Just got word that my novella, The Vanishing Woman: A Christmas Tale, has been accepted for publication. Look for it around the holidays. A little Christmas mystery.
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Approaching Fanny Price — Austen’s ‘Anti-Heroine’
[What follows are lecture notes for my current Austen seminar. We’re in the early discussions of Mansfield Park. These notes are produced on the gallop, and parts of them are to be taken up and developed later, so please read them as what they are.]
Approaching Fanny Price — Jane Austen’s ‘Anti-Heroine’
I trust it is obvious I am doing something odd with ‘anti-heroine’ in my title. It does not mean quite what it ordinarily might mean — a female anti-hero.
What I mean contacts what John Lucas means when he comments on Fanny in his introduction to the novel:
The central problem is…the novel’s heroine. For Fanny Price seems almost the anti-type of what we like to regard as the typical Jane Austen heroine. She is totally lacking in vivacity and all but lacking in wit, she appears incapable of making any effort of friendship with those about her, she is self-effacing, silent and above all passive.
Some of Lucas’ finishing descriptions here of Fanny are, I rate, too strong, and I will get to them, but what I want to focus on for now is just the introductory description: Fanny Price seems almost the anti-type of what we like to regard as the typical Austen heroine.
Lucas mobilizes a notion familiar from scripture, the notion of type/anti-type. That notion can be employed variously but, in Lucas, an anti-type contrasts with or is opposed to a type. Elizabeth Bennet, as we’ve discussed, is the type of Austen heroine (she’s the most likable of the ‘Mariannes’ characters); Fanny Price is the contrasting type, the anti-type (the least likable of the ‘Elinor’ characters). — That’s part of what I want you to hear in my use of ‘anti-heroine’. But I also want you to hear a suggestion of difficulty or dislike — an anti-hero is a character in a novel, stationed at the post of the hero, but who is not (easily) reckoned as a hero — usually, we find the character difficult to like or we even actively dislike the character. Comic books (and Superhero movies) provide accessible examples: think of the Punisher or Morbius. From novels or literature, think of The Confederacy of Dunces’ Ignatius J. Reilly. So, when I call Fanny Price Jane Austen’s anti-hero, I want you to notice both her contrast with Elizabeth Bennet (and the other ‘Marianne’ characters) and the features she has that make her difficult to like.
To Lucas’ credit, he hedges his introductory description: Fanny Price seems almost the anti-type of what we like to regard as the typical Jane Austen heroine. I put ‘anti-heroine’ in scare quotes to help you hear something else in my use of it, a reticence, an almost — to help you hear me hedging. I’m not saying quite that Fanny is an anti-heroine or that Austen intended her simply as such, but I also don’t take our reaction to Fanny to be the result of authorial incompetence or inadvertence on Austen’s part.
Austen quite deliberately, knowingly, creates a character who tasks us as readers, heaps us, — Austen makes us read uphill. We will talk about why Austen would choose to do that, since it can seem a counterintuitive, even a dangerous maneuver on the part of an author. Johnson notes somewhere that “Whatever professes to benefit by pleasing must please at once”, and we might accuse Austen of failing in this respect — Fanny does not please at once, yet she does seem ultimately meant to please. As I said, we will return to this.
But for now, having touched on the complications of my use of ‘anti-heroine’, and keeping them in mind, I want to turn to Lucas’ other descriptions of Fanny.
To frame my reaction to them, consider one of the unusual aspects of Mansfield Park’s narrative structure. We are given almost three chapters of Fanny’s childhood, in a kind of narrator’s flashback, the story-telling reaching back into Fanny’s family history, and settling on the year of her displacement from Portsmouth to Mansfield Park (a journey Fanny will make again, but in the opposite direction, much later in the novel). This should strike us as important; we are given no similar look into the childhood of the other heroines. I have been encouraging you to attend to character entrances (and exits) and Fanny enters as a child (she is ten when she arrives at Mansfield Park). Austen thematizes (mis)education in her novels, and one thing we find out about Fanny’s early years is how little education she has when she arrives at Mansfield, and how little effort is expended on her education after she arrives. Not wholly, but to a large extent, Edmund Bertram is Fanny’s education; he is the one who takes the time to interact with her, to see past his sisters’ declarations of Fanny’s stupidity. Fanny decidedly is not stupid. Edmund discovers and encourages her cleverness, her quickness, and her good sense. He supplies her with books since she is fond of reading, and, what is more, Edmund discusses the books with her, encourages her taste, and corrects her judgments. The rest of the family more or less neglects her, and takes no interest in her growing better or worse. For them, she is sheerly a charity case.
Fanny’s education contrasts with the education of the Bertram sisters. Their education, by the standards of the day, is proper. But from another, and a deeper point of view, it is improper. They develop talents and acquire information, and those developments and acquisitions are taken as proof that they are also growing better, growing in self-knowledge, generosity, and humility. But, for all the sisters’ outward grace and accomplishment, they know no inward progress — their dispositions, their habits, are neglected in their classroom education, and spoiled by their Aunt Norris’ officious and noxious praise and self-idolizing example outside the classroom. Lady Bertram’s nodding indolence plays a role here too, as does Sir Thomas’ gloomy seriousness.
Fanny’s education, comparatively makeshift though it is, reaches into who she is. She is given to inwardness, and Edmund, while doing what he can to help her overcome her diffidence, supports and strengthens her inwardness, her self-knowledge, generosity and humility. He helps her build good dispositions, building upon a nature already happily, if all-but-soundlessly, tending in that direction.
Understanding the novel requires that we do not forget these early chapters, what we see and learn of Fanny in them. Fanny is slowly recognized as what she is across the time of Mansfield Park. At the beginning of the primary action, she is a young woman of gifts, virtues, but, like the gemstones inside statues of Silenus, her gifts are hidden. For a long time, they are known only to Edmund. And, for a sad and difficult while, even Edmund loses sight of them, blinded as he is by the outwardly flashy cubic zirconia of Mary Crawford. But by the finish of the novel, they are acknowledged by all who remain at Mansfield.
Why this backward glance at Fanny’s girlhood? I find part of the answer in Lucas, in the near continuation of the comment I quoted above.
Fanny is not passive by choice but through circumstance.
This is part right, part wrong. It is true that much of Fanny’s passivity results from unfavorable circumstances — loneliness, neglect, and underestimation: all combine to make Fanny diffident, to make it hard for her to trust herself. But all these combine to work on a native passivity, a native diffidence. Fanny does not choose to be passive, and yes, her circumstances increase her passivity, but she is a passive girl, a passive woman. But the passivity is not all circumstantial. Fanny would, for instance, much rather suffer wrong than commit it. Passivity goes deep in her — but so too do patience and humility and long-suffering. The circumstantial nature of some of her passivity is shown during the visit of her brother, William, to Mansfield, when her passivity lessens. With him, with someone who does not enforce the circumstances that increase her diffidence, she blooms; she speaks out her heart and mind without shame, pause, or regret.
Note that even Edmund enforces the circumstances of Fanny’s passivity without meaning to — first just because he is a Bertram, both in and of Mansfield Park as Fanny is not; and, secondly, because he fails to be finely aware as Fanny is: Edmund misses more than he should. An obtuseness, sometimes self-caused, darkens his genuine goodness. That is among the reasons he needs Fanny.
Seeing Fanny with William shows Fanny’s charms to Henry Crawford — and she does not lack charms, for all that she can sometimes seem to. But Elizabeth Bennet or Mary Crawford’s assertiveness would never be natural to Fanny. She’s the reverse of pushy, even when with her brother.
Fanny’s passivity is worsened by circumstances, and it is natural to her, and so in both those senses not chosen, but it is also implicated in the virtues that she exemplifies, works toward, and so it is, in another sense, acquired, if not exactly chosen as such. The dichotomy, chosen or circumstantial, oversimplifies the story of Fanny’s passivity. It fails to be responsive to habit, disposition, and the complicated issues connected with the conscious development of habits, and of their concomitant changes.
Compared with Elizabeth Bennet, Fanny does seem to lack vivacity and wit — but it matters when we make the comparison, whether we make it when Fanny is young and oppressed by Mansfield Park, or when she is older and William is visiting, or when she is older still and the de facto mistress of Mansfield. Fanny is never going to equal Elizabeth Bennet, but in the later moments, she is closer to her.
Mansfield Park is the story of someone invisible slowly becoming visible. That’s why it starts with Fanny in her youth, in her nearly complete invisibility. Her increasing visibility has to do with changes in her, but it has more to do with the increasing visual acuity (moral, not physical) of those remaining at Mansfield, especially Edmund, changes Fanny creates in them slowly, passively, through her patient endurance. Fanny creates changes in others by her quiet, steadfast refusal to be anyone but herself. Edmund’s vision — what he sees and fails to see — is a major thematic element of the novel, since it is in his eyes that Fanny first materializes, is realized, both in the sense that she is made real and in the sense that he comes to know her reality. A similar change occurs in Sir Thomas’ vision too, and even, to a degree that does not require her full wakefulness, in Lady Bertram. They come to see Fanny and to see her as in and of Mansfield, indeed as integral to its continuance. She is the true heir of Mansfield.
It is an error to claim that Fanny is incapable of making any effort of friendship with those about her. The problem instead is that almost all of those around her consider her disqualified for true friendship. She lives with the Bertrams for years trapped between being a distant, slightly embarrassing relative, and a domestic servant. Her place in the house, the room she lives in, its lack of a fire, all testify to her being a servant. That may not have been Sir Thomas’ intention, but he never made any effort to make sure his intentions were carried out. In general, Sir Thomas seems inclined to think he enjoys a Divine Prerogative: he needs only to think or speak it for it to be so. That he does not enjoy this Prerogative he learns from Fanny to his eventual betterment, and from his daughters to his eventual sorrow. Mary Crawford wants to befriend Fanny — and believes she has — but Fanny can see Mary for what she is, can feel the mixed motives that prompt Mary’s efforts at friendship and Fanny mistrusts her and them.
That Fanny has a capacity for friendship, that she craves intimacy, and equality, is shown by her relationship with William and later, in Portsmouth and then at Mansfield, with her sister, Susan. It is true that they are both her relatives, but it is also true that she is separated from them both for a long time, and that her relationship with them is richer than a matter of blood. And, even more important, she is friends, longtime friends, with Edmund. She is his best friend, although he does not quite conceptualize her in that way, or in that way only. He conceptualizes her as a cousin, little sister, friend, and pupil — and all these roles function as veils that obscure her from him, obscure what she most importantly is to him, despite the fact that he sees her earlier and more clearly than anyone else at Mansfield Park.
Fanny’s love of Edmund has its girlish moments, as is shown by the whole business with the cross, the necklace, and Edmund’s note. (Fanny seems a bit like Harriet Smith moony over Mr. Elton, hoarding keepsakes). But one good effect of the Crawfords, the theatricals, and Fanny’s sojourn/return to Portsmouth is that her love matures, and understands itself. She knows Edmund for who he is and knows herself for who she has become, and she loves him still. She cannot marry Henry Crawford, not just because he is wholly an actor, corrupt even in his attempts to overcome his corruption, but because she loves another man. She believes Edmund lost to her, Henry and Sir Thomas exert enormous pressure on her, but she still says no. Her small but mighty no.
I mentioned that Austen makes us read uphill, and challenges us to contend with a Fanny who hardly seems like a heroine at all. — Why do that?
My suspicion is that Austen intends her novel to test our visual acuity. Can we see Fanny? Can we see past Mary Crawford? What are our values? Are we really all cheap and flash or do we care about what we like to represent ourselves as caring about? Can we believe that heaven belongs to the poor in spirit, that the meek will inherit the earth, — and that that is how it should be? Do we care about purity of heart?
Final thought. Lucas does realize that treating Elizabeth Bennet as the type of an Austen heroine might seem appropriate since she is the heroine of Austen’s most popular novel. But he also realizes that she does not repeat. None of the other heroines are Elizabeth Bennet: Emma is probably the closest, but there are crucial differences between the two. I believe this is why Lucas uses his extended, guarded phrasing, not only almost but also — …the anti-type of what we like to regard as...
No doubt Elizabeth Bennet has a tight hold on the imagination of Austen readers, she is all vivid, never invisible, but statistically (so to speak) she is no more frequent than any of the other heroines. Certainly, it is possible to see Austen’s novels otherwise — as I admit I often do — and to find, say, Anne Elliot with a hold on one’s imagination tighter even than Elizabeth Bennet’s, to see her as Austen’s type.
(Comment on the Bertram sisters’ education. Johnson, in his Lives chapter on John Milton, remarks of educators like Milton, that “They seem to think that we are placed here to watch the growth of plants, or the motions of the stars. Socrates was rather of the opinion that what we had to learn was, how to do good and avoid evil.” Johnson sides with Socrates, not Milton: “Prudence and justice are virtues and excellencies of all times and all places; we are perpetually moralists but are geometricians only by chance.” An education like the Bertram sisters’, for Johnson, despite its apparent propriety, is upside-down: an education for perpetual geographers and chance moralists. And their morals certainly prove chancy.)
Death’s in the world/And it’s gone viral…
Things Happen
I’ve been away from the blog for quite a while, as well as from my podcast. I was seriously ill in December, underwent emergency surgery, and spent six weeks or so in the hospital and rehab. I have recovered and am slowly re-inhabiting my life, and so, I hope, I will soon be re-inhabiting this space. If you’ve commented in the last several months and gotten no response, apologies.
New Podcast Episode: Simone Weil, Gravity, Grace and the I
Notes After Austen (Updated, Again, Again)
Each summer I re-read all of Jane Austen. This year, I decided to post a bit about it on Facebook, just some notes and jottings, noting more. I will move future FB posts here as I go so you might want to check back periodically. (Original posts and comments are on my FB page.)
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Mr. Collins, proposing to Elizabeth Bennett: “And now nothing remains for me but to assure you in the most animated language of the violence of my affections.” Austen! Hard to think of any sentence whose form more completely stutifies its content. All you can do is bow and delight.
Finished Austen’s *Emma* this morning, and was struck by the final chapters more than I recall being before, particularly the similarities between Emma and Frank Churchill, remarked upon near the end by Emma herself. We might say that both Emma and FC are ‘imaginists’ to use the novel’s own term for Emma, but Emma’s imagination mostly imposes on herself, while FC’s imposes on the entire village (more or less): Emma fools herself, FC fools Emma, the Westons, and many others. Still, like FC, Emma manages to emerge from all her foolings uninjured, ‘the child of good fortune’ (Knightley’s description of FC). In the end, Robert Martin, by proposing yet again to Harriet Smith (and by being this time accepted), saves Emma from the one lingering secret she has kept from Knightley, and a raider of neighboring poultry yards motivates Emma’s father to allow her to marry sooner rather than later. — The child of good fortune, indeed! What a remarkable novel.
Reading *Mansfield Park*, my favorite of Austen’s novels. Chaps 8-12., roughly, are given over to differentiating Fanny Price from Mary Crawford. Although the word does not, so far as I recall, occur until Chap 9, and there not in application to either woman, — the word ‘disinterested’, as Austen used it so often in *Emma*, hovers over the differentiation. Fanny is disinterestedly engrossed in everything around her on the trip to Sotherton; Mary cannot manage disinterested engrossment in anything. She can be engrossed (if that is the right word) only where she is *interested*. She can see only for her own sake, not for the sake of seeing, or, better, for the sake of the thing seen. And so she is unseeing, blinded (“she saw Nature, inanimate Nature, with little observation”). Worse, Mary’s blindness is communicable, infecting Edmund as well as herself, although he has a restive sense that something is wrong with Mary, and wrong with him for being unable to *observe* it clearly. It will take Fanny a long time, and much suffering, to clear Edmund’s vision.
Austen’s ability to force characters into hearing what they do not want to hear, in a form to warm and wound the heart all at once. *Mansfield Park*, Chap 27, Edmund to Fanny, discussing his hopes and ‘misgivings’ about Mary Crawford, his planned proposal: “You are the only being upon earth to whom I should say what I have said; but you have always known my opinion of her; you can bear me witness, Fanny, that I have never been blinded.” But blinded and blind he has been and is.
Reading the amazing 34th chapter of Mansfield Park, the chapter in which Austen shows the character of Henry Crawford to the fullest. He is a man of genuine powers, agreeable to a remarkable degree. But for Austen — as Tave has shown — the relationship between ‘agreeableness’ and ‘amiableness’ is always under investigation. The two terms are so intimately related that they can be — and often are (by Austen’s characters, in life) — conflated. In many ways, their relationship is much like that between ‘truth’ and ‘validity’: they can be mistaken for synonyms, but they can part company. In the chapter, Crawford reads Shakespeare aloud so well that he eventually entrances even the reluctant Fanny, but as the conversation turns to reading aloud well (more generally) and eventually to reading Scripture aloud well, and to preaching, Crawford cannot manage himself for long. For all that he says of which Fanny approves of, he eventually wanders into the peculiar careless self-regard that is her aversion. Fanny involuntarily shakes her head in disapproval. Crawford sees her reaction but cannot really understand it. He sees nothing to repent of: he was sincere in what he said. Of course, Crawford is so thorroughly admixed with the false that even what he says sincerely is gainsaid by his being the speaker. — But that is part of the problem. He can talk ‘sincerely’ about himself but with no proper response to the things he ‘believes’ about himself.
Finished MP. Lots of thoughts, but here’s one. There’s a fascinating subjunctive paragraph as the novel ends, one that details a successful bid by Crawford for Fanny. Its tone suggests that it details what *almost* happened. — But that’s false. To use the lingo of analytic philosophy, the world described is no *nearby* possible world. Given Crawford’s watery character in the actual (fictional) world, the stoutness of resolution that bid involves makes it quite *distant*. The tone, I believe, is Austen’s narrative voice ventriloquizing Crawford’s own, showing his point of view on the unfolded events, his very unhappy sense that a different, better life was *almost* in his grasp.
MP is a novel about conscience, consciousness and the (intertwined) corruptions of each. The stress on vision and blindness figures a stress on moral vision and moral blindness. The late, severe language on the Crawfords, on Mary’s mind as ‘bewildered’, ‘darkened’, and similar language about Henry’s, has been built to in careful stages. The long, centerstage section on the MP theatrical accomplishes much of the work, as conscience, its use, abuse, and absence is displayed. As the literature on conscience bears out, and as Austen understood full well, there’s no blameless exit from the predicament of an erring conscience: the person in the predicament is damned if she does, damned if she doesn’t. She either does what her erring conscience demands, and does wrong, or she violates her erring conscience and so does wrong. Austen elongates the section because of the delicacy of the predicaments of the characters. No one’s conscience is simply absent, but various consciences are being abused. Mary and Henry’s err in crucial ways. So too Maria and Julia’s. Edmund’s actions cause Fanny so much distress because she sees him violating, and even laboring to befuddle, his own (non-erring) conscience. Fanny herself is worked upon by the theatricals, and is dangerously close to duplicating Edmund’s folly. The unexpected arrival of Sir Thomas saves her from having to choose whether to play (read) Cottager’s wife. The problem with the Crawfords is that they do not just have bad ‘principles’, though no doubt some of their ‘principles’ are bad: they can’t see clearly enough as to justly apply principles of any sort. Their consciousnesses themselves are corrupt. They do not and will not see.Near the book’s end, Henry suggests to Fanny that, married to him, she will become, in effect, his conscience. Fanny rejects the imputed role. No one can be anyone else’s conscience. But she reminds Henry that he does not need her. Each of us, she tells him, has in him or her what is necessary for determining right and wrong. I find that line tragic: Abstractly, Fanny is right, and her saying what she says is charitable. But it is not clear that Henry, the particular concreted human being, has any longer in him what he needs to determine right and wrong. Beneath his errors of conscience lurks a more fundamental moral debility, the protoplasmic untruth in which his heart itself is and has long been afloat.
I’ve started S&S, more on it soon, but, for now, a couple of final notes on MP.— For a great deal of her life (and of the novel) Fanny seems almost voiceless. No one hears her, seeks out her thoughts (except Edmund). But she hears herself, the voice of her conscience. Fanny listens to Fanny, even when no one around her does, and despite no one around her else listening to himself or herself. — I’m thinking I will write an essay on MP. “The Moral Grandeur of Fanny Price”. — The Crawfords are such smiling villains. Complicated, gifted, they call forth sympathy and regret as they repel. Seeing them for what they are requires keeping in mind something J. L. Austin once pointed out in a footnote (about the dangerous tendency to conflate succumbing to temptation to losing control of oneself). Imagining himself succumbing to temptation, to taking his own and someone else’s serving of ice cream at High Table, Austin asks: “But do I lose control of myself? Do I raven, do I snatch the morsels…and wolf them down…? Not a bit of it. We often succumb to temptation with calm and even with finesse.” Just so the Crawfords, at least until Henry’s ‘etourderie’ (Mary’s word) with Maria.
S&S: Austen’s gift for delivering crucial character descriptions in ways that can easily slip past the reader: Early in S&S, when Colonel Brandon must cancel the pleasure party to Whitwell, Sir John tries to reverse Brandon’s decision by reminding Brandon of the sacrifices made to attend that morning (it’s after 10am). The two Miss Careys have come from Newton, the three Misses Dashwood walked from the cottage, and Willoughby “got up two hours before his usual time”.
Austen, S&S.
— More one-liners than in Emma or MP. The prose is far less complicated. Reminds me a bit of passages of H. James before he rewrote them and after he did (although Austen’s are obviously not the reworkings of passages).
— The very careful apparent parallel constructed in Marianne’s situation with Willoughby and Elinor’s with Edward Ferrars. The contrast then from the beginning between Marianne self-feeding misery and Elinor’s efforts at self-command, made all-the-more strenuous by facing an almost omnipresent tormentor in Lucy Steel. Lucy’s clever, coldly cruel indirection in her speeches to Elinor — wow. She strikes home with dagger-point precision while seeming all smiles and amiability. “She looked down as she said this, amiably bashful, with only one side glance at her companion to observe the effect on her.” Ouch. What Austen gives with one hand she takes back with the other.
— Austen’s careful foreshadowing of Lucy’s capacity for clever cruelty (the foreshadowing does not come long before the revelation of the fact) and of Lucy’s sister Anne’s blunt cluelessness (the foreshowing does come long before the decisive effect of the revealed fact).
More on S&S
— It’s easy to miss, despite her being the center of consciousness in the novel, that S&S really is the story of Elinor and Edward. The story of Marianne and Willoughby (and later, Brandon) plays a contrapuntal role in the overarching structure. Elinor’s story is ‘told’ by and in the telling of Marianne’s, in Elinor’s moments of identification with and distance from Marianne. It’s easy to lose sight of this in part because Elinor’s self-command creates inner stillness, and that inner stillness can seem (and often does to Marianne and to Mrs. Dashwood) like a lack of feeling. But it’s not that at all, as Marianne will come to understand. That inner stillness costs Elinor tremendous exertion.
— The wonderful, subtle similarity between the nasty letter from Willoughby Marianne receives in London and Lucy Steel’s torment of Elinor! We will later discover that Willoughby’s letter was dictated to him by his wife-to-be, making it all-the-more like Elinor’s torment by her rival.
More on Austen.
Much to think about as I finished S&S, but I wanted to note something that carries across the novels I have read — the notion of *tolerable happiness*. Austen uses the term repeatedly (along with a variant, ‘tolerable comfort’) in the novels, and it characterizes the happiness of the novels’ happy endings. I suspect that Austen is doubling meaning here — a not-uncommon feature of her prose. ‘Tolerable’ can describe that which can be borne or endured; it can also describe that which is moderately good or agreeable, that which is not contemptible. (In *Emma*, I believe, we also get the phrases ‘happiness a la mortal’ and ‘finely chequered happiness’, both of which belong to this discussion.) Austen knows that what we often want when we want happiness is moments of transport, of body-leaving joy (there are such moments in the novels) but she also knows that such moments are (grammatically) *moments*: such happiness is intolerable; it cannot be borne, supported, for long: the business of embodied living goes on, a la mortal. The happiness that will satisfy is one that is moderately (another doubling word in Austenian contexts) good, agreeable, supportable. It is happiness compatible with wanting rather better pasturage for one’s cows…But, someone might ask, what of Emma and Knightley’s ‘perfect happiness’? That sounds more than tolerable, at least in the second sense? — True. — Still, I wonder if the ‘perfect’ there is not a bit of deliberate ironic archness, a bit of Emma’s imaginist point of view entering into the narrator’s voice? Not that I mean they were not happy: but rather that their perfect happiness was, after all, perfectly tolerable.
Austen.
— I’ve been accompanying my reading of Austen with sallies into Crabb’s English Synonyms. Crabb, prefacing the work: “Should any object to the introduction of morality into a work of science, I beg them to consider that a writer whose business it was to mark the nice shades of distinction between words closely allied could not do justice to his subject without entering into all the relations of society and showing, from the acknowledged sense of many moral and religious terms, what has been the general sense of mankind on many of the most important questions which have agitated the world.” It seems to me that this captures a deep ambition of Austen’s novels, her writing.
Austen, *Persuasion*.
— While *MP* is my favorite Austen novel, Anne Elliot is my favorite Austen character. — The beautiful handling of Anne’s history with F Wentworth, the proposal, and eventual parting: it is easy to understand even if not to agree with the views of all the interested parties. And the subtle ways Austen shows the reader just how deeply in love Anne was (and, really, still is). Much of the novel’s power is drawn from the continuing strength of her feelings, her constancy.
Austen, *Persuasion*.
— Two observations. (1) In an early paragraph about the mutual affection of Anne and Frederick, Austen’s notes that “the encounter of such lavish recommendations could not fail…they were rapidly and deeply in love.” And so they were, and so they are. Anne, although the least self-deceived of Austen’s central characters (she is certainly less self-deceived than Frederick — but then he was the one rejected, not the one who did the rejecting), is self-deceived about the continuing strength of her feelings for Frederick. Austen shows this to the reader (even before Anne realizes it) in the comments about her loss of ‘bloom’. The return of it later in the novel is not due to Lyme’s sea breezes but to her gradual rehabitation of feelings that have long been treated as alien, abandoned. When Anne first sees Frederick in person, the meeting deeply unsettles her, and she finds that to “retentive feelings” eight years may not be a long time, indeed not much time at all. But despite that acknowledgment, she will continue to resist her feelings, sure that Frederick is no longer for her. (What a wonderful phrase, “retentive feelings” — a ‘conative’ word modified by a ‘cognitive’ one, and their conjunction tells us a great deal about Anne’s mind, in the sense of ‘mind’ that is so important in Austen, the sense that Ryle delineates in his famous essay.)
(2) The fall of Anne’s sister’s son and the consequent events not only allow Austen to delay the first meeting between Anne and Frederick but they serve to foreshadow the fall of Louisa in Lyme and that fall’s consequent events. That’s obvious enough I suppose, but I am embarrassed to say I never really recognized it before. More on that soon.
Austen, *Persuasion*:
—”Prettier musings of high-wrought love and eternal constancy could never have passed along the streets of Bath than Anne was sporting with from Camden Place to Westgate Buildings. It was almost enough to spread purification and perfume along the way.” Beautiful. I love it when Austen lets the prose spring into poetry. Such a paragraph. The play with ‘p’ and ‘sp’s!
— Anne is, in general, clear-sighted, self-commanding. That she is renders the three moments when she completely loses herself and her senses all the more memorable: when Wentworth first sees her again (and she him) at Uppercross, when she first sees Wentworth again in Bath, and when she realizes what his comments and stammering mean at the concert (“He must love her”).There are two other similar moments: one when she finds out that Wentworth is not in love with Louisa (“joy, senseless joy!”) and the other after reading the note Wentworth writes to her while she talks with Captain Harville (“It was an overpowering happiness.”)
Austen, *Persuasion*
—The early scene in which Anne’s nephew, Mary’s son, falls from a tree and breaks his collarbone is crucial to the tale. It establishes Anne’s willingness to help and presence of mind in an emergency. I recall reading once that Tiger Wood’s pulse rate fell when he lined up a put. Something like that, less reductively captured, seems true of Anne. It matters later, of course, in Lyme, in the aftermath of Louisa’s fall, but it also helps to underscore just how in love with Wentworth Anne has been and still is. She loses her senses in various scenes, always because of him, but in (other) emergencies, she exhibits a coolness and readiness that Wentworth himself fails to equal. (The exquisite irony of the ship’s captain failing in a moment of extremity, lapsing into an absence of mind, inability, while this slip of a woman, Anne, remains in control, thoughtful, able!) Wentworth overpowers her in a way nothing else does. So much of the book works only if we come to believe in Anne and the reality and justice of the depth of her love. We know relatively little of Wentworth, and some of it, certainly, *seems* unflattering, but we take Anne’s word for it — and we should.
*Emma*. I was caught today by an opinion of *Emma* held by Mr. and Mrs. James Austen, recorded by Jane Austen. She notes that they liked the book, but that they thought “the language different from the others; not so easily read.” This is perhaps the thing that has stood out to me above everything else in reading the novels this time. The complications of the language of *Emma*: it doubles more, shimmers more, twists more. Although Austen is ever fascinated by self-deception, it is in *Emma* that she makes the very center of the novel’s consciousness the most deeply self-deceived of any of her primary heroines. That requires Austen to do so much more in the writing, to find ways to allow the reader to see the deception and to see past it. Austen’s strategy and tactics for doing so are a study by themselves. To borrow a favorite Austenian term, the language of *Emma* “imposes” on itself, on the reader, but Austen takes care to make the imposition discoverable.
*Northanger Abbey*
Reading the novel this time, what struck me was the feeling of the emergence of a power, of Jane Austen herself. Guy Davenport has a collection of essays entitled *Every Force Evolves a Form*, and *NA* is Austen, an emerging force, evolving her form. To do it, she has to write herself — and her heroine — out of the fantastic, the romantic, call it the metaphysical, and reorient herself — and her heroine — on the probable, the commonplace, call it the ordinary. Most difficult of all, Austen has to demonstrate that her callow heroine’s modest victories over her ignorance, her undisciplined imagination, and her reticence to judge for herself satisfy more deeply than the knowing romantic heroine’s triumph over murderers, black veils and skeletons. And just to make it harder for herself, — because, why not? she is a power — Austen uses her authorial voice to mock, scold and pity Catherine for the modesty of her victories: especially for returning home, evicted and confused, in a hack post-chaise, — worlds away from Cleopatra in a chariot. Austen dares her reader to acknowledge what Austen wants to be acknowledged: the romance of our ordinary lives, the triumph in modest victories over ourselves.
New Podcast Episode: Socrates, Religion and Riddles
The Willingness to Be
Reading James’ Varieties today, and I ran across a phrase that struck me. ‘The willingness to be…” The phrase struck me because it seems particularly apt for characterizing a crucial part of grief and of aging. Each, in its peculiar way, threatens or diminishes our willingness to be.
Grief, the experience of loss, makes the thought of renewed investment in being frightening or unendurable. Aging all-too-often chokes the willingness to be by making it seem that being is the using up of a now urgently finite resource — and we become miserly with our willingness to be, as if unwillingness could somehow bank being, and willingness spend it, if it is spent, only in certain chosen moments.
But we will be — whether we be willing or unwilling to be.
Walden’s Epigraph
Walden’s Epigraph
I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as Chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake his neighbors up.
Thoreau chooses to write an epigraph for his own book, not to use a quotation, although he goes on in Walden to quote other writers constantly, to seed his book with the words of others. So why not choose a quotation to serve as the epigraph? It was standard practice at the time, as it is now.
Thoreau chooses his own words. Now, of course, no one owns words as such: if anyone did, they would not serve their manifold purposes. If your words are really yours, owned, then they are not available to me to be understood. An owned word is incommunicable, unsharable. Yours but inert. Language is a mutual, joint-stock world in all meridians. But these are the words Thoreau chooses, his long and elegant sentence. Why these words and in this order?
The first word of Walden is: ‘I’. — Thoreau underwrites that choice in the opening paragraphs of Chapter one but here he simply makes the choice.
Thoreau steps into view, in propria persona, first to resist a misunderstanding of the action he performed in writing Walden, and then to embrace — and subtilize — an understanding of it.
We will return to ‘I’.
After stepping into view, Thoreau, in effect, puts his hands up, stopping the reader, gesticulating. “I do not propose to write an ode to dejection…” Why would Thoreau refuse this, expect his reader to expect such a proposal?
I suspect the answer has to be that Thoreau writes ahead of his reader’s actual expectations and anticipates what the reader may take the book to be if read in the wrong way, the wrong posture, the wrong spirit. If that’s correct, then Thoreau gives his reader the benefit of his own experience of Walden.
Being the writer of Walden complicates Thoreau’s reading of the book, of course. The writer relives the spontaneity that produced the ordered words: unless the action of writing is completely forgotten, that action returns to the writer in reading: Thoreau cannot encounter his words for the first time as his reader can. The words cannot speak to a passivity unaffected by the writerly activity that produced the words. Still, admitting that is not to admit that Thoreau cannot make an educated guess about how his words will strike his reader, address his reader’s passivity.
Thoreau anticipates that his reader will mistake Walden as an ode to dejection.
Why an ‘ode’ and why to ‘dejection’?
Quantum Est In Rebus Inane 