William Deresiewicz Read online

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  Uppercross and Fanny’s reflections in the shrubbery—exhibits this same principle. Anne’s time at Uppercross has given new forms to her feelings and understandings, ones that—as that scene of mingled recollection and contemplation makes clear—are inseparably interwoven with the specific sensual textures of the place. Fanny’s rootedness at Mansfield is even more heavily emphasized, especially since she first comes there having been shaped very differently by a different place and her ultimate inseparability from Mansfield is revealed to her precisely by a return to that same place. As Edmund tells her apropos of Henry Crawford, whose courtship threatens to take her away to yet a third place, “before he can get your heart for his own use, he has to unfasten it from all the holds upon things animate and inanimate, which so many years growth have confirmed” (288). The shrubbery scene makes the point, as points about Fanny are often made, by contrasting her with Mary Crawford. Responding to Fanny’s effusions, Mary declares that ” `If any body had told me a year ago that this place would be my home … I certainly should not have believed them!—I have now been here nearly five months!’ ” (175). Five whole months—hardly enough time for Fanny’s tears to have dried. Mary—like her brother, a creature of mobility and instability—feels no such attachments as Fanny’s; home, for her, is wherever she happens to be living at the moment. And yet, ironically, it is further evidence of the novel’s investment in the idea of place as the shaper of self that that very instability, along with everything else about the Crawfords, is a product of their upbringing in London. And Emma? Emma’s rootedness to place is far less obvious than Fanny’s or Anne’s, because it receives no emphasis whatsoever. It does not have to: it is so fundamental that it helps constitute the very form of her novel itself. Alone among Austen’s works, the scene of Emma never shifts from the place in which it is set. Alone among her heroines, Emma never ventures away from that place, never even thinks of doing so. Highbury and its environs are as essential to her constitution as a character as Dublin is to Leopold Bloom’s; she is simply inconceivable without them, and everything she is she is because of them. Indeed, the story of the novel is, in one respect, the story of how Emma comes to recognize that very rootedness, her inseparability from and responsibility toward the community that includes Miss Bates, Robert Martin, and everyone else. Elizabeth Bennet, by contrast, has no particular relationship to Meryton and its environs, owes nothing of herself to their influence, and is able to live very well without them. Much the same could be said of her novel; Pride and Prejudice could take place anywhere, or even nowhere—one of the reasons it

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  has proven so adaptable to the stage. Northanger Abbey depends on certain social particularities of Bath and certain architectural ones of Northanger, but its characters have no essential relation to either locale, still less to Catherine’s home village. Of the early novels, Sense and Sensibility is the one most concerned with place, as it is most concerned with nature, but as with respect to the latter theme, that circumstance in fact allows it to serve in drawing a sharper contrast between the two groups of novels. Willoughby’s moral failings, like the Crawfords’, are associated with London, but they are, precisely, only associated with it. They are revealed there, but the city has played no role in creating them. As for the novel’s depiction of the attachment to place, that attachment is purely a matter of sentiment and sentimentality. The Dashwood women are certainly sad to leave Norland, and Marianne apostrophizes it upon their departure in a storm of exclamation points, but it is essential neither to their constitution nor, as it turns out, to their happiness. Before long, both they and the novel have all but forgotten it. As the foregoing discussion has already begun to make clear, the idea of place as the shaper of self is intimately connected, in Austen’s late novels as in the four poets, with the idea of home. “If any body had told me a year ago that this place would be my home … “; home, for Mary Crawford, is anywhere. For the mature Austen, as for the poets, it is one place only—the place that has made you who you are.22 Again, this is an idea essentially absent from the early novels. While each is intensely concerned with finding its heroine or heroines a suitable husband, in no case does that quest also involve finding them a suitable home, still less solacing them for the loss of a home they already have. Catherine Morland’s home all but doesn’t exist, while Elizabeth Bennet’s is, if anything, something to get as far away from as possible. The Dashwoods’ loss of Norland has just been discussed, and Barton Cottage, while a boon for them as a decent house, develops scarcely any resonance as a home. If anything, its proximity to Barton Park soon makes it almost as inhospitable to Elinor and Marianne as Longbourn is to Elizabeth. The idea of home has similarly little relevance to the places in which the early heroines eventually settle. Henry’s parsonage is as briefly touched upon as Catherine’s childhood home. In settling Elinor and Marianne “almost within sight of each other” (323), Sense and Sensibility comes closest of the early novels to preserving for its heroines the home of their youth. Still, whatever Elinor’s love for Marianne, relations between the sisters have never been easy, and the novel’s final, disturbing note makes the mere

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  absence of tension seem the highest blessing their relationship, and thus their common “home” (we never do get a glimpse of their actual houses), can hope for.23 The best candidate among the early novels for a house that is also a home may be thought to be Pemberley, the beauties and comforts of which are dwelt on at great length. But Pemberley functions in the novel as an estate, a socioeconomic unit whose condition bears witness to its master’s character. He has formed Pemberley, in other words; Pemberley has not formed him. At issue in its presentation is the way it has been managed, not the affective richness of the life that has grown up within it. For Elizabeth, it will be a place to be “mistress of,” not, per se, to dwell in (201). What is new in the late novels—and may be new in the European novel altogether, though it is at least as old as Homer—is the idea of home as a psychic necessity, together with the correlative idea of the loss of home as an irreparable psychic wound. That home is vital to the emotional health of each of the late heroines—as it is for Wordsworth and so many of his characters (Poor Susan, Leonard in “The Brothers”), for Scott’s Lieutenant Brown in Guy Mannering, for Childe Harold—needs little additional emphasis. We have already seen how this is true for both Fanny and Emma, and for the former it is abundantly confirmed by her acute misery, first at leaving Portsmouth for Mansfield, then at leaving Mansfield to revisit Portsmouth. In Anne’s case the demonstration is almost wholly negative. As I will discuss more fully in my chapter on the novel, Persuasion is, to a great extent, a novel about homelessness and the effort to create a home away from home—for Anne, for the naval officers both at sea and upon their return to shore, even, in their own very limited way, for Anne’s father and elder sister. While Anne finally finds that home-that-is-not-a-home, Fanny and Emma never even have to leave their homes.24 In Emma’s case, home is only slightly less important than husband, as her husband quickly finds out. But Fanny almost seems to cling to Edmund just because he can guarantee her continuation at Mansfield. (The interlude at Thornton Lacey is, tellingly, virtually elided.) Or rather, her loves for him and for Mansfield are inextricable, emotions of a single growth, and it is not at all clear which is the more important. At the novel’s close, we find her gazing not into her husband’s eyes, but out at the estate; it is really that “union” that the novel finally celebrates. So important has the idea of home become, in this late novel at least, that it overshadows the romance plot altogether. There is good reason why the ideas of place as the shaper of self and of home as the place where the self has been shaped are absent from the early

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  novels. In the early novels, the self is not “shaped” at all. Elizabeth, Marianne, and Catherine all change during the co
urse of their novels, but as I will discuss more fully below, their alterations each involve an abrupt change of consciousness rather than a continuous modification of personality. More to the point at hand, who they each are at their novel’s outset is simply a given. Missing from the early novels, in other words, is another great Wordsworthian theme, that of childhood.25 That Elizabeth even had a childhood we can only guess, for there is no evidence she had any life whatsoever prior to the opening of her novel; she simply pops into existence on its first page.26 The opening chapter of Sense and Sensibility outlines the Dashwood family’s past, including the sisters’ childhoods, but those childhoods receive no elaboration and bear no relation to the characters sketched at the chapter’s end. That Elinor, at nineteen, possessed “strength of understanding,” “coolness of judgment,” and “an excellent heart” and that Marianne, at sixteen, “was sensible and clever; but eager in every thing” remain unexplained and—in line with what the younger Austen apparently believed, for it is true of the Bennet sisters, as well—seem to be matters of innate disposition (6). Of the early heroines’ childhoods, only Catherine’s is sketched. We watch her pass rapidly from ten to fourteen to fifteen to seventeen, but her development is devoid alike of particularity and emotional significance, instead mingling and playing with two generalized developmental paradigms: the physical and attitudinal changes of puberty and the reading program of a “female Quixote.” At first glance, only Mansfield Park seems to differ from the early novels with respect to the significance of its heroine’s childhood. Fanny’s is dwelt on, not at the length that George Eliot, in her most Wordsworthian novel, would later devote to Maggie Tulliver’s, but enough to show how the patterns of behavior and feeling established then shape her actions and responses throughout the rest of the novel. Her transplantation to Mansfield at age ten, placing her in the company of four older cousins vastly her superiors in knowledge, confidence, and social standing, makes her into the timid and self-doubting creature who creeps through the next three volumes, concealing her desires, doubting her choices, and suppressing her resentments. But Fanny is not the only one in the novel decisively shaped by the treatment she receives as a child; both her cousins and the Crawfords clearly are as well, each of the six in ways that reflect differences not only in place and parents, but also in gender and birth order.27 Of the childhoods of Emma and Anne nothing directly is shown, but the summary information Austen gives on the first two or three pages of each of

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  their novels is enough to show how their early treatments, too, have produced the young women who appear at the start of their narratives proper. In Anne’s case, this significant past includes not only her accession to Lady Russell’s pressure not to marry, but extends back well into her adolescence and indeed helped give rise to that fateful choice at age nineteen. If Anne’s life from nineteen to twenty-seven has been haunted by that choice, the previous six years had been haunted by her mother’s death. Austen’s presentation is uniquely understated here, but what she asks us to infer is clear: at a crucial point in her life, right around the onset of puberty, Anne, until then her mother’s favorite, became the family member most disregarded and disdained by her emotionally frigid father and equally withholding elder sister.28 That is, when she was at home at all, for the first consequence of that untimely death was Anne’s removal to a Bath boarding school for three gloomy years. Not only did her mother’s loss teach Anne an excessive reliance on Lady Russell’s advice, then, it also established her voicelessness and powerlessness within her family, her melancholic disposition, her distrust of her own judgment, and her tendency to put her own needs and desires last. Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, could hardly be more different from the meek and marginalized Fanny and Anne, but her upbringing was no less unfortunate than theirs, precisely for giving her so unshaken a confidence in her own powers and prerogatives. Again, as with the other late heroines, the early loss of a mother is decisive. The death of Mrs. Woodhouse in Emma’s infancy left her younger daughter to the guidance of a weak father, a too-compliant governess, and a sister whom all acknowledge as her inferior.29 Where Fanny and Anne must learn to speak, to desire, and to will, Emma must learn to do less of all three. The early lives of Austen’s late heroines are not Wordsworth’s happy childhoods in nature, but unfortunate childhoods in society. All three young women struggle throughout their novels with the legacies of a misshapen upbringing. Two further developments follow from this new emphasis on childhood, one interesting but minor, the other of the very first significance. Children become more prominent in the late novels, if not quite as much as in Wordsworth and Coleridge,30 and they acquire a specific new function relative to the heroine. The only children to appear in the first three novels, other than the Gardiners’ in Pride and Prejudice, who figure very briefly, are Lady Middleton’s brats in Sense and Sensibility, who seem to exist for the sole purpose of showing how revolting children can be. In each of the late novels, by contrast, the heroine has a significant care-giving relationship with a

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  group of children within her own family—Emma’s nieces and nephews, Anne’s nephews, and Fanny’s younger sisters in Portsmouth. Not only are these children shown in a more positive (though far from idealized) light— their feelings taken seriously, as in Wordsworth—the fact that the heroine cares for them, and cares for them well, counts as important evidence to the goodness of her character. Far more significantly—another way in which her childhood or adolescence shadows her young adulthood—each heroine’s life continues to be dominated by her relationship with a difficult, domineering father or surrogate father. (This is not a kind of relationship that much interested the poets, though Wordsworth’s “Anecdote for Fathers” is an interestingly subtle portrait of paternal tyranny, but it shows Austen working out the logic of ideas she drew from them along the lines of her own concerns and within the framework of her own literary form.) In the early novels, relations between the heroine and her parents may be easy or strained, but they are never particularly important. Their emotional texture is thin, even in the strongest case, that of Marianne and her mother, and parents play little or no role in their daughters’ courtship. Elizabeth may be embarrassed by her mother, but she is hardly influenced by her. These young women do more or less as they please, at least as far as their own families are concerned. Parental figures connected to the heroes do function more prominently in the early plots, but only as comedic blocking figures. Notwithstanding the subtle delineation of General Tilney’s tyranny over his children, these relationships, too, acquire little or no depth. Indeed, the early novels overwhelmingly concern relationships among the heroine’s coevals, be they siblings, friends, or potential lovers. In the late novels, by contrast, parental and especially paternal relationships loom very large indeed. Fanny’s relationship with her uncle and Emma’s with her father are second only to those with their future husbands as their most important, emotionally fraught, and complexly negotiated. It is no surprise that at the end of their novels, they marry or settle in a way that very much pleases papa. For Anne, again, it is a matter of negatives. Deprived of her relationship, one way or another, with both parents, she clings to substitutes. Lady Russell is the obvious example, but the emotional pull Admiral Cross exerts within the narrative—on the reader as much as on Anne—points to his most significant symbolic function. He is the kind, loving, accepting father Anne has always lacked, and it is no accident that he replaces her real father as the caretaker of Kellynch, her lost home, as her protector (when she is taken into his carriage as well as when he escorts her

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  through the streets of Bath) and—though this is far more pronounced in the first version of the novel’s ending—as the person who symbolically “gives her away” to her husband. It has been noted that the late novels’ blocking figures all come from within the heroine’s family, but more to the point,
they are all parental and, for the most part, paternal figures: Sir Thomas, Mr. Woodhouse, Sir Walter, Lady Russell.31 The early novels are, like Burney’s Evelina, stories of “a young lady’s entrance into the world.” In the late novels, the young lady is already in the world (Anne), never gets there (Fanny), or has no larger “world” to enter (Emma). In this phase of her career, Austen discovers an even more compelling narrative: the family romance itself. This new attention to the shaping of the self in early life is only the beginning of the largest and most important difference between the two phases of Austen’s career. The late novels represent a complete transformation in Austen’s understanding of time: not simply in the depths of time they involve, but in their rendering of physical and social processes, of memory, of loss, indeed, of change itself. As time in all its ramifications may be said to be Wordsworth’s greatest and most persistent theme, so is it the great theme of Austen’s mature work. We can begin by noting that the early novels not only occupy less time than do most of the late ones—this is trivial—but that in the former the very nature of time is different. Two passages from Pride and Prejudice may be taken as emblematic. The Netherfield ball has been announced, but five days remain before the big event, days that prove sadly inclement: the “younger Miss Bennets,” cut off from Meryton, are especially distressed, “and nothing less than a dance on Tuesday, could have made such a Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday, endurable to Kitty and Lydia” (75). Sometime later, with the Netherfield party gone, Charlotte married, and Jane in London, Elizabeth has little to do but write letters, and so, “[w]ith no greater events than these … and otherwise diversified by little beyond the walks to Meryton … did January and February pass away” (127). “Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday,” “January and February”: two stretches of time in which, narratively speaking, nothing happens: nothing changes, nothing develops, time itself has no effect on feelings, thoughts, or relationships.32 But there is nothing anomalous about these utterly blank intervals; rather, as I suggested, they are entirely characteristic of the younger Austen’s handling of time. Events in the early novels occupy time like beads