William Deresiewicz Read online

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  is a oneline joke, the latter is plausible as a real, albeit limited, young man. As a villain, John Dashwood’s motives are as simple as his behavior is transparent; William Walter Elliot, to say nothing of Mrs. Norris, plays a more complex game, and for more complex reasons. Just as the late novels are sparing of caricatures, so too do they abound in characters who are morally ambiguous. The early novels have none such; we know exactly what we are to think of everyone in them. But as the critical literature demonstrates, equivocal figures in the later works include, in Persuasion, Lady Russell, Mrs. Smith, and Captain Benwick; in Mansfield Park, the five most important figures at the very least—Fanny, Edmund, Mary, Henry, and Sir Thomas; and in Emma, pretty much everyone except Knightley and Mrs. Elton, the novel’s moral poles. Just as emotions and motives are so much less complex in the early novels, so too are relationships. That this is so, that relationships between characters are similarly unambiguous and shift in a similarly step-wise fashion, is already largely implicit in what I have said, but it bears on narrative form in ways well worth exploring. The younger Austen—it is one of her glories— is extremely fond of what might be called the narrative set-piece. So many of her most memorable scenes belong to this type: Catherine and Henry’s teasing conversation during their first dance, Elinor and Lucy’s set-to in the Middletons’ parlor, Elizabeth and Darcy’s sparring matches while Jane is ill as well as during the ball at Netherfield. We can recognize a general likeness between these scenes, as well as the great importance of each to their respective novels, but how can we characterize this likeness more precisely? Most obviously, these episodes are all markedly performative. Austen constructs them like little plays, carefully setting the scene and disposing the characters in their places. (This is especially notable in Elinor and Lucy’s encounter, where the break between chapters 23 and 24 functions as a kind of drumroll.) The scene set, she then withdraws, rendering the rest of the encounter almost entirely in dialogue. And the characters know they are performing—not for us, but for each other. The tension is high, because the stakes are high, too. Little plays, these set-pieces are also verbal fencing matches, impromptu debates—games, as Catherine and Henry’s encounter makes clearest, albeit with unspoken rules. One more analogy: in their plotted, patterned, performed quality, their precise architectonics and balancing of opposed units, the set-pieces of the early phase are the scenic equivalents of the Johnsonian sentence, the syntactic form most favored by the younger Austen. As such, they may be said to spread out not so much in time as in space; their quality is pictorial rather than

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  narrative. They do not advance their respective plots so much as reveal existing attitudes and the tensions between them. Indeed, as a game fences itself off from “real life,” drawing a temporal boundary around itself, so do these scenes seem to arrest the narratives to which they belong, sticking out from their surface like rocks in a stream. This last observation returns us to the relevance of the set-piece to the temporal quality of relationships in the early novels. Yes, Elizabeth and Darcy’s relationship changes, in a very important sense, as a result of the sudden changes in their feelings about each other. But in another, equally important sense, their relationship never changes. The reason these set-pieces are so important, and much of the reason they are so memorable, is that each defines, once and for all, a central relationship. That is why each occurs early in its respective novel: the set-piece was the younger Austen’s way of “pictorially” representing a certain crucial dynamic that would remain unchanged and would carry through the rest of the novel. This principle is less fully true in the case of Elinor and Lucy—their relationship is less central—but in the other cases the picture we get in those scenes—light-hearted, satiric Henry and wide-eyed Catherine; wickedly ironic Elizabeth and imperturbably forensic Darcy, at glittering daggers drawn—is the one we retain even after the narrative is over. However much these relationships may change during the course of their novels, what matters more is what they intrinsically, eternally are. Set-pieces, stasis, sudden shocks and shifts—feelings and relationships in the late novels could hardly be more different. If events in the early works occupy time the way beads occupy a string, events in the later ones occupy time the way salt occupies water, so that it scarcely makes sense even to distinguish between “events” and “time.“49 Everywhere we find psychological states in continual flux, as characters respond to changing circumstances, not with stubborn rigidity or helpless collapse, but by means of gradual adjustments of feeling. This principle is everywhere in Mansfield Park, from Fanny’s slow, painful, carefully documented adjustment to her initial removal to the way she copes with the arrival of Mary, with her own emergence as an attractive and desired young woman, with the several shocks of her return to Portsmouth, and with just about every other change that comes her way. This ability effortfully to bring her feelings to a new state is precisely what underlies her resilience in accommodating herself to change. Nor are all these adjustments willed; some take her by surprise, especially those having to do with the Crawfords. In Portsmouth, she finds herself (“Here was another strange revolution of mind!”) glad to receive a letter from Mary (326); she even finds herself beginning to feel affection for

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  Henry—just as he, to his great surprise, had once found that a similarly undiscerned shift in feeling had brought him to the condition of loving her. The prospect of another letter, from Edmund, surprises Fanny by evoking terror rather than delight, occasioning what we might regard as the novel’s thematic statement about change both inner and outer: “She began to feel that she had not yet gone through all the changes of opinion and sentiment, which the progress of time and variation of circumstances occasion in this world of changes” (309). Emma and Persuasion take place in this same world. Persuasion, as we said, is about grief, a psychological process that by its very nature involves gradual adjustment, as we see most clearly, if perhaps too quickly, in the case of Captain Benwick. But such adjustments also lie at the very center of the narrative, in the slow dance Anne and Wentworth do toward each other. The process is not symmetric: because Anne has never stopped loving him, her feelings are really about his, and we learn of his through her constant attempts to divine them: “Her power with him was gone forever” (86), she first sees; then a little while later, “She understood him. He could not forgive her,—but he could not be unfeeling” (113); then later still, she finds him “turning to her and speaking with a glow, and yet a gentleness, which seemed almost restoring the past” (134), and so the gradual transformation and gradual discovery go until she reads the note in which he passionately professes his love. Emma, by unsurprising contrast, seeks frequently to measure the state not of a young man’s feelings for her, but of hers for him, Frank Churchill. After his first departure from Highbury: “Emma continued to entertain no doubt of her being in love. Her ideas only varied as to the how much. At first, she thought it was a good deal; and afterwards, but little” (217). Later, hearing the news of his imminent return, she is set to “weighing her own feelings, and trying to understand the degree of her agitation, which she rather thought was considerable” (250), but a chapter later “[a] very little quiet reflection was enough to satisfy [her] as to the nature of her agitation on hearing this news of Frank Churchill. She was soon convinced that it was not for herself she was feeling at all apprehensive or embarrassed; it was for him” (261). Here not only do we see feelings changing day by day and even hour by hour, we see them changing under their own self-scrutiny, a minuteness of analysis on Austen’s part, and a frequency of it on her heroines’, absolutely foreign to the early novels. Fanny and Anne experience no sudden recognition-cum-transformation— not, like Elinor, because they have nothing to reform, but because, like

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  Wordsworth and Coleridge in their firstperson lyrics, they practice a
continual reappraisal of feeling and experience and are thus continually changing. Emma is not quite so heroic as these two creepmice, but her transformation is every bit as profound. Critics have long noted that, unlike those of the early heroines, hers involves not one but a series of recognitions, the moment when the truth of her love for Knightley darts through her constituting only the final one.50 But to reduce Emma’s transformation to her several moments of repentance and recognition is to flatten what is in fact a comprehensive maturation of personality by fitting it to the pattern of the mere changes of consciousness experienced by the heroines of the early works. When we read, for example, in the novel’s penultimate chapter, that Emma now feels that “[i]t would be a great pleasure to know Robert Martin” (389), we recognize that her transformation has involved not just an illumination of the mind, but an opening of the heart, a supplanting of snobbery by generosity and humility, a fundamental change of character that has been gradually, continually coming over her throughout the entire novel. Because continuously evolving inner lives make for continuously evolving relationships, the major phase replaces the set-piece with what might be called the “serial scene.” If Darcy were the one who wanted to enter the ministry and Elizabeth the one who disapproved, the two would have one cracking go at it, one fireworks display, in which their antagonistic positions were fully set out, and that would be the end of it (until Elizabeth broke down, perhaps, and confessed how wrong she had been). Instead, Edmund and Mary worry the question over and over, at different lengths, in different contexts, from different angles, with different degrees of levity or vexation, and with differently adjusted feelings and hopes: in the Sotherton chapel (75), during the walk in the wilderness (77ff.), at Mansfield manor (91ff.), at the Parsonage (200ff.), at the ball (230), and so forth. Comparable serial scenes in Emma include Emma and Knightley’s long wrangle about the propriety of her behavior to those around her as well as Frank’s manychaptered, subtly shifting game of double meanings and pretend-flirtation with her and Jane. Persuasion, as we just noted, is at its core a serial scene writ large, that of Anne and Wentworth’s many tentative encounters with each other. Like feelings, relationships in the late novels are in a constant state of reexamination and recalibration, with characters constantly repositioning themselves relative to one another. That is why both feelings and relationships are often so hard to define. In the early novels, we always know where people stand with each other. But what is Emma’s relationship with Frank? And what is it with Knightley:

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  brother and sister? friends? lovers? Wordsworth raises the same question about his relationship with his former schoolteacher in the Matthew poems. In fact, the issue of such “ambiguous relationships” will be the subject of my chapter on the novel. Again, how many shades of uncertainty and mutual misunderstanding must we account for in characterizing Fanny’s relationship with Edmund at any given moment, and how many different ones at the next? About Anne and Wentworth’s we needn’t undertake such an investigation—as we’ve seen, Anne does it for us. It is no wonder that just as relationships in the late novels are so often ambiguous, feelings are so often, what they never are in the early works, ambivalent. And, as in the Romantic poets—for whom ambivalent feelings are their favorite feelings of all—they are incomparably stronger for being so.51 That this is the case in Persuasion has been noted more than once, specifically in connection with Byron as well as Keats and Shelley.52 Again and again, Anne’s encounters with Wentworth plunge her into agonizingly mixed states of mind, “compounded of pleasure and pain” (113) or of “agitation, pain, pleasure, a something between delight and misery” (185), the parade example occurring at the Musgroves’ lodgings in Bath, where, waiting for the chance to open her heart to Wentworth, she finds herself “deep in the happiness of such misery, or the misery of such happiness” (233). Fanny’s ambivalences tend to cluster around Edmund’s attraction to Mary, as jealousy fights against guilt and hope against hopelessness. As she listens to the account of his final conversation with Mary, one that has crushed his own hopes, she cannot help but feel both “pain” and “delight” (375) and be “almost sorry” to have made him speak at all (377). Emma expresses similar feelings not only with respect to Frank, but also after the proposal scene, as her love for Knightley conflicts with feelings of duty toward her father and guilt toward Harriet. About feelings in general in the late novels as opposed to the early ones, we can say that they are not only far stronger for being conflicted and far deeper for being rooted in a denser matrix of personal history, but also far more various. The early novels work with the limited repertoire of emotions proper to the marriage plot: love, humiliation, dejection, hope, happiness. But the later novels, while still ostensibly presenting pictures of courtship, in fact deemphasize the marriage plot to such an extent that it becomes merely the vehicle of narrative resolution, and generally a hasty resolution, at that. The later novels spend almost no time on what almost exclusively concerns the early ones: the conversations and events of the hero and heroine’s courtship. In the first two, in fact, the hero and heroine do not even dis46 Early Phase Versus Major Phase

  cover that they are lovers until the very end, and in the third, they do not rediscover it until then.53 Instead, each of these novels opens itself to a broad range of social situations and psychological states, which is why each traverses such a broad range of feelings. To take only Fanny, and only the first volume of her work, we watch her experience loneliness, despondency, gratitude, shame, guilt, jealousy, selfpity, terror, and moral revulsion. The rest of her story adds other feelings, the stories of Emma and Anne, others still. In all this, then—the slow shaping of the self in childhood and adolescence, the multifarious operations of memory, the continuous conquest of self-knowledge, the gradual evolution of feelings and minute adjustment of relationships—we see how central was Austen’s discovery of time in giving rise to the incomparably greater psychological complexity of her later novels. And we also see how unmistakably that discovery bears the imprint, in its central, structuring logic as well as in so many of its particulars, of the Romantic poets, and especially of Wordsworth. We can go still further in delineating the impact of Austen’s new understanding of time on her ideas and her art. The conceptual landscape of the early novels is dominated by the abstract moral vocabulary Austen inherited from the eighteenth century: “pride” and “prejudice,” “sense” and “sensibility.” It is fallacious, of course, to see Elinor as personifying sense and Marianne sensibility (we are twice told of the latter’s sense in the very first chapter), but it is not fallacious to see the novel as organizing itself around a struggle between those two faculties. Pride and prejudice, in their novel, are rather mutually reinforcing than antagonistic, but they remain dominant terms of analysis. Nor are these the only important abstractions. In Sense and Sensibility, both characters and narrator spend a great deal of time identifying the story’s various single men as “amiable,” “agreeable,” or the reverse. Pride and Prejudice simply cannot be fully understood without a grasp of what Austen means by such terms as “gentlemanliness,” “respectability,” “elegance,” “dignity,” “grace,” “cordiality,” and “warmth” (not to mention “address,” “countenance,” “manner,” “air,” and “features”). A powerful categorizing intelligence is at work. But by the late novels, Austen’s mind has grown into a far different shape. To be sure, the earlier mode of analysis has not been discarded, but it has receded into the background. The very titles point to the change, the paired abstractions having been replaced by names that may be understood as signifying, not collections of fixed qualities, but fields of possibility. How will Mansfield Park change? And famously, “[w]hat will become of” Emma? A

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  phrase worth pondering, that: not only “What will happen to Emma,” but also, “What will develop from Emma?” and “What will Emma become?” (35).54 Become, indeed: from an artist of being, of st
atic characters and abstract qualities, Austen becomes that most “Romantic” of creators, an artist of becoming.55 We can see it in her language. The greater “subtlety and flexibility of Jane Austen’s mature prose” has long been noted.56 At its worst, the language of the early Austen can practically drive itself dizzy with its Johnsonian juggling of paired and tripled abstractions. After Willoughby concludes his impassioned confessional monologue, “Elinor made no answer. Her thoughts were silently fixed on the irreparable injury which too early an independence and its consequent habits of idleness, dissipation, and luxury, had made in the mind, the character, the happiness, of a man who, to every advantage of person and talents, united a disposition naturally open and honest, and a feeling, affectionate temper” (280). The late language displays its freedom most fully in the rendering of speech. Nothing can compare to Miss Bates’s free-associative monologues of broken fragments, but a comparable freedom from syntactic order is often essential to the reporting of Fanny’s speech, as well. This is a heroine whose first words are “`no, no—not at all—no, thank you’” (14) and who responds to the news that it was Henry who had arranged for her brother’s promotion with, “`Good Heaven! how very, very kind! Have you really—was it by your desire—I beg your pardon, but I am bewildered. Did Admiral Crawford apply?—how was it?—I am stupefied’” (247; emphasis in the original).57 Comparable examples from Anne’s speech are harder to find, since she does so little speaking at all, but they are not at all scarce in Austen’s notation of what passes through her mind. A scene discussed above, Anne’s first meeting with Wentworth, provides what has become the best-known example: “Her eye half met Captain Wentworth’s; a bow, a curtsey passed; she heard his voice—he talked to Mary, said all that was right; said something to the Miss Musgroves, enough to mark an easy footing: the room seemed full—full of persons and voices—but a few minutes ended it” (8485). As these last two examples suggest, the greater syntactic freedom of the late novels overwhelmingly serves one particular purpose: the moment-bymoment registration of feeling.58 And this attention to the flux of feeling points, as we will see, to a development of the very first importance, nothing less than a revolution in Austen’s conception of both the mind and the moral life. For even as we see the late characters’ feelings develop moment by moment, so, very often, do we see their thoughts simultaneously doing