William Deresiewicz Read online

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  than a nursery maid”)41—all women in circumstances and with prospects far below even those of the Dashwood sisters, with their thousand-a-piece. It is to the pressures of such lives, not to the marriage plots of the relatively well set-up, that the late fiction gives the bulk of its attention. These women share another, related characteristic: marginality within their family or community. Elizabeth Bennet, Jane, Elinor, Marianne, Catherine and her friends—all young and lovely, all cynosures of their circle, all avidly courted. But the late fiction gives most of its attention to young women whom no one regards: Fanny and Anne, of course, and—because Emma is told through the eyes of its heroine, who is herself fascinated by two more such women—Harriet and Jane. Yet because no one regards them, they (with the exception of Harriet) regard everything. As Fanny says, “I was quiet, but I was not blind” (300). Aside from Elinor’s always-keen interest in Marianne, silent observation plays no significant role in the early heroines’ lives. Scarcely more does silent contemplation, for the younger Austen tends to stage deliberative episodes as dialogues—Elizabeth with Jane or Charlotte, Elinor with Marianne, Catherine with Henry. The lives of these heroines are almost entirely absorbed by social activity; scarcely ever do we see them alone, their moment of transformation being in each case the one important exception. But the late heroines, including Emma, are frequently alone, and when alone are invariably immersed in introspection. Austen has discovered, in other words, the great Wordsworthian theme of solitude, essential to the flowering of a dynamic and ever-evolving inner life, a life of recollection and reflection. It is to that life that we now return. The element of the inner life most obviously involved with time is that of memory. Memory plays only one role in the early novels, and though it is a crucial one, arising in connection with each novel’s central scene, that of its heroine’s transformation, it also exhibits the narrowness of Austen’s conception of memory at this time in her career.42 Pride and Prejudice provides the clearest instance, for its heroine’s transformation, her self-recognition, is the most stunningly swift. Darcy’s letter forces Elizabeth to reconsider all her judgments about him and Wickham, a reconsideration that in turn forces her to remember her impressions of the latter. The result proves distressing: “She tried to recollect some instance of goodness … But no such recollection befriended her … ” (169). She reads on, and her memory becomes more particularized: “She perfectly remembered every thing that had passed in conversation between Wickham and herself, in their first evening at Mr. Phillips’s … She was now struck with the impropriety of such communications to a stranger” (170, emphasis in the original). Her old judgments

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  weaken, and only a paragraph later comes the catastrophe, the two dozen words on which the whole novel pivots: “She grew absolutely ashamed of herself.—Of neither Darcy nor Wickham could she think, without feeling that she had been blind, partial, prejudiced, absurd” (171). There are two things to note here. First, as I suggested above, the contents of memory undergo no change or decay from the moment of the event to the moment of recollection. Five months later, and Elizabeth still “perfectly remembered everything that had passed in conversation.” It must be so, else the second and more important circumstance could not be true: the function of memory here—the only function it performs in the novel—is that of moral selfcorrection. The heroine remembers what she did, thinks about it, is heartily ashamed of it, and resolves to do better. This is one of those instances in which an idea implicit in Austen, or at least in the early Austen, is identical to one explicit in Samuel Johnson: “Memory is the purveyor of reason, the power which places those images before the mind upon which the judgment is to be exercised, and which treasures up the discriminations that are once passed, as the rules of future action, or grounds of subsequent conclusions.“43 And so it is in Northanger Abbey, when Henry’s rebuke opens Catherine’s eyes to the “extravagance of her late fancies” (173). And so it is in Sense and Sensibility, for Marianne undergoes her transformation, not because Willoughby jilts her, not because her grief over him makes her ill, but because her illness “has given me leisure and calmness for serious recollection”: “I considered the past; I saw in my own behaviour … I saw that my own feelings… . Whenever I looked towards the past … ,” and so forth (293294). Recollection, judgment, mortification, a resolution to judge and act better, and Marianne is cured in more than just the medical sense. But because memory is confined to this one special role, its workings understood in so schematic a way, its potential impact on the sense of time in the early novels is negated. Time here is essentially Bergsonian temps— linear, unidirectional clock-time—with none of the thickening and deepening provided by those back-and-forth movements of consciousness that cause time present and times past to coexist in a complex temporal space. Compared with this mechanical understanding of memory’s operations and limited view of its functions, the multifarious roles it plays in the late novels represent an immeasurable advance. From being Johnsonian, Austen’s understanding of memory becomes Wordsworthian.44 So essential are the workings of memory to Mansfield Park and Persuasion, and so important will their exploration be to my chapters on these novels,

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  that to give a full account of them here is neither desirable nor necessary. I will only touch on the most important points. We already began to see the ways in which memory operates for Fanny Price when we examined her response to nature in the shrubbery scene.45 As opposed to what we find in the early novels, but very much like we see in Wordsworth and Coleridge’s firstperson lyrics, memory arises for her spontaneously. It also gives her a sense of rootedness in time, a way of understanding not only the past, but also the present. As in the greatest poems of memory Wordsworth published during Austen’s lifetime—“Tintern Abbey,” “The Brothers,” “The Two April Mornings”—the present acquires significance because of the way it both echoes and alters the past. Memory thus makes palpable the distance between present and past, helping give time the weight it so lacks in the early works. Late in the novel, we find Fanny sharing the Portsmouth parlor with her father: “And the remembrance of her first evening in that room, of her father and his newspaper came across her. No candle was now wanted. The sun was yet an hour and half above the horizon. She felt that she had, indeed, been three months there” (362, emphasis in the original). This passage, like the shrubbery scene, also shows memory connecting the temporal rhythms of Fanny’s life to those of the life of nature, the passage of seasons and years (“five summers, with the length Of five long winters! and again I hear These waters … “). Another scene of recollection in Portsmouth suggests a deeper way in which the past gives meaning to the present through the action of memory. In a remarkable testament to the power of time to both alter and fix the affections, Fanny, greeting Mrs. Price for the first time in eight years, embraces a mother whose features she finds she “loved the more, because they brought her aunt Bertram’s before her” (313). It is not that she so loves her aunt’s features, as such; it is the electric charge of recognition, transmitted between memory’s two poles of “then” and “now,” that galvanizes her heart. The present is loved because it evokes the past, and the past is loved because it lives again in the present. Without the other, each is barren.46 But the supreme scene of recollection in Mansfield Park, as I mentioned in the previous chapter and will discuss at length in the next, is the first description of the East room, where Fanny, under the presiding emblem of Tintern Abbey, casts her glance about her and “could scarcely see an object in that room which had not an interesting remembrance connected with it.—Everything was a friend, or bore her thoughts to a friend.” But what these beloved mementos speak of, in the first instance, are “the pains of tyranny, of ridicule, and neglect.” Yet “almost every recurrence of either had led to something

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  consolatory …
and the whole was now so blended together, so harmonized by distance, that every former affliction had its charm” (126). Nothing could be more like Wordsworth, and especially the Wordsworth of “Tintern Abbey”: memory’s power, not to repeat the past, but to transform it, and in particular, to redeem experiences of suffering and loss. In essence, the kind of temporal and therefore emotional depth Fanny experiences at particular moments undergirds the whole of Persuasion, constituting the affective ground bass of this, Austen’s lushest orchestration of feeling. The whole narrative is a “now” shadowed by a “then,” so that the novel itself may be said to remember: to possess a memory that grounds its sense of self, gives meaning to the present and weight to time, and finally redeems the past by bringing it again to life, immensely transformed. Of course, most of the novel’s remembering is focused through the consciousness of its heroine, for whom, as for James in Wordsworth’s “Brothers,” memory becomes an almost physiological process.47 Where Fanny courts memory, often her only friend, Anne has long suppressed hers, and so, when Wentworth’s reappearance calls it forth, it seems to push its way to the surface from the very depths of her body. The mere mention of his name evokes blushes and sighs, effusions of blood and breath, that send her hastening out for a walk in an attempt to regain control of herself. With his actual approach, “a thousand feelings rushed on Anne,“48 and with his appearance, her very senses rebel, rendering her scarcely able to hear or see (we can practically feel the blood pounding in her ears) and leaving her scarcely able to eat, her mind and body—if the distinction can still be maintained at this point—“resuming the agitation” that almost eight years “had banished into distance and indistinctness” (8485). We can scarcely speak of the past as being recollected here, because it seems never to have gone away. Both Anne’s habit of suppressing her memories of Wentworth and the force with which those memories reassert themselves once that suppression is overborne arise, of course, from the grief she feels at having lost him. In this novel, whose central theme is loss and grief, memory is always closely allied to both. For what is grief but memory made visceral, memories felt in the body, and felt the more sharply for being only memories, for belonging to that which can never come back in another form? Memory is clearly less important in Emma than in the other late novels, primarily because Emma is so different a figure from the melancholy, introspective Fanny and Anne. Where their thoughts tend to turn back to the past, those of Emma, a creature of energy and will, are busy striding forth into the future. But Emma is not unmarked by its author’s new understanding of

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  memory’s place within a full human personality. Indeed, the narrative proper, which begins on Emma’s governess’s wedding day, begins in a manner that strikingly, if only lightly, anticipates Persuasion: “It was Miss Taylor’s loss,” we read, “which first brought grief” (7). Alone that same evening, Emma has “only to sit and think of what she had lost”—in other words, to remember. “She recalled [Miss Taylor’s] past kindness—the kindness, the affection of sixteen years … but the intercourse of the last seven years … was yet a dearer, tenderer recollection” (8). Of the mother who had died in her infancy, we have already been told that Emma had no more “than an indistinct remembrance of her caresses” (7). As it is for Fanny and Anne, memory here is affective, even physical (those caresses seem more felt than anything else); helps ground the self by creating a sense of its history, including the different eras of that history (“sixteen years,” “seven years”); and helps form, strengthen, and reform the affections. Already Emma dwells more deeply in time than do the early heroines, and in so doing, possesses herself more fully. In discussing the quality of time in the early novels, I noted that the intervals between events possess no narrative significance, that time itself is a neutral medium. To say this is also to imply something about the nature of characters and relationships in the early works, of the feelings people have about each other and the ways they negotiate them—how these occupy and are affected by time. In the early phase, feelings remain precisely as they are, with neither change nor growth nor decay, until some specific event, some confrontation or recognition, shocks them into a new, equally static condition. Darcy snubs Elizabeth, and from then on, she hates him; she reads his letter, and from then on she esteems him and regrets her behavior toward him; she meets him at Pemberley—perceiving what the estate says about its owner and what his behavior says about his feelings for her—and from then on, she loves him. The same analysis may be made of any of the less central feelings in the early novels (Jane, for example, has never stopped carrying a torch for Bingley, as we eventually learn, nor he for her), as well as of the major ones in Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility: Catherine’s for Isabella Thorpe and Henry Tilney, Marianne’s for Willoughby—this last moving through sharply demarcated stages of passionate love endlessly dwelling on itself, passionate grief doing likewise, and finally a letting go of love and grief that happens, as we saw above, in the space of just a few days. True, Marianne’s heart does “in time” become “as much devoted to her husband, as it had once been to Willoughby” (322), but this gradual transformation happens

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  after the end of the narrative proper. The younger Austen may recognize that feelings can sometimes change with time and time alone, but she does not know how to dramatize that perception and for the most part disregards it. A graph of virtually any feeling in the early novels would resemble a set of stairs: a series of horizontal lines—steady states—linked by vertical jumps up or down—sudden shifts, as the personality that has hardened into one configuration is shattered by some dramatic event and instantaneously reassembles itself into a new one. There are several implications and corollaries of this principle of sudden emotional transformation. Because changes in emotional state depend so much on confrontation and shock, melodramatic elements are much more prominent: stock events like Lydia’s elopement, Catherine’s ejection from Northanger, or those lurid tales Darcy tells of Wickham or Brandon of Willoughby; stock characters like the false, fortune-hunting female (Caroline Bingley, Lucy Steele, Isabella Thorpe) and the domineering dowager on the man’s side (Lady Catherine, Mrs. Ferrars, Willoughby’s Aunt Smith; General Tilney is a male version). We may also note, in this connection, how much more schematic are the early plots than the later ones, and how much greater is the family resemblance among them than among the later group. The younger Austen, having written out a certain narrative paradigm three times, had brought it to perfection; the mature writer clearly had no desire to repeat it, or in fact to repeat anything. Indeed, in trotting out Mrs. Clay, whose ambitions trouble Anne for about ten seconds, and William Walter Elliot, whose charms stand not the slightest chance of winning her over and whose perfidy she cannot finally be bothered to expose, Persuasion thumbs its nose at that very paradigm, with its lurid tales and its fortune hunters and its Mr. Wrongs. With this relative simplicity of both emotional structure and narrative structure comes a relative simplicity of characterization. Complexity of character, to a great extent, is complexity of emotion. In many cases, in fact, figures in the early novels are not so much characters as caricatures, albeit brilliant ones. The late novels have their caricatures, too, but far fewer of them, and in far less prominent positions. We can see this deepening of characterization most clearly through a comparison of analogous figures. Collins and Miss Bates are both fools, but the latter is also a full human being, with complex feelings capable of being wounded, significant relationships, and a social role within her community, and that she is no mere figure of fun becomes, indeed, an extremely important idea at a certain point in the novel. John Thorpe and Yates are both “puppies,” but while the first