William Deresiewicz Read online

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  on a string; they function as discrete entities the intervals between which have no significance and could thus be made arbitrarily greater or smaller without materially affecting the narrative. Nothing changes in Elizabeth’s story between Christmas and her arrival in Hunsford in March, and again nothing changes between her departure from Hunsford the following month and her visit to Pemberley in July. Had she and Darcy met in Hunsford in January and Pemberley in April, their story would have been the same. Austen clearly had aesthetic reasons for having both Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility occupy the space of twelve months, and there were circumstantial reasons, such as the winter season in London, for setting certain scenes at certain times of year, but nothing internal to the narratives, no matter of emotional development or personal change, would have prevented either novel from occupying two years or six months. As for the deeper past in the early novels—for in each it eventually turns out that a crucial event took place during the prehistory of the narrative—it exists in a purely schematic relationship to the present, as if the time between it and the start of the narrative proper were as blank as the intervals we just looked at. At a certain point in each work, forward movement is suspended for the recounting of some lurid tale that, like the opening of a secret door in a Gothic mansion, throws a stark light on the dark recesses of the villain’s character and the hero’s hidden wounds: Darcy’s story of Wickham and Georgiana, Colonel Brandon’s of Willoughby and the two Elizas. (In Northanger Abbey, the one novel in which the secret story, that of Mrs. Tilney’s death, actually is told in a Gothic mansion, the satiric point is that neither is it lurid nor does it reveal dark secrets about General Tilney or his son.) But in each case, no organic relationship, no sense of continuity, connects past event and present moment. Each tale is framed and offered for inspection like a painting hanging on a wall. Indeed, in Pride and Prejudice, paintings hanging on walls become another way of gaining access to an isolated moment from the deep past—Darcy and Wickham’s appearance as they were eight years prior to the narrative present. The device suggests something I will deal with more extensively when considering the question of memory: that in the early novels, memory functions, as we might say today, like a camera, a recorder of isolated mental images that remain unchanged by intervening lapses of time. Again, time in the early novels progresses in discrete quanta, not along a continuum of constant change. Any sense of the physical effects of time is similarly absent from the early phase. Wordsworthian examples include, most famously, Simon Lee’s swollen ankles and other signs of age and hard times, but also any number

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  of others, including those that mark the old Cumberland beggar and Ruth. The early novels, to be sure, contain characters of all different ages, but other than Colonel Brandon with his rheumatism—an ailment that proves, precisely, no impediment to his marrying a woman a generation his junior— none is shown to have been physically affected by the passage of time. The counterexamples in Persuasion are too numerous to mention, for what with illness, injury, and simple aging, they include most of the characters in the book. In Mansfield Park, they include both Sir Thomas, who returns thin and worn from his two-years-plus in Antigua, and Fanny herself, who has blossomed during the same interval into an attractive young woman. In Emma, such effects are more subtle; we find no physical changes taking place during the span of the narrative, but we do find what we see nowhere else in Austen, the senescence of the elderly. Mr. Woodhouse is ostentatiously feeble. Mrs. Bates, as we are frequently reminded, is both hard of hearing and weak of vision. And Mrs. Churchill—continually ill, though no one will believe her, these past twenty-five years—bears witness to the ultimate effect of time on the human constitution and, doing what virtually no one else in the course of a Jane Austen novel does, dies.33 The late novels similarly display a new attention to social change. While such change is not absent from the early novels, it remains in the background. General Tilney’s modernization of Northanger, John Dashwood’s of Norland, the tension between Lady Catherine’s old-fashioned understanding of the distance between aristocracy and gentry and Elizabeth’s newer one—all these point to large-scale changes in English society that surround and contextualize the narratives. So too, at a smaller level, several of the novels’ figures are themselves in the process of changing social position, but in each case the change lies outside the main action of the novel in question. The Dashwood women suffer a sharp decline in fortune as their story starts, but only as it starts, as a precondition of the narrative proper. So too, Elinor and Marianne enjoy an elevation of wealth and status when they get married—that is, as their novel ends. Their social positions, however, like those of everyone else in the early novels, remain static during the main course of their narratives. In the early phase, change both large and small happens around the edges; it is not an intrinsic property of the stories themselves. In the late novels, change becomes pervasive at both the national and personal scales. Among the poets, Wordsworth registers social change particularly in his more extended portraits of the dispossessed rural poor—“The Female Vagrant,” “Michael.” But its leading exponent, of course, is Scott.

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  Most of the great historical novels would come after Austen’s death, but Scott anticipated their rendering of large-scale change in verse romances that likewise reflect on the passing away of old sociocultural orders and the rise of new ones, as the very title of the first of them, The Lay of the Last Minstrel, suggests—a point I will take up more fully in my chapter on Persuasion. In Mansfield Park, the drama of small-scale change is embodied by the fortunes of Sir Thomas: imperiled enough before the start of the main action to necessitate his trip to Antigua to take personal charge of his estates; improving handsomely upon his return with the marriage of his eldest daughter to a wealthy young man and prospective marriages of his younger son and adopted niece to two more wealthy young folk; contracting suddenly at the end with the collapse of all three matches. As for larger-scale changes, the issue of the improvement of estates, peripheral to Sense and Sensibility and Northanger Abbey, becomes central. In Persuasion, social change involves both the rise and fall of personal fortunes—Wentworth’s and William Walter Elliot’s rising, Sir Walter’s falling—and, as I will discuss at length in the relevant chapter, the larger changes rippling through English society as it makes the transition from war to peace and, concurrently, from the leadership of the aristocracy to that of the professional middleclass. In the virtually self-enclosed world of Emma, large-and small-scale social change are hard to distinguish; what counts in the other novels as small feels momentous here. Austen’s presentational techniques are at their subtlest in tracing these movements; by a myriad of small strokes, she charts the rise of Highbury’s second-rank families to greater prominence: the Coles, beginning to give dinner parties; the Perrys, thinking of setting up a carriage; and of course, the Eltons, intruding everywhere and talking up their wealthy connections at every opportunity.34 Add to them Mr. Weston, recent purchaser of an estate; Mrs. Weston, just risen from governess to mistress of that estate; Harriet Smith, learning new ideas about what she can aspire to; Robert Martin, a “gentleman farmer” “on his way,” in Lionel Trilling’s phrase, “to being a gentleman pure and simple”;35 and Miss Bates, sinking ever deeper into genteel poverty; and there scarcely seems a single person standing still in this supposedly timeless idyll. In Emma, then, as in all the late novels, change—continuous change—becomes the very groundwork of the narrative and of its characters’ existences.36 Of all that gives these novels their increased complexity and density as compared to Austen’s earlier works, this fact of continuous change is surely one of the most important. To use a mathematical analogy, a kind of narrative arithmetic sufficed for the sort of analysis that Austen undertook during

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  the first part of her caree
r, that of fixed characters within a fixed setting. For the novels of her maturity, in which both self and world exhibit continuous alteration, she had to devise a narrative calculus. The corollary of the late novels’ insistence on the inescapable fact of physical and social change is the prominence they give to characters who resist change both within and without, figures willfully stuck in time. (This is not a type prominent among the poets, though Byron’s Giaour is an example.) Mr. Woodhouse—“a valetudinarian all his life”; “a much older man in ways than in years” (8)—seems never to have been young. Sir Walter Elliot, a freeze-dried version of what he was thirty years before, seems never to grow older. It is no accident that they both so vehemently reject the alterations going on around them; just as they stand still, so do they want their world to stand still. Sir Walter does his best to ignore the changes sweeping through English society in these “unfeudal” times, changes the most deplorable effect of which, in his view, is precisely the opportunity they give to persons of low birth to elevate their social status (152). Mr. Woodhouse resists all change whatsoever, but what he especially seeks to wish away are the changes consequent upon marriage. Having apparently never felt the longings of youth himself—for newness as little as for sex—he literally cannot seem to understand how anyone else could feel them. The case of Sir Thomas, a more complex figure than these other two patresfamilias, is less obvious. Time has marked his body, his household, and his estates, and he does not seek to remain oblivious to these alterations. But his orientation is fundamentally conservative, and his way of dealing with these changes is to seek to reverse them: to restore his estates, recover his health, and, emblematically, remove every vestige of the theatricals that have so disrupted his household.37 But Sir Thomas’s desire to continue living in the past shows itself most importantly in his high-handed, authoritarian way of conducting himself as a father.38 Written and set during the Regency, a time when the British national household was headed by a disreputable prince filling the place of a father who had lost his mind, Mansfield Park documents an evolution in family life that has weakened paternal authority and strengthened the willfulness of children in resisting it. Admiral Crawford, Mr. Price: fathers here are not what they used to be, and even if they don’t know it, their children do. Sir Thomas solemnly admonishes his eldest son for his extravagant ways, and Tom laughs in his sleeve. He cautions his eldest daughter not to enter into marriage with a man she cannot respect, and Maria practically cracks her gum in his face. Even Fanny, who buys into her uncle’s retrograde notion of the obedience

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  due one who stands in place of a father, resists his commandment to marry Henry in favor of her own hidden desires. And so, because his authority will not bend, it finally shatters, his daughters breaking into open revolt. Resisting change, all three of these proud men cut themselves off from the people around them. To place oneself beyond the realm of change, in the late novels, is to place oneself beyond the realm of human connection. Three proud men, three stern fathers. Given what we have seen about the hold these figures have over their daughters’ imaginations, it is no wonder that each of the late novels gives us a young woman with something of this same resistance to change. Each case is different. Persuasion’s is the least interesting, since the daughter in question is not the heroine, but her elder sister. Elizabeth Elliot’s freeze-dried quality exactly resembles her father’s. Emma is not nearly as bad as her own father, but as we have begun to see, much of what is wrong with the way she conducts herself—her snobbery, her obstruction of Harriet’s marriage to Robert Martin, her refusal to take her proper place within her community—stems from her resistance to the very social changes outlined above. And while she herself does change gradually throughout the novel, as I will discuss below, she does not see that she does, and indeed thinks that no alteration will ever be necessary on her part: “I am not only, not going to be married, at present, but have very little intention of ever marrying at all … I cannot really change for the better” (73). While the literal meaning of that last phrase refers only to a change of marital circumstances, its larger, unconscious implications point to the attitude embodied in Emma’s every infuriating display of imperturbable selfpossession—her belief that she has nothing to learn and no more growing up to do. Like Elizabeth Elliot, though in a very different respect, Emma is stuck at a certain stage of emotional development. But what of Fanny? In her social values, as I have said, she emulates her uncle’s conservatism, and in her visceral repugnance to any change in her personal circumstances, she approaches Mr. Woodhouse. If anyone would seem to constitute a counterargument to the idea that the late novels insist on the necessity of change, it is she. Doesn’t she resist it in just the way Sir Thomas, Mr. Woodhouse, Emma, Sir Walter, and Elizabeth Elliot do? No, she does not. The resistance to change we find in those five figures is, as we have seen, a willful rejection of it: a refusal to acknowledge or yield to it. But Fanny’s hatred of nearly every change that comes her way—her removal to Mansfield or, most poignantly, her recognition in Portsmouth that her parents no longer love her—is matched only by her resilience in accommodating herself to it.

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  The mature Austen does not insist that her characters like the changes happening to and around them, she only insists that they adjust to them. She never suggests that change is necessarily desirable, only that it is necessary. Each of the late novels, in fact, spends a great deal of energy exhibiting, examining, and evaluating the changes it documents. In each case, Austen chooses the middle way between the most radical agents of social change and its most conservative refusers: between Sir Thomas and the Crawfords, Mr. Woodhouse and Mrs. Elton, Sir Walter and William Walter Elliot. And in each case, that middle way is embodied, finally if not initially, by the hero and heroine. The idea of change leads in turn to perhaps the most profound and important Wordsworthian idea of all, one that is also of the first significance for Byron and Scott: loss. As criticism has shown on a massive scale, the fact of loss and the attempt to come to terms with it is everywhere in Wordsworth, be it the loss of youth and youthful powers or the loss of beloved individuals. The lamentation for the loss of childhood places, friendships, and loves is the principal subject of Byron’s early lyrics, while the Turkish Tales are, one and all, stories of bereavement. Scott’s romances—as the conspicuous framing devices of the first and best of them, The Lay of the Last Minstrel and Marmion, make clear—mourn the loss of the very cultural and narrative traditions they memorialize. But absent a true consciousness of change, Austen’s early novels are likewise innocent of loss. In each, the heroine must give up someone she once cared deeply about, but in every case, as she is made at great length to learn, the person in question turns out not to have been worth having in the first place. Even the pain of error is made perfectly good, and so happiness finally comes at no real cost whatsoever—surely one important reason the early novels, for all their splendors, feel so much less profound than do the later ones. For the later ones are saturated with loss. In fact, in two cases, the question of loss will be my main focus in the later chapters of this study. Fanny must give up nearly everything she loves, starting with her home in Portsmouth, and do without nearly everything she wants, being forced, in each case, to find substitute objects of affection or desire. Anne, like almost everyone else in Persuasion, is “widowed” of the person she most loves, and even if she retrieves him at novel’s end, the lost time remains lost, so many years of happiness replaced by so many of loneliness and self-reproach. And while the very structure of Emma works to conceal its heroine’s losses from us—precisely because she cannot see them herself—we should not doubt that they are heavy and continuous. Until her final release, Emma’s impris34 Early Phase Versus Major Phase

  oning egotism deprives her of nothing less than a full emotional life, true intimacy with those around her. That loss is embodied in Jane Fairfax, and by refusing to allow Emma a belated friendsh
ip with that young woman as the reward of her reformation, Austen tells us that things once lost cannot be recovered. In the late novels, time is real: too late is too late. In discussing Austen’s understanding of time in the later novels, my focus thus far has been on externals: physical appearance, social position, the loss of beloved objects. But the most important, pervasive, and subtle manifestations of this great new theme lie in the inner realm: in matters of feeling, reflection, recollection, relatedness, and personal transformation. It is also in these matters that we will find the grounds on which the new complexity and density of the late novels most significantly develop. I will turn to this large set of questions in a moment. First, though, I would like to touch on several other, strikingly Wordsworthian characteristics of the mature novels, ones that seem at first remote from these issues but will soon lead us back to them. Few characteristics of Wordsworth’s poetry in Lyrical Ballads and Poems in Two Volumes are more immediately striking than the attention it pays to the poor, the marginal, and the dispossessed. Many examples may be cited, including “Simon Lee,” “The Old Cumberland Beggar,” “Michael,” “Resolution and Independence,” and so forth. While such figures are entirely absent from Austen’s earlier novels, they appear in all of the later ones, often with a great deal of emphasis. Fanny’s family in Portsmouth may not be quite poor, but it is far down the economic scale from anyone in the early works. Miss Bates is poor, as is Mrs. Smith, and far poorer are the cottagers visited by Emma and Harriet.39 Servants and dependents are newly visible, as well—nurserymaids, valets, laborers, tenant farmers, bailiffs—as are shopkeepers and the members of the less lucrative professions. In the late works, Austen opens her imagination to a whole world of economic realities that lies below the lives of the country gentry.40 As several of these examples suggest, this expansion of focus involves, in particular, a new attention to what Emma thinks of as “the difference of woman’s destiny” (316). So too, most of Wordsworth’s pictures of the poor and dispossessed are pictures of women, including “The Female Vagrant,” “Goody Blake and Harry Gill,” “The Thorn,” “Her Eyes are Wild,” “Alice Fell,” and many others. Fanny, Jane Fairfax, Harriet, Miss Bates, Mrs. Smith, even Clara Brereton, Sanditon’s presumptive heroine (“[s]o low in every worldly view, as … to have been preparing for a situation little better