19/10/07 - English Literature - Austen and the Novel

In the twentieth century Austen has been seen as a writer who transcends criticism, who is above it. People rarely admit to not liking her work. Her superstar status relies only on six texts. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were published posthumously. Her canvas is very limited, for her stories are always set in a particular setting and are about a particular class.

"The little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour."
[Jane Austen, letter to J. Edward Austen, 16 December 1816]

Here she shows a realisation that she has limited scope, and it is because of her background. Charlotte Bronte shows that criticising Austen is a high-risk strategy.

"Why do you like Miss Austen so very much? I am puzzled on that point. What induced you to say that you would rather have written Pride and Prejudice or Tom Jones, than any of the Waverley novels? I had not seen Pride and Prejudice till I had read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book. And what did I find? An accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a commonplace face; a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses. These observations will probably irritate you. But I shall run the risk."
[Charlotte Bronte, letter to G.H. Lewes, 12 January 1848]

Austen wasn't immediately recognised. Her literary qualities, such as her finely detailed narration, were praised, but she was not yet raised to her current high status.

"That young lady had a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life, which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The big Bow-Wow strain I can do myself like any now going; but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment is denied to me."
[Walter Scott, Journal entry, 14 March 1826]

Walter Scott's period belonged to a time when people were not quite aware of Austen's genius, but when Charlotte Bronte was writing, people were expected to read and enjoy Austen. Austen found her way to the forefront of the literary canon because she leaves her work open to many directions of criticism, such as moral and New Criticism.

Kettle asked what significance Emma has for us today, but his criticism leaves little scope for wider context.

Austen depicts the middle classes almost exclusively. Aristocratic figures remain in the periphery of her work. There are three types of people on whom she focuses in her novels: the small landowners (who run the country at a local level, and whose main concern is the value of land); the rural middle classes (such as Mr Collins) and the rentier class (who live off interest in trade and industry). Walter Scott says of class in Emma:

"We bestow no mean compliment upon the author of “Emma” when we say that keeping close to common incidents, and to such characters as occupy the ordinary walks of life, she has produced sketches of such spirit and originality that we never miss the excitation which depends upon a narrative of uncommon events, arising from the consideration of minds, manners, and sentiments, greatly above our own. In this class she stands almost alone; for the scenes of Miss Edgeworth are laid in higher life, varied by more romantic incident, and by her remarkable power of embodying and illustrating national character. But the author of “Emma” confines herself chiefly to the middling classes of society; her most distinguished characters do not rise greatly above well-bred country gentlemen and ladies; and those which are sketched with most originality and precision, belong to a class rather below that standard."
[Walter Scott, Quarterly Review, October, 1815]

Scott sees Austen is working in a political way, carving recognition for the middle classes, i.e. the class to which she belongs. Britain in 1813 had a rigid social hierarchy. In the 1830s, the hierarchy buckled, particularly after the Great Reform of 1832. Social and political mobility had kept the rigidity in place. The idea of estates is important in Austen's novels because they are tied up with inheritance, acquirement and marriage.

Marriage became more political as middle trading classes could make just as much capital as the aristocracy. Hardwick's Act stated that people under the age of twenty-one had to get parental consent to marry.

"Riches is the blood of the body politic: it must be made to circulate: if you allow it to stagnate, or if too much of it be thrown into any own part, it will destroy the body politic, as the same cause often does the body natural: if this Bill passes, our quality and rich families will daily accumulate riches by marrying only one another; and what sort of breed their offspring will be, we may easily judge: if the gout, the gravel, the pox and madness are always to wed together, what a hopeful generation of quality and rich commoners shall we have amongst us?

"The marriages of their [the French] quality are something like the marriages of sovereign princes: the bride and bridegroom sometimes have never seen one another, till they meet to be married. Can any love or affection be expected between such a married couple?

"…In this country, Sir, we as yet know of no distinctions with regard to marriage: a gentleman’s, a farmer’s daughter is a match for the eldest son of the best lord in the land, and perhaps a better match than his father would chuse for him, because she will bring good and wholesome blood into the family."
[Robert Nugent, MP, Hansard 1813: columns 14-16]

Nugent argues for romantic love rather than dynastic marriage. In terms of Austen's work, this means that he argues for the female's freedom to choose. In Austen's novels, young girls often go against the will of their parents when it comes to marriage. Elizabeth Bennet goes against her father's will when she declines Mr Collins' proposal and her father cannot intercept; it is her own choice. Eventually she marries well and notice that she marries for love.

Edmund Burke celebrates tradition over new economics. Austen maintains a Burkean kind of conservatism. She is seen as being against the Jacobin rebels. But we might find more complex views in her work, for example, the concept of sensibility.

The novel of sentiment was an established canon when Austen was writing, and it was about refined feelings, the ability to feel and understand. In Sense and Sensibility the Dashwood sisters are divided in sentiment:

'“And how does dear, dear Norland look?” cried Marianne.
“Dear, dear Norland,” said Elinor, “probably looks much as it always does at this time of year. The woods and walks thickly covered with dead leaves.”
“ Oh!” cried Marianne, “with what transporting sensations have I formerly seen them fall! How have I delighted, as I walked, to see them driven in showers about me by the wind! What feelings have they, the season, the air altogether inspired! Now there is no one to regard them. They are seen only as a nuisance, swept hastily off, and driven as much as possible from the sight.”
“ It is not every one,” said Elinor, “who has your passion for dead leaves.”'
[Sense and Sensibility, Chapter 16]

Austen uses a comic juxtaposition of opinions. Butler argues that Austen falls into identifying sensibility with political radicalism, which parallels her with Burkean theory.

"[T]he characteristic recourse of the conservative … is to remind us ultimately of the insignificance of individual insights and even individual concerns when measured against the scale of the universe as one vast whole."
[Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, Oxford University Press, 1975, p. 130]

But this kind of reading of Austen is too black-and-white and we should be sceptical of pigeon-holing the subtle Jane Austen. In her novels there is an ongoing struggle between the heart and the head. Elizabeth Bennet is a prime example, seeming to replicate proto-Jacobin traits; she is sceptical as a person and sceptical of Mr Darcy and others. Butler recognises the problem of Austen's theory in the character of Elizabeth Bennet, yet states that her marriage to Mr Darcy conforms to the conservative feeling of the book.

"If this novel ends by affirming the claims of hierarchal society over the perspective, rationality and feeling of the individual, the experience of reading it is nevertheless an immersion in that perspective, that rationality and that feeling."
[Robert P. Irvine, Jane Austen, Routledge, 2005, p. 119]

"Our habit of thinking of Mary Wollstonecraft as a Jacobin, and Jane Austen as a Lady Novelist praised by [the conservative Walter] Scott, makes it difficult for us to see connections between them; attention to the ‘feminist tradition’ of the eighteenth century, in its widest sense, shows that it is by no means bizarre to look for such connection."
[M. Kirkham, Jane Austen, Feminism and Fiction, Harvester, 1983, pp. 40-1]

Austen complicates subjects for us. She disrupts our view of middle class society using certain characters and irony. We see Austen as occupying conservative opinions, yet she addresses controversial topics in a thought-provoking way, making it difficult to place her definitively. She can be all things to everyone.