Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2001/03/12/a_jane_for_all_seasons.php
Monday, March 12, 2001
Was there a soup¡on of sapphic yearning when heroine Fanny Price—playing a vicar in a home theatrical!—was caressed by Miss Crawford in the new movie version of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park?
Jane Austen is one of those women from the past who has both been co-opted by feminists and patronized for her lack of geopolitical interest. Of course, her unmarried state is a hopeful sign to feminists, and the injection of at least a hint of lesbianism into an Austen movie was inevitable.
But the politicization of Jane Austen began much earlier, at the conclusion of the suffragette era and the beginning of modern feminism, with that pivotal figure in modern female thought, Virginia Woolf. Woolf faced the problem that feminist lovers of books always face with Jane Austen—she writes so well, and is so much fun to read, that some way must be found to 'save' her for private reading and academic study even though her plot lines run to standard romantic boy-meets-girl, boy-leaves-girl, boy-gets-girl formulas. In other words, feminists must distinguish Jane Austen from her successors in the romantic fiction genre in order to justify the pleasant habit of reading her.
They face this same problem with the BrontŒ sisters' slightly later entries, notably Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. These are much more broodingly 'romantic' works, but all those smoldering passions and broken conventions—or conventions teetering on the brink of being broken, as in the almost successful attempt at a bigamous marriage by Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre—count as marks in the BrontŒs' favor. This is because spontaneity and elemental passions and lack of self-control and epatering the bourgeoisie are modern virtues.
And one other thing counts in the BrontŒs' favor: their selection of heroes or heroines precariously perched on the edges of middle-class respectability, and at times falling over the edge. Heathcliff, the foundling of obscure, possibly gypsy parentage, and the penniless orphan Jane Eyre (who tutors an illegitimate child of a French courtesan, no less, and fights off the mad mixed-blood Caribbean married to Mr. Rochester) are far removed from the more proper circles of Jane Austen's Bennets, Woodhouses, and Elliots.
It is in her (let us admit it) delightfully written A Room of One's Own that Woolf uses the BrontŒs and Jane Austen to develop a forthrightly feminist thesis: that historically, female social constraints and lack of financial independence and educational opportunities have prevented almost all gifted women throughout most of English history from competing on equal terms with men in literature. (Never mind that almost equally daunting drawbacks have prevented nearly all gifted males throughout most of history from making use of their talents as well. Misfortune is remarkably gender-blind.)
Virginia Woolf, like many non-religious authors of her day, valued the integrity of the written word with a religious fervor. She believed the novelist had a duty to subordinate his voice and concerns to the consistent development of his fictional characters. Woolf described Austen's 'miraculous' freedom from resentment and frustration in her sphere—'I could not find any signs that her circumstances had harmed her work in the slightest... Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching.' Woolf concedes that this psychological balance permits Austen to approach a kind of creative perfection within the world of her novels.
But where Austen comes in for faint praise and even criticism is in that very acceptance of her limited experience. Not only did Austen have no opportunities to jaunt about Napoleonic Europe, sail the seven seas with her naval brother, or pursue parliamentary politics, she did not even betray a desire to do any of these things by covering any of these topics second-hand. Her heroines dispense baskets of food to the poor, but do not involve themselves in questions of land reform, the economic dislocations of the early Industrial Revolution, labor struggles or the extension of the suffrage.
Indeed, Austen's lightness, good humor, and mental balance, her easy negotiation of the conventions of her social class, contribute to her technical success but also keep her from that creative dissatisfaction with her lot that might have moved her, in Woolf's judgment, to reach out for a greater and larger world—pumping her brother, perhaps, for nautical recollections in sufficient detail to make them her own for literary purposes.
So Woolf's delight in Austen's confident style and rancor-free mind is tempered by her feeling that, after all, there is something slight and unweighty about Austen's work, so that her significance, though real, may owe much to her role as a Missing Link between Fanny Burney (a great early success story among female novelists in the generation before Austen's, and still a good read) and, well, Woolf's own more open, enlightened, liberated generation.
Alas, poor Jane gets it from both sides here, since the traditional manly man's reaction to her novels also tends toward the 'where's the blood, where's the action?' school. Even childbirth very definitely occurs off-stage in a Jane Austen novel. Recall also Elizabeth Bennet's anxious nursing of her sister Jane's common cold (though anxiety over fairly wimpy complaints can more easily be forgiven when we remember that there were no antibiotics to handle wimpy complaints that deteriorated into things like pneumonia). And then there is Louisa in Persuasion, whose entire personality is permanently altered by a fall she suffers while jumping down the steps at the seaside resort of Rye. She is stunned, perhaps by some sort of concussion, but by the time she fully recovers (after more anxious nursing by most of the females in the novel), she has become markedly more timid, easily startled by noise, and fond of quiet.
There is another, more forgiving, more admiring strand of feminist reaction to Austen, which seizes on her sometimes cool, acerbic humor and ironic detachment from most of her characters as evidence that she was satirizing society and the social conventions of her day. To be sure, she was doing that, to some extent. But from what angle, and with what purpose, was she laughing at people like Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Mrs. Bennet, Mr. Collins, Sir William Elliot and his daughter Elizabeth, or the insufferable clerical couple in Emma?
Some revisionists would like to believe that Austen was in some sense 'deconstructing' her society as busily as she was constructing her characters—that she allowed them to condemn not only themselves, but by extension the entire world to which even her heroes and heroines comfortably accommodate themselves. In this ingenious way feminists can snuggle up in an armchair with Emma or Pride and Prejudice while deploring almost every convention, value, or article of faith that Austen herself not only was reared in but also accepted as her own.
C. S. Lewis wrote an essay on Jane Austen in which he called her the daughter of Samuel Johnson, thinking of the clarity and sharp edges of the moral vision they both shared. The feminists have got some of the picture right—Jane is the antithesis of treacly nineteenth century sentimentalism and its romantic descendants. Yet this is not because she rejects the conventions of society.
In fact, she was reared in the last years of that eighteenth century Johnsonian society against which the Romantics rebelled. The Romantics were the great individualists of their day, the ones who argued against general laws from an egocentrically particular vantage point ('I must follow my star! I have a right to be happy!'—that kind of thing). Austen's Anne Elliot, the most mature of all her heroines, did not believe she had a right to be happy either at someone else's expense or at the expense of societal conventions, even though they doubtless seemed sturdier then than they do now. Anne wished very much to be happy—as who does not?—yet denied herself the right to do so even at the relatively small cost of her godmother's disapproval of the dashing and impecunious yet respectable naval officer she loved.
Years later, after Anne has secured a hard-bought sense not of happiness but of contentment with her place in life and the fulfillment of her duties to friends and family, she continues to believe she would have been happier married to her young naval officer, but not at the expense of violating the forcefully expressed views of her godmother. How much more conventional can you get? How less free to follow your star?
It is preposterous to conclude that because Anne's godmother gave her bad advice, Austen meant to call into question the entire traditional family and social structure, any more than we are to believe that because Pride and Prejudice's Mrs. Bennet is silly and superficial, her children should feel free to mock and disobey her.
No, there is another reason (besides, of course, Austen's sharp eye and sense of fun) why Jane Austen's heroines are presented with so many silly authority figures. In their quest for an adult romantic destiny, issuing in a fruitful, stable, and sustaining married life, her heroines are confronted with the female, bourgeois, early nineteenth century equivalent of hardships to undergo and dragons to slay to grow in wisdom and virtue and prove their worthiness. When Jane Austen temporarily deprives her heroines of the men they love, she is not only engaging in a suspense-building device, but demonstrating her heroines' worth, as they repent of bad choices and ill-chosen words, if need be, and commit themselves to better ones.
If this sounds almost as solemn and humorless as a feminist tract, we all know that Austen's novels easily avoid the comparison. They are acutely witty, since Austen delights in the manifold foibles and interactions of human creatures. Yet she is not afraid to judge her characters in very clearly defined moral terms, even as she skewers them as comic objects of derision.
One of the most striking examples of Austen's willingness to judge occurs during the excursion to Box Hill in Emma, where Emma becomes intoxicated by her own wit and the playful attentions of Frank Churchill, and directs a cuttingly funny remark at the garrulous and simpleminded but good-natured impoverished gentlewoman Miss Bates. Emma's own properly formed conscience convicts her of insensitivity and impiety toward an elder, but she also suffers the privately expressed condemnation of a shocked and offended suitor, Mr. Knightley.
This scene marks the moral and educational turning point for Emma, as she faces the need to put aside childish things—her play-acting of the lady of the manor and regional matchmaker—and accept her real power to harm or help those around her. Only then, as a woman aware of responsibilities, consequences, and human limitations, can she qualify as a fit wife for Mr. Knightley. (Note, by the way, how many of Austen's heroines grow up without a mother's guidance, or hampered by a silly mother. They are left to look for role models among friends and relations who embody the best virtues of society. Only Anne Elliot, in Persuasion, seems to have no peer in judgment around her, though her godmother is, within the limitations of her worship of status, a good woman.)
Unfortunately for the feminists, Jane Austen is neither a lightweight prisoner of her benighted times nor a deliciously devious mole bent on undermining her social system. She is a virtuoso novelist whose bedrock seriousness permits her to play entertainingly with the faults and foibles of those around her. The proof of her moral maturity is that she treats stupidity married with immorality (as in Lydia Bennet's elopement with Whickam) very sharply, while stupidity married with generous good will receives the warm sunshine of good-humored ribbing from this worthy daughter of an Anglican clergyman.