William Deresiewicz Read online

  chapter 2 : Early Phase Versus Major Phase: The Changing Feelings of

  the Mind

  1. Letters, p. 99 (811 April 1805). 2. John Wiltshire, “Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion,” in Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, p. 58. 3. John Wiltshire, Jane Austen and the Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 9. 4. Jane Nardin, “Jane Austen and the Problem of Leisure,” in Jane Austen in a Social Context, p. 123. 5. Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 208209. 6. Litz, Jane Austen, p. 153. 7. Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 123. 8. Warren Roberts, Jane Austen and the French Revolution (New York: St. Martin’s, 1979), p. 105. To these more recent characterizations we can add the inaugural ones of AustenLeigh—“a greater refinement of taste, a more nice sense of propriety, a deeper insight into the delicate anatomy of the human heart” (Persuasion, p. 374)—and Simpson—“in the former set the art is simpler, less concealed, more easily discovered: in the latter, both passion and humour are rather more developed” (in Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, ed. Southam, pp. 253254). 9. Although the ensuing discussion will cite specific works as points of reference, I will not be discussing poets or poems at any length. Apart from considerations of space, the characteristics in question are too well known as elements of Wordsworth’s or the other poets’ work to require additional demonstration, and the kind of influence I am considering here (as opposed to in my later chapters) is not such as is visible in one-to-one correspondences—allusions, echoes, rewritings—but rather involves the absorption of fundamental orientations. 10. Whether this also makes them “Romantic” I will leave the reader to decide, being anxious, for reasons I explained in the previous chapter (see notes 17 and 18), to avoid that term. 11. In making this argument, I will be drawing my lines of classification athwart those of Julia Prewitt Brown and Susan Morgan, who have articulated two of the most valuable taxonomies of Austen’s work. Brown, focusing on narrative structure, divides the novels into works of ironic comedy, Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma, and works of satiric realism, Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion, identifying the former with the eighteenth century, the latter with the nineteenth (Jane Austen’s Novels, pp. 3745). I have no quarrel with this classificatory scheme, not even with Brown’s assignment of each novel to its respective century, not only because she clearly does not mean

  172

  Chapter 1: Introduction

  us to take her temporal classifications literally (Emma is of course not literally a work of the eighteenth century) but also because her criteria relate not to the kinds of questions I will be taking up, but to unconnected matters of social setting and narrative dynamics (pp. 3839). Morgan, focusing on modes of cognitive development, divides the novels into stories of crisis, Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma, and stories of passage, Mansfield Park and Persuasion. Sense and Sensibility splits between the two categories: Marianne’s story is one of crisis, Elinor’s one of passage (In the Meantime, pp. 78). Again, I have no quarrel with this. Still, it is worth noting that both Brown’s and, to a slightly lesser extent, Morgan’s groupings differ from mine with respect to the same two novels, Sense and Sensibility and Emma. These are indeed the two that present the most difficulty in seeing Austen’s earlier work as uninfluenced by the Romantic poets and her later work as decisively shaped by them. Sense and Sensibility, to a cursory glance, does seem to present “Romantic” characteristics, while Emma seems to present few or none. I will accordingly focus on these two works whenever possible in the ensuing discussion. 12. The handling of nature in the late works has been discussed mainly in connection with Persuasion, though also occasionally with Mansfield Park. See chapter 1, note 15. 13. Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (London: Penguin, 1995), p. 85 (hereafter cited parenthetically). 14. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (London: Penguin, 1996), p. 129 (hereafter cited parenthetically). 15. Jane Austen, Persuasion (London: Penguin, 1965), p. 107 (hereafter cited parenthetically). 16. Litz, “Persuasion: Forms of Estrangement,” in Bicentenary Essays, p. 228. 17. As discussed, classically, in M. H. Abrams’s “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric” (in From Sensibility to Romanticism, ed. Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom [New York: Oxford University Press, 1965], pp. 527560). This is not to say that this or any scene in Austen reproduces the structure or possesses all the features of Abrams’s model. But by the same token, many of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s nature poems that also do not fully fit the model exhibit the dialectic in question, which is indeed fundamental to their approach to the perception of nature. 18. Litz, Jane Austen, p. 153. See also his “Persuasion: Forms of Estrangement,” p. 228. 19. See especially ll. 9199 and 146166. 20. Though, as Litz points out, it shows a much greater sensitivity toward the natural world than any of the early novels, working the annual cycle into the fabric of the narrative by keying Emma’s moods to the passage of the seasons, so that, to take only the most obvious examples, her frosty reception of Elton’s proposal accords with the weather outside the carriage, while she and Knightley declare their mutual warmth on a midsummer afternoon (Jane Austen, p. 151). 21. Much of Wordsworth’s most important poetry of place not having yet been published, the most obvious example available to Austen would have been “The Brothers,” in which this theme is central. It is also essential to “Tintern Abbey,” of course, as well as to Coleridge’s peroration in “Frost at Midnight” (“For I was reared … ,” ll. 51ff.). In Scott’s verse, the theme receives its most emphatic expression in the title character of “The Lady of the Lake”; in his early fiction, in the figure of Brown in Guy Mannering, especially upon

  Chapter 2: Early Phase Verus Major Phase

  173

  that character’s return to Ellengowan at the start of vol. III. But it is also an idea that, in an expanded form, informs virtually everything Scott wrote: that national character—whether of Highlanders, Lowlanders, or Englishmen—is shaped by the land in which it took root. Wiltshire, as I noted above, also mentions the idea of place as among the differences between the first and last three novels (“Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion,” p. 58). For the view that character is formed in relation to place in all six of the novels, see Ann Banfield, “The Influence of Place: Jane Austen and the Novel of Social Consciousness,” in Jane Austen in a Social Context, pp. 2848. 22. Byron expresses the sentiment in two early poems on his school days, “On a Distant View of the Village and School of Harrow on the Hill, 1806,” and “Lines Written Beneath an Elm in the Churchyard of Harrow,” but his fullest expression of it is negative: Childe Harold’s self-tormenting self-exile from his native land. 23. For Elinor’s love for Marianne as the emotional center of the novel, see Eve Sedgwick, “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl,” Critical Inquiry 17 (1991): 818837; and George E. Haggerty, Unnatural Affections (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), pp. 7287. The passage in question reads, “among the merits and the happiness of Elinor and Marianne, let it not be ranked as the least considerable, that though sisters, and living almost within sight of each other, they could live without disagreement between themselves, or producing coolness between their husbands” (322323). 24. Gene W. Ruoff discusses the tendency of the last three novels to be about “coming home,” as opposed to going out (“The Sense of a Beginning: Mansfield Park and Romantic Narrative,” Wordsworth Circle 10 [1979]: 184185). 25. Austen did not know The Prelude, of course, but she would have known any number of Wordsworth’s other poems that show the self as formed during childhood, most obviously the Intimations Ode and “My heart leaps up when I behold,” which makes explicit the doctrine that “The Child is father to the Man.” 26. In Ruoff’s words, “Elizabeth seems in some peculiar fashion to have been born yesterday” (“Sense of a Beginning,” p. 178). 27. Wiltshire traces this shaping of character by upbringing in the cases of Fanny and Mary (“Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion,” pp. 5966). 28. That Anne was her mot
her’s favorite is implied by the fact that she becomes Lady Russell’s, her mother’s closest friend’s, but even more by the fact that “it was only in Anne that [Lady Russell] could fancy the mother to revive again,” for it is a rule in Austen’s world that a parent will love the child most like them, as Mr. Bennet does Elizabeth, Mrs. Bennet Lydia, Mrs. Dashwood Marianne, and Anne’s own father his Elizabeth. 29. The novel’s opening also sketches the histories of several other characters in such a way as to show that their present patterns of behavior are the outgrowth, if not of their childhoods, then still of their pasts. Mr. Weston and Miss Taylor/Mrs. Weston are thus characterized in chapter 2, Miss Bates in chapter 3. Emma’s argument to Knightley about Frank in chapter 18 rests on the same logic. 30. Any number of examples may be cited, including “We are Seven,” “The Idiot Boy,” “Anecdote for Fathers,” “Lucy Gray,” “Alice Fell,” and Coleridge’s “The Foster Mother’s Tale.” 31. Morgan, In the Meantime, p. 134.

  174

  Chapter 2: Early Phase Versus Major Phase

  32. Another, silent example is the gap between the reception of Collins’s initial letter, dated 15 October, and his arrival a month later on 18 November, an interval indicated by nothing more than a paragraph break. It took me many years to notice just how long this gap is, probably because, as is not the case with these other two intervals, it does occur at a point in the plot when something important is supposedly in progress, Jane’s romance with Bingley. Nevertheless, this interval, too, remains blank, devoid of development. 33. Two peripheral figures, Mr. Norris and Dr. Grant, die during the course of Mansfield Park. It is no coincidence that Mrs. Churchill’s death precipitates the cascade of changes that results in the novel’s culminating unions by releasing a whole raft of characters from the situations in which they had been frozen: Frank and Jane, Emma and Knightley, Harriet and Robert Martin—even, in a comic touch, Mr. Churchill himself, finally able to pay his very old friend the visit he had been promising these ten years. 34. I am indebted to Karl Kroeber for this insight. 35. Lionel Trilling, “Emma,” Encounter 8 (June 1957): 53. 36. The same is also true, more massively and emphatically than ever before in Austen’s work, for Sanditon. 37. For a different view, see Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, p. 179, who argues that his experiences in Antigua leave Sir Thomas a fundamentally changed man. 38. Particularly illustrative is his remark to Fanny during their dialogue about Henry’s proposal, where he rails against the “willfulness of temper, self-conceit and … tendency to that independence of spirit, which prevails so much in modern days, even in young women” (262263). 39. For a reading of this visit that sees it as implicitly critical of Emma’s contempt for the poor, see Brown, Jane Austen’s Novels, pp. 114117. 40. This development is clearly related to Wiltshire’s observation that the later novels undertake a much broader and deeper social critique (see note 2 above). Mary Evans, arguing that Austen criticizes capitalist morality in all her novels, notes that they all present pictures of desperate or potentially desperate financial circumstances (Jane Austen and the State [London: Tavestock Publications, 1987], pp. 47). (For a similar view, see Judith Lowder Newton’s reading of Pride and Prejudice in Women, Power, and Subversion: Social Strategies in British Fiction, 17781860 [Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1981], pp. 5585.) But there is an important difference between a desperate situation and one that is merely potentially so. It is worth noting in this connection that while all three of Brown’s “ironic comedies” maintained their lightness of tone by shielding their heroines from financial pressures, Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey simply wave those pressures away (her mother may worry about the future, but Elizabeth doesn’t, and neither does the narrator), whereas in Emma the importance of money is confronted squarely, the heroine simply being fortunate enough to have a lot of it. 41. Lady Susan/The Watsons/Sanditon, p. 168. 42. I regard Marianne’s story as Sense and Sensibility’s principal narrative line, with Elinor present mainly to provide contrast and a point of view. 43. Rambler 41, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, 16 vols., ed. W. J. Bate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), III:223. 44. For a discussion of the difference between the Johnsonian and Wordsworthian

  Chapter 2: Early Phase Verus Major Phase

  175

  conceptions of memory very much along these lines, see Margery Sabin, English Romanticism and the French Tradition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), pp. 7880. 45. Stuart M. Tave provides the most extensive analysis heretofore of the theme of memory in Mansfield Park, primarily comparing Fanny’s strong memory to the Crawfords’ weak ones (Some Words of Jane Austen [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973], pp. 194204). For other discussions, see my chapter on the novel. 46. “The Two April Mornings” presents a particularly complex intertwining of past and present moments through the uniting power of memory. In a striking effect not dissimilar from what we see here, Matthew recollects how, coming upon his daughter’s grave some time after her death, he “loved her more, For so it seemed, than till that day [he] e’er had loved before” (ll. 3840). The key to this striking statement seems to be the fact that Matthew had come upon the grave inadvertently; as in Fanny’s experience with her mother, memory acts the more powerfully when acting unexpectedly. 47. In one of Wordsworth’s most striking images of the power of memory over the body—its physical dwelling within it—the priest says of James that “often, rising from his bed at night, He in his sleep would walk about, and sleeping He sought his brother Leonard” (ll. 351353). 48. Austen is driving home here the closeness of the word “feeling” ‘s two senses, just as Wordsworth, in Karl Kroeber’s account, “prefers the word `feeling’ to `emotion,’ in part because he wants to exploit the dual relevance of `feeling,’ which by its ambiguity emphasizes the inseparableness of emotion and sensation” (Romantic Landscape Vision [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975], p. 35). 49. As Ruoff puts it in connection with Mansfield Park, “[l]ife is continuous, without sharply demarcated beginnings and endings; revelations are not sudden, and genuine turning points are not dramatically vivid” (“Sense of a Beginning,” p. 181). Thus, “[i]n place of a mode of romance that had enhanced dramatic occurrences—first meetings, flirtations, misapprehensions, quarrels, and conquests—we must substitute one that exemplifies continuity of feeling, the growth of emotion so slow that its very stages are virtually undetectable” (p. 183). 50. Litz notes that Emma’s reformation occupies the entire course of the novel, contrasting it to Elizabeth Bennet’s (Jane Austen, pp. 133134), while Brown remarks that “Emma has had three enlightenments, and we expect that she will experience more” (p. 123). 51. In Karl Kroeber’s analysis, “[f]or the romantics, the highest human achievement is to achieve and sustain intensely contradictory feelings” (Ecological Literary Criticism [New York: Columbia University Press, 1994], p. 5). Examples from Wordsworth include the “aching joys” of “Tintern Abbey” (l. 84), the “discontent / Of pleasure” of “To the Daisy” (ll. 23), and “That sweet mood when pleasant thoughts / Bring sad thoughts to the mind” of “Lines Written in Early Spring” (ll. 34); from Coleridge, the disposition of Genevieve in “Love,” who “Loves me best, whene’er I sing / The songs that make her grieve” (ll. 1920); from Scott, his claim that “When, musing on companions gone, / We doubly feel ourselves alone, Something, my friend, we yet may gain; There is a pleasure in this pain” (Marmion, Introduction to canto II). For Byronic instances, see the following note.

  176

  Chapter 2: Early Phase Versus Major Phase

  52. For Byron, see Know-Shaw, “Persuasion, Byron, and the Turkish Tale,” p. 69, who gives examples of “feelings that simultaneously smart and enchant.” For Keats and Shelley, see Nina Auerbach, Romantic Imprisonment (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 54. 53. As Ruoff notes of Mansfield Park, “[I]n conventional terms Edmund begins to love Fanny three pages from the end of the story—so much, the novel tells us, for those conventional terms” (“Sense of a Beginning,” p. 185). 54. Austen’s intended
title for Persuasion, The Elliots, also fits this model, especially when understood as referring not just to the nuclear family of Sir Walter and his daughters, but, as the opening paragraph makes clear it should be, to the family conceived of as a lineage. Catherine, her title for Northanger Abbey, is clearly a parody of such titles as “Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda” (34) rather than a field-of-possibility title like Emma. 55. See Peckham, “Toward a Theory of Romanticism” in Triumph of Romanticism. See also Peter Thorslev, “German Romantic Idealism,” in Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, who remarks that for Wordsworth and Hegel, to modify Pope, “Whatever’s about to be is right” (p. 82). 56. Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, p. 261. Butler cites studies by Howard Babb (Jane Austen’s Novels: The Fabric of Dialogue), K. C. Phillips (Jane Austen’s English), Kroeber (Styles in Fictional Structure), and Page (The Language of Jane Austen). 57. In “The Two Voices of Fanny Price,” Moler notes how inarticulate Fanny is in the face of passion (Jane Austen: Bicentenary Essays, pp. 172179). In this “schoolgirlish” voice, among other things, “sentences are often loosely structured. Thought is lost and caught up with by means of repetition, left incomplete, revised in mid-sentence” (p. 175). 58. Know-Shaw speaks of “[a]n unusually direct registration of thought and emotion” in Persuasion, noting that Anne’s feelings “are given comparatively raw, and seem to belong to the moment” (“Persuasion, Byron, and the Turkish Tale,” p. 53). 59. As Geoffrey Hartman puts it in reference to Wordsworth, “here is a man whose mind moves as he writes, who thinks aloud in verse” (Wordsworth’s Poetry: 17871814 [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964], p. 209). In “Nature and the Humanization of Self in Wordsworth,” Hartman further remarks that Wordsworth’s was a radically new “consciousness of consciousness,” for he shows us feeling moving in “natural rather than fictionally condensed time” (in English Romantic Poets, ed. M. H. Abrams [2nd ed.; New York: Oxford University Press, 1975], p. 125). In Kroeber’s formulation, Wordsworth’s “attitude toward language is apparent in his characteristically long sentences of loose syntactic structure, which permit development of thought, expansive treatment of emotion, and—above all—a fluid interplaying of perceptual fact with mental fancy” (Romantic Landscape Vision, p. 128). Hartman and Kroeber clearly have in mind such explicitly introspective firstperson poems as “Tintern Abbey,” “Resolution and Independence,” and the Intimations Ode (as well as The Prelude), to which we can of course add Coleridge’s conversation poems, but some of the same characteristics—thought moving in real time as emotion finds itself through language—can be seen in such Wordsworthian “dramatic monologues” as “The Complaint of the Forsaken Indian Woman,” “The Affliction of Margaret—,” and “The Emigrant Mother.” For Byron, see Jerome J. McGann, “On Reading Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” where McGann discusses how the poem’s tonal