William Deresiewicz Read online

  Chapter 1: Introduction

  161

  Henrietta Ten Harmsel, Jane Austen: A Study in Fictional Conventions (The Hague: Mouton, 1964), which concentrates on Richardson and Burney; Frank W. Bradbrook, Jane Austen and Her Predecessors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), which covers a range of eighteenth-century literature, including periodical essays, conduct books, the literature of the picturesque, drama, poetry, and, especially, fiction; Kenneth L. Moler, Jane Austen’s Art of Allusion (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968), which is organized thematically rather than by genre, but which concentrates on conduct books and the novel; Jocelyn Harris, Jane Austen’s Art of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), which focuses on Richardson; and Mary Waldron, Jane Austen and the Fiction of Her Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), which focuses on the didactic novel. Enumerations of Austen’s major influences include Johnson and Cowper (Mary Lascelles, Jane Austen and Her Art [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939], p. 43); Shakespeare, Cowper, and Crabbe (Q. D. Leavis, “Mansfield Park,” Collected Essays, I:167); Richardson and Fielding (Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957], pp. 296299; and Joseph Wiesenfarth, The Errand of Form [New York: Fordham University Press, 1967], p. ix); and Milton, Richardson, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Locke, Cowper, and Thomson (Jocelyn Harris, “Jane Austen and the Burden of the [Male] Past: The Case Reexamined,” in Jane Austen and the Discourses of Feminism, ed. Devoney Looser [New York: St. Martin’s, 1995], pp. 87100). 9. Not even Crabbe’s impact has been investigated, though a leading critic counts him as one of her three major influences (see Leavis, previous note) and her love for his poetry is well known (see Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995], p. 243 [21 Oct. 1813] and elsewhere, and AustenLeigh, Persuasion, p. 331). Bradbrook spends only a few sentences on Crabbe. For the other halfdozen very brief treatments in the critical literature of the last half-century, see Barry Roth and Joel Weinsheimer, An Annotated Bibliography of Jane Austen Studies, 19521972 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1973); Barry Roth, An Annotated Bibliography of Jane Austen Studies, 197383 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1985); and Barry Roth, An Annotated Bibliography of Jane Austen Studies, 198494 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1996). The fact that the great majority of Crabbe’s work began to appear only in 1807 does not seem to be the sole reason for this neglect. Even Cowper, whom virtually everyone acknowledges as a major influence, has scarcely ever been investigated as such. (The only study listed in the aforementioned bibliographies is John Halperin’s brief essay on the quotation from The Task that appears in Emma, “The Worlds of Emma: Jane Austen and Cowper,” in Jane Austen: Bicentenary Essays, ed. John Halperin [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975], pp. 197206.) The bias seems to be against any consideration not only of the literature of Austen’s adulthood, but also of poetry as such. Waldron’s study is an exception to the former prejudice, but the didactic fiction she discusses is hardly representative of the new currents in English literature, and in fact her point is that Austen introduced the moral complexity of nineteenthcentury fiction into didactic fiction’s simplistic paradigms—again leaving open the question of where she absorbed the new elements from. 10. For an example of the old view, see Q. D. Leavis, “Jane Austen: Novelist of a Changing Society,” Collected Essays, I:5859. For examples of the more recent one, which

  162

  Chapter 1: Introduction

  sees her novels as combining elements of both centuries, see Julia Prewitt Brown, Jane Austen’s Novels: Social Change and Literary Form (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 3839; and Patricia Spacks, “Muted Discord: Generational Conflict in Jane Austen,” in Jane Austen in a Social Context, ed. David Monaghan (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1981), pp. 159179. 11. Susan Morgan discusses this longstanding critical posture, and the prejudices that underlay it, in “Jane Austen and Romanticism,” Jane Austen Companion, pp. 364368. To cite the opinions of three venerable critics of the first half of the twentieth century: for A. C. Bradley, Austen is not Romantic at all: she appreciates nature, but we detect in her none of the “new modes of feeling” toward it (“Jane Austen,” A Miscellany [London: Macmillan, 1929], p. 42); according to C. S. Lewis, “[i]n her we still breathe the air of the Rambler and Idler” (“A Note on Jane Austen,” in Jane Austen: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Ian Watt [Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963], p. 28); and for Leavis, while Austen “shows she knew the work of the Romantic poets and novelists,” she was “unimpressed” by it, remaining thoroughly eighteenth century in her view of human nature, her approach to depicting it, and her language (“Jane Austen: Novelist of a Changing Society,” pp. 5859). For a later assertion of this view in response to early claims of Austen’s affinity with the Romantics, see Robert Langbaum’s contribution in Karl Kroeber, Jerome J. McGann, and Robert Langbaum, “British Romanticism and British Romantic Fiction: A Forum,” Wordsworth Circle 10 (1979): 139146. 12. Needless to say, this does not devalue such studies. Examples include Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (New York: Routledge, 1993); Harris, “Jane Austen and the Burden of the (Male) Past”; Glenda A. Hudson, “Consolidated Communities: Masculine and Feminine Values in Jane Austen’s Fiction,” in Jane Austen and the Discourses of Feminism, pp. 101114; Beth Lau, “Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice,” in A Companion to Romanticism, ed. Duncan Wu (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 219226; and Susan J. Wolfson, “Romanticism and Gender,” in A Companion to Romanticism, pp. 387396. See also Linkin, “The Current Canon in British Romantics Studies.” 13. See Robert Kiely, The Romantic Novel in England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972); Joseph Kestner, “Jane Austen: The Tradition of the English Romantic Novel, 18001832,” Wordsworth Circle 7 (1976): 297311; Butler, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries, pp. 5573; Gary Kelly, “Romantic Fiction,” Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, pp. 196215; and John Sutherland, “The Novel,” in A Companion to Romanticism, pp. 333344. Jay Clayton, Romantic Vision and the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), sees Mansfield Park as articulating an opposition to Romantic desires for vision or transcendence (pp. 61ff.). 14. For Karl Kroeber, both Austen and Wordsworth reject conventionality through a critical engagement with convention (“Jane Austen, Romantic,” Wordsworth Circle 7 [1976]: 291296). Kroeber delineates further parallels between Austen and the poets in his contribution to “British Romanticism and British Romantic Fiction: A Forum.” Stuart Tave discusses a number of affinities between Austen and Wordsworth, including their shared interest in common subjects and familiar language, in “Jane Austen and One of Her Contemporaries,” in Bicentenary Essays, pp. 6174. For Susan Morgan, Jane Austen shares the Romantic poets’ epistemological concerns: “The subject of Austen’s fiction,

  Chapter 1: Introduction

  163

  like that of the major poets of her time, is the relation between the mind and its objects” (In the Meantime [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980], p. 4). Morgan delineates further parallels in “Jane Austen and Romanticism.” Larry J. Swingle incorporates Austen into a number of studies in which he has sought to reconceptualize British Romantic literature. In “The Poets, the Novelists, and the English Romantic Situation,” Wordsworth Circle 10 (1979): 218228, Austen’s other novels, particularly Emma and Persuasion, exemplify the observation that “achieved unions of the Romantic period tend to take place in contexts of division that expose barriers” (p. 220), a line of thinking Swingle had developed earlier in “The Perfect Happiness of the Union: Jane Austen’s Emma and English Romanticism,” Wordsworth Circle 7 (1976): 312319. In “The Romantic Emergence,” in Romantic Poetry: Recent Revisionary Criticism, ed. Karl Kroeber and Gene W. Ruoff (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993), pp. 4459, Swingle uses Austen and others to develop the related idea that Romanticism is characterized by an interest in occupying the middle ground between competing systems. In “Jane Austen an
d the Romantic Imprisonment,” Nina Auerbach argues that Austen’s depiction of the “tension between the security of a restricted world and its unrelenting imprisonment” aligns her with the Romantics (Jane Austen in a Social Context, p. 10). Martin Price sees Austen as valuing the cultivation of what Wordsworth calls “wise passiveness” (“Austen: Manners and Morals,” in Jane Austen, ed. Harold Bloom [New York: Chelsea House, 1986], p. 178). Marshall Brown points out that Austen’s heroines, like the Romantic poets, come to know themselves by remembering past experience (“Romanticism and the Enlightenment,” in Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, p. 43). Clifford Siskin argues that in both Austen and Wordsworth the idea of “development” is used to legitimize, by naturalizing, social change—particularly social change in the direction of hierarchical differentiation (“A Formal Development: Austen, the Novel, and Romanticism,” Centennial Review 2829 [19841985]: 128). William Galperin sees in the narrator’s defense of novel-writing in Northanger Abbey a covert gesture toward the male Romantic poets—an “alliance,” he says, “that dare not speak its name” (The Historical Austen [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003], p. 84; and see also his “What Happens When Jane Austen and Frances Burney Enter the Romantic Canon?,” in Lessons of Romanticism: A Critical Companion, ed. Thomas Pfau and Robert F. Gleckner [Durham: Duke University Press, 1998], pp. 376391). Clara Tuite, in Romantic Austen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), undertakes a different kind of project: rather than looking at Austen’s work in the light of that of specific contemporaneous authors, she seeks to set it within the context of Romantic-era cultural formations—especially what she calls “Romantic organicism” (p. 11)—as a way of understanding issues of “genre, national culture and canon-formation” (p. 2), particularly “the history of the canonical production of Austen” (p. 3). More generally, Rachel M. Brownstein sees women’s courtship novels—in their stress on individual choice, sentiment, and subjectivity—as playing a crucial role in the Romantic revolution in culture (“Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice,” in Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, pp. 3257). 15. Significantly, these observations almost always concern one of the last three novels; they tend, however, to be made in passing and to reflect, in their diversity, the lack of critical consensus over what constitutes the “Romantic.” Thus, for example, Fanny Price

  164

  Chapter 1: Introduction

  seems to be Austen’s most Romantic heroine in her least Romantic novel. Harold Bloom sees Fanny as Wordsworthian (“Introduction,” Jane Austen, pp. 78), while Nina Auerbach sees her as a monstrous and marginal Romantic figure akin to Wordsworth’s leachgatherer or Coleridge’s ancient mariner (“Jane Austen’s Dangerous Charm: Feeling as One Ought About Fanny Price,” in Jane Austen: New Perspectives, ed. Janet Todd [New York: Holmes and Meier, 1983], pp. 208223). For Mansfield Park as Austen’s least Romantic novel, see Galperin, “What Happens When Jane Austen and Frances Burney Enter the Romantic Canon?” Whether Emma is Romantic depends on what one sees as the novel’s final judgment on the value of the imagination—“Imagination” being, along with “Nature,” one of the two abstractions to which Romanticism is most often reduced. For Emma’s imagination as Romantic, see A. Walton Litz, Jane Austen: A Study of Her Artistic Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 135; and Moler, Jane Austen’s Art of Allusion, pp. 156157. If “Imagination” is most often invoked in discussions of the Romantic in Emma, “Nature” is indeed the key term in analogous discussions of Persuasion. See, for example, Litz, Jane Austen, p. 153, and “Persuasion: Forms of Estrangement,” in Bicentenary Essays, p. 228. Litz writes in the former study that “Nature has ceased to be a mere backdrop; landscape is a structure of feeling which can express, and also modify, the minds of those who view it. In their quiet and restrained fashion [Persuasion and Sanditon] are part of the new movement in English literature.” The latter is one of several studies that see Anne’s solitary leavetaking of Uppercross, in its mixing of natural observation with recollection, as the novel’s most Romantic scene; others point to the first part of the walk to Winthrop (pp. 106107). For Persuasion as Romantic for reasons other than its attention to nature, see Karl Kroeber, Styles in Fictional Structure (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 83; and Harris, “Jane Austen and the Burden of the (Male) Past,” p. 95. That the novel is Austen’s most Romantic has become common wisdom of late: see Juliet McMaster and Bruce Stovel in their introduction to Jane Austen’s Business (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996), p. xix. For Anne as Austen’s most Romantic heroine, see Joseph Wiesenfarth, “Persuasion: History and Myth,” Wordsworth Circle 2 (1971): 164. For readings that reject the characterization of the novel as Romantic, or see it as itself involving a rejection of the Romantic, see John Halperin, The Life of Jane Austen (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1984), pp. 302303; Laura G. Mooneyham, Romance, Language, and Education in Jane Austen’s Novels (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 152153; and Lorrie Clark, “Transfiguring the Romantic Sublime in Persuasion,” in Jane Austen’s Business, pp. 3041. For a critique of facile labelings of Austen as un-Romantic or the later Austen as incipiently Romantic, see Swingle, “The Poets, the Novelists, and the English Romantic Situation,” p. 218. 16. See Peter Knox-Shaw, “Persuasion, Byron, and the Turkish Tale,” RES 44 (1993): 4769; Keith G. Thomas, “Jane Austen and the Romantic Lyric: Persuasion and Coleridge’s Conversation Poems,” ELH 54 (1987): 893924; and Jane Millgate, “Prudential Lovers and Lost Heirs: Persuasion and the Presence of Scott,” in Jane Austen’s Business, pp. 109123. 17. A question so famously vexed in the study of the literature of the period as to constitute a virtual subspecialty. See, among others, Arthur O. Lovejoy, “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms,” in English Romantic Poets, ed. M. H. Abrams (2nd ed.; New York: Oxford

  Chapter 1: Introduction

  165

  University Press, 1975), pp. 324; Wellek, “Concept of Romanticism”; Morse Peckham, The Triumph of Romanticism (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1970); M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971); Anne K. Mellor, English Romantic Irony (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980); Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Mellor, Romanticism and Gender; and Swingle, “The Poets, the Novelists, and the English Romantic Situation” and “The Romantic Emergence.” 18. For the pitfalls involved in trying to address the question of whether Jane Austen is a Romantic—the lack of consensus about how Romanticism ought to be defined, the superficiality of the “checklist” approach, the dubious value of declaring Austen a Romantic in any case—see Morgan, “Jane Austen and Romanticism,” p. 364. 19. On the matter of influence and of Austen’s relationship to these male poets, I should say at the outset that I will not be proposing a gendered reading of that relationship. While feminist criticism has contributed enormously valuable insights to the study of Jane Austen over the last several decades—has, indeed, revolutionized the field to become the major framework through which she is read today—and so has shaped my understanding of her work in ways too numerous and too deeply assimilated to enumerate, I have not found gender to be the first or most urgent line of questioning that has presented itself to me in the course of this investigation—have not found Austen’s response to these poets to have been inflected by her female subject position. In this respect my approach is no different from the great bulk of the many influence studies that have been written about Austen’s reception of Richardson, Johnson, and other earlier male authors. Nor have I chosen these four poets, as my inclusion of Scott indicates, for their canonical (or formerly canonical) status, but rather, as I show below, because Austen herself signals their importance to her through allusion and reference. Thus, while I hope the conclusions I set out here will be found valuable to the feminist conversation about Austen, as food for future thought, I have developed them within a differently or
iented critical framework. 20. It should be said that the attempt to read Austen against these poets presupposes an affirmative answer to a more fundamental question: is it ever legitimate to make arguments of influence across generic lines? The belief that it is not, at least with respect to Austen, is the reason, as I suggest above (note 9), that we have so very few studies of Austen’s reception of Cowper or Crabbe. And yet we don’t hesitate to accept such arguments with respect to other novelists; no one disputes, for example, that Wordsworth had a profound impact on George Eliot, or that Shakespeare influenced just about everybody. Course syllabi that include both poetry and fiction, once unthinkable, have become common in recent years. And yet, as some of the responses to this study in manuscript suggest, we still resist arguments of influence that cut across the grain of formal and other differences, whatever the demonstrable affinities of theme and concern between the works in question—a resistance that only reinforces the generic boundaries that have made such arguments, at least in Austen’s case, lamentably scarce. 21. Austen’s exposure to German Romanticism—at least until the appearance of the translation of Mme. de Stael’s De l’Allemagne in 1813, quite late in the period in question and only an indirect exposure—was almost certainly limited to the plays of Kotzebue and Schiller and, among Goethe’s work, The Sorrows of Young Werther, mentioned in the juve-166