Jane Austen For Dummies (52 page)
Read Jane Austen For Dummies Online
Authors: Joan Elizabeth Klingel Ray
The single clergyman in Austen's fiction who is said to have “zealously” performed “all the duties of his office” “for more than forty years” is
Persuasion
's Dr. Shirley â though in the novel, he has reached a point where he has grown “too infirm” to continue (P 1:9). This is all we know about him. But his presence certainly shows that Austen knew good, devoted clergymen as well as careless, self-involved clergy.
Austen's realism as a novelist included moral realism. Knowing human nature as well as she did, she showed a world that for all its etiquette, decorum, and tea drinking was also a fallen world. At age 20, while visiting Bath and attending a ball in the Upper Rooms, she wrote to her sister, “I am proud to say that I have a very good eye at an Adultress” (Letter, May 12â13, 1801). Yet even with her eye for picking up on the sins of the day, she doesn't sermonize to her readers in her novels.
Instead, Austen writes about sin through examples in her novels without stating her opinions of the sin. Her readers are to come to their own conclusions about moral and immoral behaviors. Through Austen's background in the church and her keen insight into her characters, she deals with each of the “seven deadly sins,” as portrayed in the Bible, in her fiction.
Proverbs 16:18 states: “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall” (King James Version, which is the Bible edition Austen knew). Austen sharply discerns between the good pride that's healthy self-confidence and the bad pride that encompasses an excessive ego and self-importance. Some of Austen's self-important characters find themselves thwarted, while others learn from having mistaken pride or too much pride.
Pride and Prejudice
immediately comes to mind when speaking of pride. The novel doesn't
present the two characteristics of the title as a simple dichotomy, with â as the 1940 film version of the novel emphasized â Darcy representing pride and Elizabeth prejudice. On the contrary, they both have their share of pride and prejudice. For example:
The proud Darcy hurts Elizabeth's pride when he says she isn't pretty enough to ask for a dance.
The proud Elizabeth, in the sense of having healthy self-esteem, doesn't become weak in the knees and submissive when introduced to the boorishly proud Lady Catherine de Bourgh, who presumes to know more than everyone and whose presumption leads to outright rudeness.
Lady Catherine's pride in her noble ancestry (her father was an earl) takes a real beating when Elizabeth refuses to follow her orders not to marry her nephew, Darcy. Not only do Lady Catherine's plans for Darcy to marry
her
daughter amount to nothing, but also her interference leads to Darcy's having “hope” that Elizabeth will accept his second proposal.
In Darcy's second proposal, he admits to Elizabeth that her earlier disapproval of his ungentlemanly ways “âproperly humbled'” him. But Elizabeth has also been humbled: She believed Wickham's lies about Darcy only to learn that she'd been deliberately misled by Wickham's charm. “âHow humiliating is this discovery,'” she says to herself, blaming her own “âvanity'” (PP 2:13).
Emma
also presents another example of pride. Emma Woodhouse is also humiliated â not just once, but several times â because Austen claims that Emma has “the power of having rather too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself” (E 1:1). Emma's ultimate humiliation leads to her learning that she has been “totally ignorant of her own heart” in denying that she loved Mr. Knightley as someone more than a brother. She grows “ashamed of every sensation but the one revealed to her â her affection for Mr. Knightley. Every other part of her mind was disgusting” (E 3:11).
The pride of minor characters is also appropriately demolished. For example, in
Sense and Sensibility
Mrs. Ferrars thinks she can use her power over her son Edward's inheritance to force him to marry a rich young woman, whose only attraction is the money she'll bring to the marriage. But Edward sticks with the poor Lucy out of duty and ends up with the less poor (but in now way rich!) Elinor out of love. Likewise, Mrs. Ferrars's younger son fails to gain the Morton money for the family because he winds up marrying the poor Lucy Steele just to spite his mother! Finally, Lucy uses her manipulative skills to worm her way into Mrs. Ferrars's favor, despite her pride.
Greed is unpleasant and frequently inflicts pain on the less fortunate in Austen's novels.
Sense and Sensibility:
Fanny Dashwood is a greedy woman. While her husband has inherited wealth from his mother, and she has wealth from her family, she convinces him to neglect his father's deathbed wish to use some of the money and estate he just inherited to care for his poor half-sisters and stepmother and give them nothing (SS 1:2). Fanny Dashwood won't part with a shilling for her sisters-in-law.
Northanger Abbey:
This novel is full of greedy people:
⢠Isabella dumps Catherine's brother in an attempt to secure a richer man. The money-hungry Isabella winds up losing both men.
⢠General Tilney is misled by the lying John Thorpe into believing that Catherine is an heiress. Thus, he encourages the romance between her and his younger son, Henry. But the General evicts her from the Abbey when he believes Thorpe's new lies that Catherine's family is deeply in debt. Henry, however, refuses to give up Catherine, who's neither very poor (much to his father's relief) nor very wealthy (much to his father's dismay).
In
Northanger Abbey,
Austen takes potshots at the Gothic novels â books full of mystery and horrors â that were highly popular at that time. She paid particular attention to Ann Radcliffe's bestseller,
The Mysteries of Udolpho,
which Catherine reads voraciously and which leads her to suspect murder and torture where there is none. Radcliffe was known for writing “the rationalized Gothic,” where all the seemingly supernatural horrors have natural, reasonable explanations that she holds back until the end of the book. In
The Mysteries
of Udolpho,
the villainous Montoni, for all his threats, turns out to be nothing more than a greedy man who wants the heroine's inheritance from his late wife, her aunt. So Montoni and General Tilney are cut from the same Gothic cloth: both are greedy!
Some people think of Austen as a gentle, genteel, and ever-ladylike writer. But she was a realist who clearly knew the world. And she uses her worldly knowledge to add to the moral realism of her novels, especially relating to lust. Austen presents parents whose lax upbringing of their children negatively affects their children as adults:
Mansfield Park:
Coming from a home where parents didn't pay serious attention to them, the Bertram sisters were educated and bred to show good manners. But Maria and Julia are “entirely deficient in the less common acquirements of self-knowledge, generosity, and humility” (MP 1:2).
⢠Maria, the elder, becomes an adulteress.
⢠Julia elopes with a young man who “had not much to recommend him beyond the habits of fashion and expense, and being the younger son of a lord with a tolerable independence” (he has money to his name) (MP 1:13).
⢠The girls' mother and father weren't involved in their education, moral or otherwise.
⢠Their father, Sir Thomas, is a great spokesman for morality and prudence. But he's so distant from his daughters that they're uncomfortable talking with him.
⢠Their mother pushes all her maternal responsibility to her sister who's selfish herself and spoils her nieces.
Sir Thomas Bertram punishes his adulterous daughter by providing a minimally sufficient income for her; he also sends her to live “in another country [county or borough] â remote and private” (MP 3:17). There Maria, who “had destroyed her own character,” and her Aunt Norris reside as each other's “mutual punishment.”
Pride and Prejudice:
The character of Lydia flees and lives with Wickham while they are unmarried. Both Mr. and Mrs. Bennet are responsible for Lydia's immoral behavior with Wickham:
⢠Mrs. Bennet overindulges Lydia and even encourages her in chasing the militia officers, announcing that she, too, “âliked a red coat myself very well â and indeed so I do still at my heart'” (PP 1:7).
⢠When Lydia begs to be allowed to go on her ill-fated trip to Brighton, her mother supports her, saying, “âA little sea-bathing would set me up for ever'” (PP 2:18).
⢠Mr. Bennet, for all his witty charm, also shoulders responsibility for Lydia's actions. Discussing her sister's disappearance with her Aunt Gardiner, Elizabeth bemoans “âmy father's . . . indolence and the little attention he has ever seemed to give to what was going forward in his family. . .'” (PP 3:5).
⢠Spoiled by her mother and ignored by her father, Lydia shows she is, indeed, “âso lost to every thing but love of [Wickham], as to consent to live with him” out of wedlock (PP 3:5).
⢠Lydia, later married to Wickham, returned home and felt neither shame nor guilt for her earlier behavior, and her actions add to her poor reputation. She proudly shows off her marriage ring, adding pride to her sin of lust.
Sense and Sensibility:
Eliza Williams, the unmarried ward of Colonel Brandon, becomes pregnant with Willoughby's child (SS 2:9). In this case, Brandon sends his ward into the country to have her child as a protective measure, so Eliza will be away from the sneers of those who know her and the snares of other men, who, like Willoughby, indulge in irresponsible sexual behavior. Eliza's moral fall repeats that of her mother, Eliza Brandon (the colonel's sister-in-law), who had her daughter out of wedlock. Eliza Brandon died, poverty-stricken and shamed when her daughter was just an infant. Society would see her daughter's fall as an example of “like mother, like daughter.”