Jane Austen For Dummies (17 page)

Austen's juvenile works mentioned in Chapter 3 include pieces ridiculing sentimental novels — fiction that pulls out all the stops to get the reader's sympathetic tear ducts flowing. Just the titles of such works give you an idea of their contents:
The Man of Feeling
and
A Sentimental Journey
. The most notable example of Austen's reaction to titles like those is her
Love and Freindship
(spelled just like that!), where the sentimentality of the characters borders on the absurd as young people fall in love literally at first sight and fall (literally, on the ground!) into hysterics. Written in 1790, two yeas after the Austens performed Fielding's farcical comedy
Tom Thumb,
in which the then 12-year-old Jane may have even acted,
Love and Freindship
is clearly influenced stylistically by Fielding's play, described under the major header “Learning from Drama.” As with Fielding's farce, ridiculing heroic drama, so is Austen's youthful send-up of sentimentality. For heroic tragedy and sentimental novels shared certain traits:

Sense and Sensibility
is a serious treatment of excessive emotionalism in the character of 16-year-old Marianne Dashwood, whose total loss of control when she loses her beloved Willoughby caused her to become ill. (Austen attributes her illness in the novel to walking in long wet grass and then failing to change her stockings when she comes indoors. My students and I have decided that Marianne suffers a situational depression when Willoughby ignores her, wherein she spends nights not sleeping and days not eating. Our class decided that this lack of care for herself leads to a depressed immune system that leaves her open to infection.) Instead of mocking sensibility as she had in her youthful
Love and Freindship
(remember, that's how Austen spelled it!), she now tells a serious story to remind the reader that a healthy psyche needs a balance of sense and sensibility. (For more info on the treatment of sense and sensibility in this novel, head to Chapter 14.)

From a Son reduced by his own Extravagance, requesting His Father's Advice on his Intention to turn Player [become an actor].

From a Maid-Servant in Town, acquainting her Father and Mother in the Country with a Proposal of Marriage, and asking their Consent.

Letters are also called epistles (as in the New Testament's Paul's Epistle to the Romans), so writing a novel where the plot is rendered through letters makes the novel an
epistolary novel.

Richardson's epistolary style was based on an episode that he recalled hearing 20 years before he was asked to compose the model letter book. The story was of a 12-year-old girl whose poor parents had fallen on even harder times and so had to send their daughter to be the personal maid of an old woman. The son of this woman attempted to seduce this girl. But she successfully resisted the man's numerous attempts through varied “innocent” strategies; her virtue impressed the rich young man so much that he turned honorable and married her.

Richardson was so impressed with this story that he created two letters (#138 and #139) for his book: “by a father to a daughter in service, on hearing of her master's attempt on her virtue,” and her model reply. Given that the novel had yet to be fully developed as a genre of literature, Richardson decided to use this episode for a full-length book of letters written between his fictional character, Pamela Andrews, and her parents, as well as a series of extended journal entries written by Pamela when she no longer has access to mail. He called this “writing to the moment” because Pamela demonstrates a fabulous skill of being able to transcribe entire events in a letter, complete with verbatim conversations, immediately after they occur. The result in 1740 was a very thick book:
Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded
.

What was especially important about
Pamela
to the development of the novel form was that Richardson paid very close attention to the thoughts and feelings of Pamela, the heroine, as she goes through her numerous trials. Readers, male and female, became totally absorbed by the character; they worried through her dilemmas, cried when she cried. Readers' sensibilities were aroused: They felt for her! The novel evoked readers' sympathetic tears. And when she and Mr. B., the young man who has been trying to seduce her, married, church bells rang all over England. Thus, Richardson made this character real to his readers so that they felt both her pain and triumph! He did this by getting the reader into Pamela's emotions and thoughts as events happened through her supposedly transcribing those feelings and ideas in her letters moments after the events that evoked those emotions and thoughts occurred. He called this “writing to the moment.” Granted, the ability to transcribe events verbatim — and one after the other — is a stretch! But by having his heroine do this, he puts the events in the present as his heroine gives her readers her immediate reactions to them. Austen would take Richardson's value in the feelings of a young woman to a new level, without resorting either to letters or to sentimentality.

Reading Richardson taught Austen that writing about the feelings and experiences of a young woman could be the stuff of a novel. All of Austen's novels deal with this topic. When in 1795 Austen began her first full-fledged novel (as opposed to the short pieces, mainly ridiculing current sentimental novels, in her juvenile work),
Elinor and Marianne,
she used Richardson's epistolary style. She did the same in 1796 when she wrote
First Impressions.
While neither manuscript exists, we can infer from the books that each eventually became —
Sense and Sensibility
and
Pride and Prejudice
— that Austen was using the epistolary style for the same reason as Richardson used it in
Pamela:
to convey the thoughts and feelings of her heroines. Although she eventually made major revisions to both epistolary manuscripts to turn them into the novels we know today, it's interesting to observe how Austen uses letters in
Pride and Prejudice,
a non-epistolary novel, to convey the feelings and personalities of various characters. Even before Collins appears on the scene, his letter to the Bennets tell them and the reader a lot about him, as do his letters to the Bennets after Lydia's scandal (PP 1:13, 3:6, 3:15). And Darcy's lengthy letter to Elizabeth allows him to explain himself in detail to her (PP 2:12). But she also surpassed Richardson in finding a new way to let her readers into the emotions and thoughts of her characters: by using free, indirect discourse as a method of narration. (For Austen's achievements in this area, head to the last section in this chapter, “Bringing It All Together: The Genius of Jane Austen,” and to Chapter 16.)

As the discussion of
Pamela
showed, Richardson's novel aroused its readers' sensibility. One way he achieved this was putting the innocent Pamela into terrifying situations that placed her virginity at risk. Pamela's terror became the reader's terror. Yet for today's reader, most of these situations are now embarrassingly laughable: having Mr. B. dress in a maid's nightgown to get into bed with Pamela is totally ridiculous, even though Richardson wrote the scene with complete seriousness. (Don't worry — nothing happens because Pamela faints, and Mr. B. is not interested in her when she faints!) Austen never puts her heroines in excessive physical danger from another person, never threatens them with melodramatic villains, nor does she evoke in her readers strong feelings about her characters by placing them in tear-inducing situations. (In fact, she's tough on Mrs. Musgrove's sentimentality in
Persuasion
[1:8].) Austen stays within the confines of the probable and the familiar. And among her many great talents is giving the probable and familiar a witty, original, and thoughtful turn.