William Deresiewicz Read online

  Introduction 13

  chronologies would be internally consistent. MacKinnon concluded, to both his satisfaction and Chapman’s, that Mansfield Park takes place in 18081809 (from July to May).63 This has since become the accepted dating of the novel’s internal chronology.64 There are two problems, however. The first, which MacKinnon himself recognized, is that while Easter is said in the novel to be “particularly late this year,” Easter 1809 fell on April 2—a very early date indeed.65 The other problem is that in the autumn of the period in question—that is, putatively, the autumn of 1808—we find Fanny Price reading George Crabbe’s Tales. Crabbe’s Tales, which were very well known, were not published until September 1812.66 It seems to me that one can only conclude that the main part of the novel takes place in 18121813, at the earliest. In fact, as Mansfield Park was published in May 1814, and as the novel’s action is continued somewhat beyond the May of the principal events, the novel must be regarded as occurring in 18121813. To suppose otherwise is to suppose that Austen believed that her readers would recognize “Thursday, December 22” as a date in 1808 more readily than they recognized Crabbe’s Tales, and that an author supposedly so scrupulous about keeping her chronologies consistent would have had no qualms about committing so egregious an anachronism as inserting the name of a work into a novel that takes place four years before that work was published. (Nor is this the only anachronism she would have been guilty of if MacKinnon’s theory is right.67) Indeed, the presence of Crabbe’s Tales argues that Austen herself was unaware of the calendrical significance of “Thursday, December 22,” or indeed of any full date; that she did not use almanacs in the composition of her novels; and that she was unconcerned with the internal consistency of her chronologies. Chapman clearly felt otherwise. Using MacKinnon’s methodology, he concluded that the full dates mentioned in Pride and Prejudice agree with the calendar of 18111812. This in turn led him to conclude that Austen had consulted the almanacs of those years in revising the novel and that she must therefore have revised the novel during those years. Chapman concluded, in a much-quoted judgment, that “we must infer that the book as we know it was substantially written in 1812; for it is certain that so intricate a chronological scheme cannot have been patched on to an existing work without extensive revision.“68 Chapman presumably means that Austen revised the novel during this period for different reasons and naturally used the contemporaneous calendars to keep her internal chronology consistent. Like MacKinnon’s conclusions with regard to Mansfield Park, however, Chapman’s redating of Pride and Prejudice is not without its problems. For

  14 Introduction

  one thing, at least one of the novel’s full dates does not fit. Chapman’s explanation is that Austen confused the date of one event with that of a similar event that occurs fifteen days earlier.69 This is plausible, though not entirely convincing: why would a novelist who took such pains to keep her chronologies consistent make such a mistake at all? More important, though, why would she take such pains to keep her chronologies consistent? This is a question Chapman brings upon himself, for at the end of the painstaking explication of his theory he writes, astonishingly, that “Miss Austen’s punctilious observance of the calendars of 1811 and 1812 … was for her own satisfaction; she did not expect her readers to play the detective. We are still free, therefore, to suppose, if we choose, that she at all times conceived the events as belonging to the closing decade of the 18th century.“70 For one thing, this admission makes nonsense of MacKinnon’s argument for the dramatic date of Mansfield Park, since that argument is premised on an identity of the calendrical and dramatic dates (as well as on the assumption that Austen did indeed “expect her readers to play the detective”). For another, Chapman’s admission redoubles the question of why Austen would bother paying attention to her internal chronologies, because now it appears, bizarrely, that she did not even care whether those chronologies matched the years in which the novels’ actions supposedly take place. In fact, a cogent argument was made a long time ago—in reference to Pride and Prejudice in particular—that Austen did not care about the consistency of her internal chronologies. In an analysis that deserves to be much better known, P. R. S. Andrews, minutely sifting the evidence once again, finds that not one, but two full dates mentioned in the novel are incompatible with the calendar for 18111812, and that fully four major anomalies must be taken into account by any attempt to make sense of the novel’s internal chronology.71 Andrews’s own conclusion is that some of the dates correspond to the calendar of 1802, and that Austen therefore undertook a revision of the novel around that time. He does not seek to reconcile these dates with others in the novel; dates taken from different calendars, during different revisions, were used, he says “[w]ithout any regard for overall consistency.“72 I am not persuaded by Andrews’s theory of an 1802 revision any more than I am by Chapman’s of one in 1812 (among other things, Andrews’s also seems motivated by the kind of circular logic I discussed above).73 Rather, I believe that the overall thrust of his analysis demonstrates that, as he says, Austen had no regard for overall consistency, and that any argument about the dates of revisions based on dates given in the novels— any of the novels—is without foundation.74

  Introduction 15

  In short, there is no good evidence to conclude that the Pride and Prejudice we have is not substantially the same work as the First Impressions of 17961797. In fact, Austen’s recent biographers agree with this judgment.75 In terms of its plot structure, thematic concerns, image patterns, significant allusions, even its characteristic diction and syntax, Pride and Prejudice remained, like Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility, what it had originally been: the work of a writer in her early twenties.76 If that strains our credulity, the problem, as I have suggested, is with our credulity. But I do not believe it should strain our credulity, not if we accept, as nearly everyone does, that Northanger Abbey, at least, is the work of Austen’s early twenties. This is not the place for a detailed explication, but that “little work” is far more sophisticated than it is usually given credit for being. Its satirical program, along with the fact that it is always enumerated as the first of Austen’s novels, makes it all too easily seen as continuous with the juvenilia.77 But it did not come right after the juvenilia, and its satire has very little in common with theirs.78 It came after Austen had already written two full-length novels (and revised one of them), two works in which, whatever one thinks they looked like then, she was giving herself a thorough education in how to shape and manipulate her readers’ responses, how to anticipate and defeat their expectations. And that is exactly the knowledge she puts to use in Northanger Abbey. The juvenilia are mainly burlesques; author and reader laugh together at the kind of fiction being parodied. But in Northanger Abbey, it is the reader who is being put to the test. Austen puts us to the test, in part, by putting us—in an almost Escher-like tangling of representational levels—inside the novel, in the person of its heroine. The very first sentence, which encapsulates the game Austen is playing, induces an ontological vertigo from which we never recover: “No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be an heroine” (13). The more you think about that sentence, the harder it gets to understand—the more its layers of irony unfold like the petals of a Venus flytrap. There is no other sentence in Austen’s work comparable to it in the imperturbability of its surface and the cunning of its designs upon the reader. No other sentence but one, of course: the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice. I don’t suppose there is anyone who doesn’t think that, if any part of Pride and Prejudice was written in Austen’s maturity, it is that sentence. But if Austen could have written the first sentence of Northanger Abbey when she was twenty-two (and the novel so depends on it that it could not have been tossed in later), then she could have written the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice—and every other

  16 Introduction

  sentence, too—when she was twenty-one. And not only is there n
o solid reason to believe that by about 1800 the first three novels were not “substantially the books we know,“79 there is a very good reason to believe the reverse: the systematic set of differences between those novels and the novels of the major phase, to which I now turn.

  Introduction

  17

  c h a p t e r

  t w o

  Early Phase Versus Major Phase

  The Changing Feelings of the Mind

  But seven years I suppose are enough to change every pore of one’s skin, & every feeling of one’s mind. —Letters1

  hat did change, in Jane Austen’s art, in those seven years and more between Susan and Mansfield Park? The few attempts to differentiate the second “trilogy” from the first have been general and brief, yielding, in sum, only a disconnected series of distinctions: “a more intensified sense of the influence of place and environment on personality and action, a broader and more thoughtful social critique, and a much greater power of imagining … figures within the social and geographical spaces they inhabit”;2 a greater focus on questions of bodily health;3 a new emphasis on fulfillment through socially useful labor;4 a new insistence on the claims of desire;5 a deeper involvement with nature;6 a new “sense of hazard to the larger community”;7 and a new consciousness of the Napoleonic War.8 While these characterizations are, by and large, unobjectionable, they fail to add up to a coherent account of how Austen’s art matured. Nor do they go very far in explaining either our common readerly intuitions about the higher merits of the later novels—their greater emotional depth, artistic complexity, and psychological profundity—or our sense of the thematic developments and attitudinal shifts that mark those novels, as we note in critical shorthand, as belonging to the nineteenth rather than the eighteenth century. A more thorough analysis is required. As the one I present in the ensuing pages argues, the differences between the novels of the major and early

  W

  phases are both systematic, exhibiting a mutual coherence, and comprehensive, touching matters of narrative structure, characterization, language, and theme—touching, indeed, Austen’s fundamental beliefs about those issues central to her art, the nature of personal growth and of the mind.9 And my analysis indicates one more thing about these changes: that they are, to put it a bit too simply, Wordsworthian.10 The influences of Scott, Byron, and, of course, Coleridge (not always distinguishable from that of Wordsworth) can also be recognized, but as we make our way through this system of changes, we will find that attribute after attribute bears the unmistakable imprint of Wordsworthian ideas and concerns. And those that do not will be seen to have grown out of those that do, to represent a development, within a novelistic framework that necessarily introduces aesthetic considerations of its own, of those same ideas and concerns. For in those seven years and more, much, indeed, had changed. English poetry had changed, with the appearance of the new poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge: a poetry of change, of the growth of the mind through the development of feeling; a poetry of memory and loss, interiority and solitude, ambivalence and openness—a poetry of process. And as the late novels make clear, Austen’s beliefs had also changed, about those very questions, the most important questions with which her art, and especially her late art, concerns itself. In their form, language, and themes, but more, in the very sense of exploration with which they proceed, the novels of Jane Austen’s major phase reflect her absorption of the new poetry.11 Of course, nothing of what follows should be taken as a disparagement of the early novels. Were they the only of Austen’s works that we had, her place in the front rank of English fiction would still be secure; as it is, Pride and Prejudice in particular remains central both to her popularity and to her critical reputation, and in many respects nothing in the major phase surpasses its achievement. What is in question here is rather the greater overall merits of the late novels, merits that, as I began this study by noting, critics have sensed from the very first and that can be connected, as I will argue, to Austen’s reception of the Romantic poets. To begin with what has already been fairly well noted: Austen’s late novels display an entirely new receptivity to nature and attitude toward natural contemplation.12 In both Sense and Sensibility and Northanger Abbey, characters’ observation of nature serves only to exhibit and ridicule stereotyped modes of response. Henry and Eleanor Tilney survey the country around Bath in strict accordance with the principles of the picturesque, and Catherine, their

  Early Phase Versus Major Phase 19

  all-too-apt pupil, proves “so hopeful a scholar, that when they gained the top of Beechen Cliff, she voluntarily rejected the whole city of Bath, as unworthy to make part of a landscape” (99). The more passionate Marianne Dashwood supplements picturesque conventions with effusions derived from Thomson, Cowper, and Scott, but she fares less well with her auditors, one of whom, Edward Ferrars, clearly represents Austen’s approved way of evaluating a rural scene at that point in her career. “[M]y idea of a fine country,” he says, is one that “unites beauty with utility … I do not like crooked, twisted, blasted trees. I admire them much more if they are tall, straight, and flourishing … I have more pleasure in a snug farm-house than a watch-tower—and a troop of tidy, happy villagers please me better than the finest banditti in the world.“13 Edward’s ideal, in fact, is more than a union of beauty and utility, it is beauty understood in terms of utility, of the health and prosperity of a country’s human inhabitants. As for Pride and Prejudice, it deliberately swerves away from an engagement with nature. Elizabeth and her uncle and aunt plan to visit the Lake District, for “[w]hat are men to rocks and mountains?“14 But because their trip is delayed they can venture no farther than Derbyshire, where their attention is indeed brought back, willy-nilly, to “men.” The heroines of Mansfield Park and Persuasion, by contrast, display an attentiveness and spontaneous emotional responsiveness to nature that is in no way criticized or ironized. Though Anne, on the walk to Winthrop, “repeat[s] to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn,” her response has a relationship to poetry the very reverse of Marianne’s.15 The earlier heroine projects onto the landscape feelings derived from verse; Anne recollects lines of verse to express feelings the landscape spontaneously evokes. In her farewell to Uppercross, as has been noted, she does more.16 There, as in so many of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s best-known nature poems, observation and emotion, outer and inner worlds, interact dialectically.17 A mood of melancholy turns her attention to the dreary outer scene (that she looks out through misty panes reinforces the sense of a semipermeable membrane between self and world), which in turn prompts memories of her whole sojourn at the place—memories of pain as well as of reconciliation, but both modified under the influence of the scene, the ones softened, the others made melancholy. As in Wordsworth and Coleridge, feeling and observation are mutually reinforcing, mutually deepening. In the words of one critic, landscape in Persuasion becomes “a structure of feeling which can express, and also modify, the minds of those who view it.“18

  20 Early Phase Versus Major Phase

  Fanny Price’s interludes of natural contemplation, while not exhibiting the dialectical complexity of Anne’s, embody other important WordsworthianColeridgian ideas. Gazing out at a brilliantly starlit night, “solemn and soothing, and lovely,” she is roused to feelings of tranquility and rapture and moved to profess the conviction that “there certainly would be less” “wickedness [and] sorrow in the world” “if the sublimity of Nature were more attended to, and people were carried more out of themselves by contemplating such a scene” (9495). We might smile at this, especially as Fanny’s tone approximates the sentimental ardors of Marianne Dashwood, but neither here nor in connection with any of her other effusions (on memory, for example) does Austen give any hint of satiric intent. And we should remember that the morally healing power of immersion in nature is precisely Coleridge’s theme in “The Dungeon,” Wordsworth’s in “The Convict,” and Wordsworth’s again in the passage in “Tintern A
bbey” that speaks of the influence of “beauteous forms”: “On that best portion of a good man’s life, His little, nameless, unremembered, acts Of kindness and of love” (23, 3335). Sometime later, sitting in the Mansfield Parsonage shrubbery, enjoying the “sweets of so protracted an autumn,” Fanny remarks on an example of the kind of human adaptation of nature that would have cheered Edward Ferrars—the fact that the spot had only three years before been “nothing but a rough hedgerow”—but her purpose is less to praise the utility or even the beauty of the transformation than to remark on the contrast between past and present: “and perhaps in another three years we may be forgetting—almost forgetting what it was before. How wonderful, how very wonderful the operations of time, and the changes of the human mind” (173174). Alterations in nature, as Wordsworth explores most fully in “The Brothers,” become the yardstick for measuring alterations in the self.19 Indeed, as Austen has Fanny suggest—and this is an idea that lies at the heart of Wordsworth’s poetic encounter with the natural world—the life of the mind and of vegetation are not only parallel phenomena, they are, equally, natural ones, alike subject to “the operations of time”—persistence and decay, remembering and forgetting. They are interlinked phenomena as well. Thus while Emma contains no scenes of natural contemplation,20 it embodies even more fully than the other late novels the more general principle of which the human interaction with nature—whether in Mansfield Park or Persuasion, Wordsworth or Coleridge, or Scott, for that matter—is ultimately only a particular instance: the shaping of the self by place.21 The second scene discussed above in connection with each of the other late novels—Anne’s leavetaking from