Jane Austen For Dummies (54 page)
Read Jane Austen For Dummies Online
Authors: Joan Elizabeth Klingel Ray
Austen was as aware of the goodness in people as she was of their flaws â mental or moral. Charity to one's neighbor was an important facet of Georgian life, and it was especially important to the gentry. For the master and mistress of the estate were to exercise
noblesse oblige
â the idea that people born into the nobility or upper social classes must behave in an honorable, generous way toward those less privileged.
Jane Austen took care of the poor. She and her sister sewed clothes for them, so in turn, Austen would want to create characters who look out for the poor and ailing, too. Austen shows this most visibly in
Emma:
For all of Emma's self-centeredness, she visits the poor and sick in her village and sincerely provides comfort, as well as soup.
She sends pork from her family's farm to the Bates ladies, who live in genteel poverty.
Likewise, Mr. Knightley sends the Bates family apples from his farm â even his last basket instead of keeping the apples for himself â and uses his carriage for a party just so Miss Bates can ride to and from the party in it.
Persuasion
's Anne Elliot is also kind to the less fortunate. In spite of her egotistical father's objections, she visits and cheers an old school friend from her youth, Mrs. Smith, who is not only “widowed, and poor,” but also suffers from “a severe rheumatic fever which finally settling in her legs, had made her, for the present, a cripple” (P 2:5). Mrs. Smith, herself, while confined to bed, knits items that are sold to the rich to benefit the poor.
Austen also praises
Pride and Prejudice
's Darcy for his charity. His housekeeper tells Elizabeth and the Gardiners that he, like his late father, is “âaffable to the poor'” and the “âbest landlord, and the best master.'” She goes on to say, “âThere is not one of his tenants or servants but what will give him a good name'” (PP 3:1).
Enjoying Austen and Her Influence Today
In this part . . .
P
oor Jane Austen! She didn't live long enough to earn royalties on all the films, television shows, stage productions, and books that are either based on or inspired by her novels. This part surveys the Austen-related productions, in both print (literary classics and pop culture) and other media. Chapter 14 even gives you tips on reading Austen.
Reading Jane Austen
In This Chapter
Studying each of Austen's six major novels
Forming a study group and having some discussion
M
any of you reading this book read Austen's novels for pure pleasure, and that's just fine. But Austen put a lot of effort into her writing, and she deals with much more than courtship. So this chapter suggests some ways of approaching each of the six novels so that perhaps you can get more out of them than you have. The nice thing about this is that there are no papers and no grades!
Keep in mind that readers come to Austen's novels at different ages and with different life experiences. Speaking for myself as a lifelong Austen reader, I can say that as a teenager, I read her books for their romantic stories. But as I got older and became more informed about my own world and Austen's, I became more aware of her as a social satirist. I found myself laughing with her more than I did as a teenager.
So as you â yes, you! â read Austen, you will approach and come away from her with different reactions. But her novels are always vivid and meaningful. For this reason, she's a classic.
Northanger Abbey
shows its early place in her writing because at the end of Volume 1, Chapter 5, Austen defends the novel as a form of literature. It's as if she has to reinforce for both her readers and herself that novels are quality literature. This book is the only time that she ever defends her chosen form of literature, the novel.
Austen's writing this novel, first as
Susan
and then as
Catherine,
undoubtedly came about as her reaction to the popular “Gothic novels” of her day â fiction that set a young heroine in scary, mysterious circumstances with ghosts and spirits, or what seemed like ghosts and spirits, making noises and frightening her as she loses sleep in a dark room with no candle or fire (both have been blown out) and no lock on her door. The most popular Gothic novel and the one that most influences Austen's reading heroine, Catherine Morland, is Ann Radcliffe's
The Mysteries of Udolpho.
Radcliffe's
Udolpho
deals with a young lady, Emily, who's orphaned and compelled to live with her aunt, who marries the striking, but scary, Montoni. He takes his new wife and her impressionable niece to his fortresslike castle of Udolpho high in the Italian mountains. He's accompanied by a gang of threatening-looking thugs. Hearing all kinds of strange noises, Emily snoops around the castle, scares herself, and spends many sleepless nights. After reading several hundred pages, the reader discovers that Montoni is after Emily's inheritance, which the aunt has left to Emily. Montoni tries to scare Emily into signing papers that will turn her inheritance over to him, but Emily doesn't budge. She's finally saved, and Montoni's plan fails.
Not only does Catherine Morland love scaring herself by reading
The Mysteries of Udolpho,
but Henry Tilney, who has also read the book â his “âhair standing on end the whole time,'” as he jokes â teases Catherine on their way to Northanger Abbey by taking some of Emily's Udolpho adventures and suggesting that Catherine may experience something similar at the Abbey. But this is only the most obvious way Austen uses Radcliffe's book in her novel.
While Catherine expects to find that the severe General Tilney, father of her friends Henry and Eleanor, is Montoni-like in having locked up his wife and deprived her of care, she learns that the general is actually only greedy: He thinks Catherine is rich and dismisses her from the Abbey when he incorrectly believes that she's a poor fortune-hunter. But in reviewing
The Mysteries of Udolpho,
you see that Montoni â though a murderer â is also greedy. So Catherine's suspicions that the general is like Montoni aren't really that far off the mark.
Naïve and inexperienced, Catherine goes to Bath with family friends, Mr. and Mrs. Allen. Bath was the popular spa city where people went not only for their health but also to introduce their marriage-aged children to the whirling social life and perhaps to meet a future spouse. More interested in fashion than Catherine, Mrs. Allen means well, but she's a poor guide for Catherine. But Catherine has good instincts. And so she doesn't allow herself to be guided by the dangerous yet attractive Isabella Thorpe into doing things that aren't right, such as breaking promises. Likewise, Catherine always senses that General Tilney's children are uncomfortable around their father (something is strange about the general). Catharine is, of course, correct, but she learns it the hard away â by being suddenly sent home â and not knowing until later how misled the general's greed has allowed him to be.
Catherine's coming to learn more about herself and others begins a pattern in Austen's writing. Her heroines achieve better self-knowledge, as well as better knowledge of the world through their mistakes.
The
narrator
of a novel is the voice that tells the story. In this early novel Austen speaks quite overtly in her own voice â for example, in her defense of the novel as a literary form or genre. Elsewhere in the book, Austen is unusually heavy-handed in her narration, dripping with
verbal irony,
which is when you say something, but mean something else. Here's an example of verbal irony from
Northanger Abbey:
Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well-informed mind, is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing any thing, should conceal it as well as she can. (NA 1:14)
This passage occurs when Catherine and the Tilneys are walking together, and the Tilneys begin to praise the scenery, using language that shows their familiarity with art. Catherine feels “ashamed of her ignorance,” and the implication is that she will defer to the Tilneys' views. But does Austen really want females to be ignorant? While Doctors Fordyce and Gregory, discussed in Chapter 12, prescribed female ignorance as a way of catching a husband, Austen certainly doesn't uphold this view in her other novels. So what's with Catherine? And what's with Austen? Austen is being ironic.
Readers should contemplate another irony in the novel. Catherine is Austen's most inexperienced heroine and one of her two youngest heroines at age 17. (
Sense and Sensibility
's Marianne Dashwood is the other young heroine.) And Henry Tilney is her most teacher-ish hero, ready to instruct Catherine, who thinks that he's always right. After all, he's “about four or five and twenty,” and a university graduate (NA 3:2). But by the end of the book, it turns out that Henry is wrong in not suspecting his father of greed, and Catherine is right in sensing a villain lurking within the general â a villain who allowed himself to be duped by another character's conflicting stories about Catherine Morland. Who's the most ignorant person now? Not Catherine! So much for the general.
Sense and Sensibility
is one of those titles that lead a reader to think, at first glance, that these two traits are going to be opposed by two characters.
Sense
is common sense, practicality, intelligence, and reason.
Sensibility,
in Austen's time, meant relying on one's feelings as a guide to behavior, as a guide to truth. Is Austen preparing to advocate one over the other?
The two Dashwood sisters, Elinor and Marianne, are sometimes seen as representing sense (Elinor) and sensibility (Marianne). But each heroine has some of each trait, and each heroine suffers by letting one trait dominate. Austen shows us that neither sense nor sensibility is the right way to go. A person needs to be balanced.
Elinor seems to be the one with sense:
She advises her mother about saving money and living economically.
She advises Marianne to reject Willoughby's present of a horse on the grounds of its expense.
She knows how to play the social game and is always polite, responsive, and pleasant, even to those who try her patience, because she sees that practical good sense is the best way to achieve the “general civility” that she desires all to practice.
Yet her sense that Edward Ferrars loves her and not Lucy causes her great emotional pain because Edward has neither the sense nor the sensibility to come out and tell his true feelings and personal circumstances. Elinor has strong feelings, “but she know how to govern them” â by sense (SS 1:1). But with Edmund's odd behavior â he hangs around her, but looks gloomy and acts like a friend, rather than a boyfriend â Elinor still maintains a calm exterior. Puzzled, Elinor arrives at a conclusion drawn from common sense: Edward's behavior is the result of his mother's pressuring him to marry a wealthier young lady. But Elinor's sense takes a real hit when the manipulative and money-hungry Lucy Steele confides in Elinor that she, Lucy, has been secretly engaged to Edward for four years. No wonder Edward's behaving oddly!
Elinor's stiff upper lip gets only stiffer from acting as though she's not in love with Edward and doesn't care about his engagement to Lucy. Instead of looking gloomy and hurt, Elinor puts up a good front: She acts coolly and behaves reasonably, as if all is well. She shows no emotion and tells no one of her feelings. Forced into a role of constant game-playing by and with Lucy, Elinor doesn't make sense look very appealing. While emotionally certain that Edward truly loves her and is tired of Lucy â this is Elinor's sensibility at work â her senses show her that everything conspires to get Lucy and Edward married:
He keeps the engagement even though his mother disinherits him for it.
Lucy sticks to him like glue, even though he has been disinherited (after all, his little money is far more than she has!).
He unexpectedly gets a church living with a house from Colonel Brand on â when it looks like nothing will be available for him â that will enable him to save money to marry Lucy.
Yet this makes no sense to her: She can see that Edward is trying to get out of his Lucy entanglement.
Marianne uses her feelings (sensibility) as her guide.
She flaunts convention and decorum, going off with Willoughby for an unchaperoned carriage ride to explore a house where she has no permission to be.
She insists she has done no wrong because her feelings would've told her if her actions were incorrect.
Her senses tell her that Willoughby loves her:
⢠He pays attention only to her.
⢠He asks for a clipping of her hair as a love token.
⢠He likes everything she likes.
⢠He acts like a hero of sensibility, a man of feeling who adores her.
What makes more sense than to think he's truly caring, based on such evidence? But Willoughby uses a selfish sense to guide his actions. He deserts Marianne because his financial sense tells him he needs to marry money. His sense of self-preservation also told him to desert the pregnant Eliza Williams so he wouldn't get stuck with her and their baby. If Willoughby's sense dictated such behavior, can sense be all that desirable? Meanwhile, Marianne, unable to find meaning in Willoughby's conduct and unwilling to control her emotions with even a little sense, is left to suffer: Her feelings betray her body, and she slips into a deeper and deeper depression until she nearly dies from a resulting infection brought on by an extended period of neither sleeping nor eating. Willoughby's cruelty to her makes no sense for a long time, and so her sensibilities go on overload, weakening her body. Marianne believed her feelings for Willoughby and Willoughby's feelings for her. But feelings turned out to be an unreliable guide without some sense to temper them.
Just as Elinor suffers from repressing her sensibilities with too much sense, so Marianne suffered from refusing to let any sense temper her sensibilities.
Elinor and Marianne aren't the only characters in the novel to get tangled up in sense and sensibility.
At the opening of the novel, Uncle Dashwood disinherits the Dashwood females and gives his estate to a 4-year-old grandnephew. Now is that sense or sensibility?
⢠On the one hand, the uncle was charmed by the child's antics (sensibility).
⢠On the other hand, the uncle undoubtedly sees that leaving his estate to the little boy ensures male Dashwood occupancy for several more generations (sense).
Similarly, when Fanny and John Dashwood assist each other in arguing away John's promise to his father to assist his stepmother and sisters, are they using sense or sensibility? Certainly, Fanny's financial sense is at work as she pressures her husband's sensibility in saving everything for their little boy.
Mrs. Ferrars disinherits Edward, her elder son and heir, because he honors his engagement to Lucy: Is that Mrs. Ferrars's sense at work in protecting the Ferrars money from a gold-digger or her emotional reaction of anger prompting her to punish Edward monetarily?
Neither sense nor sensibility is always right. Either can lead people to cruelty, greed, selfishness, or goodness. The two characteristics need to be balanced so that neither is perverted by the other.