Jane Austen For Dummies (10 page)
Read Jane Austen For Dummies Online
Authors: Joan Elizabeth Klingel Ray
Austen's books are realistic because she gives her readers an entire community. While focusing on the gentry and gentlemanlike, she includes secondary and minor characters who're merchants, physicians, apothecaries, farmers, schoolmistresses, household help, and the militia (the militia protected the homeland, while the army fought abroad). Some of these characters never say a word, but they walk in and out of the pages of their novel and add to its social world.
An example that portrays the wide range of Austen's characters is Mr. Perry (the apothecary, a pharmacist, and more!), in Highbury, who cares for Mr. Woodhouse, Emma's hypochondriac father.
Apothecaries served the medical needs of most of the ordinary people of the day. Jane Austen, herself, was treated mostly by apothecaries. As their name suggests, they dispensed medicines and also made diagnoses, referring only their most serious cases to physicians.
Characters in and readers of
Emma
know Mr. Perry; he attends Miss Taylor's wedding and gives his children wedding cake; he visits Mr. Woodhouse almost daily. He's an important part in Highbury society. Yet he never utters a word. One of Austen's many skills as a novelist is her ability to flesh out her main characters' world without having too many actors crowd the stage with speaking parts.
Keep in mind that the English class system was accepted as a fact of life in Austen's day. A nobleman who acted pleasantly toward a social inferior was considered admirable and courteous. In other words, the aristocrat, though higher in rank than the person he or she is addressing, doesn't pull rank. This concept is known as condescension â being nice to those who rank lower than you do.
But the characters in Austen's novels didn't always follow this notion. If you take a look at Lady Catherine in
Pride and Prejudice,
you see her acting in the worst condescending way: She gives Mr. Collins his orders to marry, tells him what kind of woman he should marry, and then tells the new Mrs. Collins how to care for her poultry. Lady Catherine's behavior is anything but pleasant. Mr. Collins idiotically observes that Lady Catherine “â. . . likes to have the distinction of rank preserved'” (2:7). His inability to see the difference between friendly condescension and the snobbish superiority that Lady Catherine displays is another mark of his stupidity.
Through Lady Catherine's behavior, Austen reminds us that even titled folks could let their titles and status go to their heads. Instead of behaving the way she shouldâwith “condescension” that is pleasant â Lady Catherine is proud, overbearing, and never lets anyone forget that she is the daughter of an earl.
An example of proper condescension is seen in
Emma
's Mr. Knightley. The richest man in Highbury and from an old and distinguished family of the gentry, Mr. Knightley, while not titled, behaves with kindness and generosity to those below him socially and economically: He quietly sends apples to the poor Bates family; he advises the young farmer Robert Martin who seeks him out; and he even dances with Harriet, a young woman of uncertain parentage, when she is left as the only wallflower at the Crown Inn Ball. Mr. Knightley understands and practices condescension in the best possible way.
The novel was a new literary genre that Jane Austen was familiar with growing up. In a letter to her sister, she reminds Cassandra that “âour family . . . are great Novel-readers & not ashamed of being so'” (December 18â19, 1798). “Not ashamed of being” novel readers? Why would someone have to be ashamed of reading novels?
Well, as the novel developed in England, it was sometimes viewed suspiciously because imagined characters and plots were presented as real people and situations. England had enough problems with overactive imaginations in the 17th century, when Puritan soldiers, fueled by intense emotionalism or fancied inspirations, marched against the king. (This was England's Civil War, 1642â 1649.) Thus, some people viewed novels, works of the imagination that are presented as realistic, as a throwback to that dangerous “fancy” that caused England to have a king beheaded in 1649. It may seem a stretch to connect political unrest with literature, but many folks felt that the fancy or imagination that caused the first event (political unrest) contaminated the second event (the appearance of novels, which are works of the imagination that are presented as if they were realistic and true). The imagination was viewed with so much suspicion, that Dr. Johnson's popular fictional work of 1759,
Rasselas,
contains a chapter called “The Dangerous Prevalence of Imagination” (Chapter 44). To avoid having their books appear as products of the imagination, early experimenters in novel writing presented their fiction as “true stories” that the authors claimed to have merely found and edited. For example, in 1722, Daniel Defoe offered
Moll Flanders
as the “Memorandums” of an actual woman who used the name Moll Flanders as a guise because she is so well known, and himself as the mere editor who fixed up her immodest language. But Defoe actually invented the character and plot; he's the author.
This section highlights other forms of writing that preceded and influenced the development of the novel in England. Notice that the word “novel” also means “new”âas in the phrase, “What a novel idea!”
A novel has several characteristics:
It presents realistic, breathing characters, which are products of the author's imagination, who live their lives on the pages as we read.
It is a fictional prose narrative.
The novel's length is considerable, say at least 200 pages.
Its characters and actions represent real life of past or present times in a plot with varied complexity.
It brings us into the lives of characters who are learning how to live through trial and error â characters try something else and finally (hopefully!) learn from their mistakes.
The novel didn't develop spontaneously and fully grown like Athena did from the head of Zeus. A variety of sources contributed to the growth of the novel as we know it today.
One of the earliest influences on the development of the novel was the newspaper. Newspapers offer the latest news: News is set in reality and occurs here and now. Events in a novel occur here and now on the page of the book! Newspapers went from hand to hand: One person bought it and would pass it on. Thus, newspapers had wide circulations beyond the original purchasers. So many readers were familiar with newspapers. Reading newspapers taught them to be novel readers.
The first English daily newspaper,
The Daily Courant,
founded in 1702, obviously couldn't bring up-to-the-minute news reports to its readers the way newspapers can today with faxes, e-mails, and cell phones. Also, the newspaper was printed by hand, a time-consuming process. The
Courant
and its followers did offer readers actual news of new events occurring in different parts of the world, even though the news was several days (if it was carried by horseback rider), weeks, or months (if it was carried by ship) old. But to readers of the 18th century, this was news because they just learned about it in the newspaper. It was
new
information.
Another early influence on the formulation of the novel included personal guides or conduct books, which were highly popular in the early 18th century: They had titles like
A Young Man's Guide
or
The Whole Duty of Man
. (And you thought self-help books were a phenomenon beginning in the 1990's!) As a new and growing middle class learned how to live, they sought all sorts of conduct and guide books about customs and manners. Many folks moved from the country to the city, experiencing a whole new lifestyle, a whole new world, requiring new modes of behavior. Novels introduce us to new characters and lifestyles, and the characters in novels usually have something new to learn. Moreover, unless a character is living an isolated life on a remote island (like Defoe's Robinson Crusoe), he or she must learn how to live in society and deal with all types of social interactions. Thus, personal guides provided a basis for characters' experiences in the novel.
During the 17th century, readers enjoyed pamphlets and tracts about true accounts of murders, fires, and robberies. They also enjoyed reading about travel to exotic places. Lots of these pamphlets told sensational tales. Reading these works entertained people and took them out of themselves and to another world. Has that ever happened to you while reading a novel?
Because a novel merely
represents
real life, the lives of Elizabeth Bennet or Mr. Knightley in their novels may not be factually true, but their life experiences certainly represent reality and the truth.
Diaries, biographies, and autobiographies were three other favorite nonfiction reading materials, which all shared a common characteristic: recording an individual's life experiences and the responses to the experiences. When reading a biography, personal dairy, or journal, we're examining the subject's life; the text is full of day-to-day details, including drama and conflict. Everyone likes to read about other peoples' experiences because they take us out of ourselves. In the days before the novel, reading diaries, biographies, and autobiographies did that. Novels do that, too.
Some early novel titles include
Joseph Andrews,
Tom Jones,
Belinda,
Evelina,
Cecilia,
Pamela,
and
Clarissa.
What do they all have in common? The titles are names of people, thus promising the reader a story of the title character's life. You may be able to name dozens of novels, old and new, that use characters' names for the titles. Centralizing a story on one character provides the reader with focus. The reader follows that character for hundreds of pages, and through many important events in his or her life. As readers, we come to relate to that character, whose life experiences draw us in. Can you name any novel you've enjoyed that doesn't have a central character?
With the growth of industry and the movement of people from the country to the town, individuals had time to read. People were freed of everyday chores:
Spinning cotton to make cloth for clothing: The cotton mills in Manchester and other northern cities took care of that work, first with water-powered and then steam-powered machinery.
Growing and tending to the crops or animals: People could go to the shops where they could buy food.
Performing time-consuming household tasks such as making soap: You just went to town to buy your supplies.
So women, especially, with their newfound freedom (because they were the ones mostly performing the daily chores), had time to read. Women of the landed gentry class, as well as the growing middle class (wives of tradesmen and businessmen) were looking for new reading material. They needed something that they could do and enjoy on their own. With the boys away at school and the girls with their governesses, solitaire became a boring option. And let's face it: There is only so much country dance music that one wants to play! (For more on the daily lives of men and women in Austen's day, see Chapter 11.) Is there any wonder, then, that early novels were written with a female readership in mind?
If you remember the titles of the novels using person's names that I offered a few paragraphs back, you'll have noticed that all but two of the names were female names. While women certainly read fiction by male authors, they particularly liked to read about other women's experiences. And that is precisely what those novels offered. Female novelists who preceded Austen include Aphra Behn, Elizabeth Inchbald, Eliza Heywood, Charlotte Smith, Amelia Opie, Fanny Burney, and Maria Edgeworth (called “the Irish Jane Austen” for her depiction of Irish life). If we jump ahead a few decades in literary history to Jane Austen, we recognize that this is what Austen writes about, too.
While many of the female writers who preceded Jane Austen have been long out of print, their works are being republished and reissued.
We're now at the point in English literary history when the novel â with its many contributing influences (newspapers, diaries, conduct books, and so forth) â is born. Austen read the fiction by many of her female and male predecessors. To learn more about the major literary influences on Austen, as well as how people and events influenced her writing, head to Chapter 4. But remember, the novel in England is a Georgian English baby and the product of its times.