are a few quotes: "The opening scene, with the John Dashwoods' coolly disengaging themselves from their solemn family obligations to support Mrs. Dashwood and her daughters, begins the book, it must be noted with an attack on the abuses, not of sensibility, but of sense, in its prudential economic meaning. John Dashwood is much more a caricature of a narrow view of sense than Marianne is of sensibility; while his wife, as Jane Austen tells us, is a 'strong caricature' of him.”
“Today we are less accustomed to look for universal norms in what we read: partly because there is so much less common agreement about intellectual, moral, and social standards, and partly because we tend to see life, and therefore literature, mainly in terms of individual experience. Jane Austen's own standards – always present in her use of such abstract terms as 'reason,' 'civility,' 'respectability,' and 'taste' – were, like those of her age, much more absolute; and as a novelist she presented all her characters in terms of their relation to a fixed code of values...”
“Why Do We Read Jane Austen?” by John Wiltshire
“For if there is one thing that is as ingrained in Jane Austen's style as it is endemic in her thinking, it is her suspicion of the romantic in all its forms. This is what creates such a compelling tension between the form or genre in which her novels are composed, and their ideological or moral content. For they are, broadly speaking, committed to a 'romantic' narrative in which affirmation of human possibility takes ultimate form in the marriage of love. If there is one belief that is at the heart of the romantic it is that human beings are, despite appearances, essentially good, and human possibility necessarily endless. Like Johnson, Austen would have no time for this. For them, human beings are inveterately self-interested and prone to evil, and this was, after all, a cornerstone of the mainstream Christianity to which they both subscribed. Hence they are skeptical when people parade their goodness – a sympathetic nature, a superior intelligence, a feeling heart. In practice this means that Jane Austen's delight in the ridiculous very often has a cutting edge, an implicit agenda, which consists in the undermining or exposure of romantic expression in all its protean manifestations, from Isabella Thorpe's fashionable jargon, to the Bertrams' sentimental adoption, to Mrs. Elton's desire to arrive at the Donwell Abbey picnic like a Gypsy and riding a donkey.”
“A Note On Jane Austen” by C.S. Lewis
This fabulous essay - which should be read by every Janeite - points out the pivotal moments of self-discovery and un-deception" (or to use a perhaps anachronistically evangelical word, "conversion") that take place for four of the seven heroines. The following statements on Austen's moral basis sum up my own understanding of Austen perfectly.
“Have I been treating the novels as though I had forgotten that they are, after all, comedies? I trust not. The hard core of morality and even of religion seems to me to be just what makes good comedy possible. 'Principle' or 'seriousness' are essential to Jane Austen's art. Where there is no norm, nothing can be ridiculous, except for a brief moment of unbalanced provincialism in which we may laugh at the merely unfamiliar. Unless there is something about which the author is never ironical, there can be no true irony in the work. 'Total irony' – irony about everything – frustrates itself and becomes insipid.”
“It is perhaps worth emphasizing what may be called the hardness – at least the firmness – of Jane Austen's thought exhibited in all these un-deceptions. The great abstract nouns of the classical English moralists are unblushingly and uncompromisingly used: good sense, courage, contentment, fortitude, 'some duty neglected, some failing indulged,' impropriety, indelicacy, generous candor, blamable distrust, just humiliation, vanity, folly, ignorance, reason. These are the concepts by which Jane Austen grasps the world... All is hard, clear, definable; by some modern standards, even naively so. The hardness, is, of course, for oneself, not for one's neighbors. It reveals to Marianne her 'want of kindness' and shows Emma that her behavior has been 'unfeeling.' Contrasted with the world of modern fiction, Jane Austen's is at once less soft and less cruel.”
"Fanny Was Right" by James Collins was another of my favorite essays - again vindicating Fanny and MP - and is one of the few essays available (abridged) online.
"Reading and Rereading Emma" by David Lodge
This essay has some great thoughts on why we learn more each time we reread Emma and a good argument against the charge that Emma does not really change. It addresses subjects like why we end up liking Emma despite all her faults, and the merging of the authorial voice with Emma's internal monologue. “The effect is to confirm the solidarity of author and heroine in a commitment to intelligent virtue."
“From 'Emma and the Legend of Jane Austen'” by Lionel Trilling
“It is possible to say of Jane Austen, as perhaps we can say of no other writer, that the opinions which are held of her work are almost as interesting, and almost as important to think about, as the work itslef. This statement, even with the qualifying 'almost,' ought to be, on its face, an illegitimate one.” This statement seemed appropriate to throw in at the end of this discussion of opinions on Jane Austen's work.
This essay speaks of how every “established writer exists in the auro of his legend - the accumulated opinion that we cannot help being aware of...” Reading Jane Austen we know that we are about to be drawn into the great battle on her worth (check out this discussion I recently participated in) AND who she really was.
Was she gentle Jane, a fierce gossip, a bitter feminist, or another of the innumerable personae that have been assigned her? “As far back as 1905 Henry James was repelled by what a more recent critic, Professor Marvin Mudrick, calls 'gentle-Janeism'...” And now serious Janeites find "chick-lit Jane" a revolting image.Although I'm still not sure about Trilling's statement that Emma's energy comes from self-love, here's some fine praise of my favorite of The Great Six. "Emma is more difficult than any of the hard books we admire... The book is like a person – not to be comprehended fully and finally by any other person. ... The extraordinary thing about Emma [the character now] is that she has a moral life as a man has a moral life. And she doesn't have it as a special instance, as an example of a new kind of woman, which is the way George Eliot's Dorothea Brooke has her moral life, but quite as a matter of course, as a given quality of her nature.”
Well, I'm tempted to try to edit some more thoughts or quotes I jotted down on this volume, but since this has taken enough time, and I had to return the book to the library, I'll leave it at this. I'd love to hear anyone else's thoughts on any of the essays, or responses to my thoughts and views even from those who haven't read any of the essays. My purpose in posting these thoughts is to provoke discussion and help myself and others learn to love Austen more.
P.S. Screech at me if you find typos - I typed out a lot of these quotes very quickly last summer, and I probably missed some typos editing this.
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