What Matters in Jane Austen?: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved (40 page)

Mr. Collins, to be sure, was neither sensible nor agreeable; his society was irksome, and his attachment to her must be imaginary. But still he would be her husband.

Pride and Prejudice, I. xxii

Jane Austen knew that her novels were different. You can see it in her ‘Plan of a Novel, according to hints from various quarters’, which she wrote in around 1816, not long after publishing
Emma
. Based on the ‘hints’ (by which she means requests) of particular relations and acquaintances, it is also a list of ingredients learned from the very many novels that she had read. There was no doubt what would be expected of a female protagonist: ‘Heroine a faultless Character herself—, perfectly good, with much tenderness & sentiment, & not the least Wit . . . All the Good will be unexceptionable in every respect—and there will be no foibles or weaknessses but with the Wicked, who will be completely depraved & infamous.’
¹
Her own notes indicate that her niece Fanny Knight, whom she elsewhere recorded ‘could not bear
Emma
herself’, had wanted a faultless protagonist, and that family friend Mary Cooke had preferred a heroine without wit. No more Elizabeth Bennets. The notion that a heroine should be faultless, which now sounds psychologically so improbable, would have been entirely familiar to a keen novel-reader of the period. It went back to the hugely influential fiction of Samuel Richardson, who, according to Henry Austen, was his sister’s own favourite. When he revised his great novel
Clarissa
in response to what he thought were misreadings of the novel, Richardson upbraided critics who had suggested that his heroine was at fault in her conduct towards either her family or her would-be seducer, Lovelace. ‘As far as she could be perfect, considering the people she had to deal with and those with whom she was inseparably connected, she is perfect.’
²

‘Pictures of perfection as you know make me sick & wicked,’ Austen wrote in a letter to Fanny Knight just a few months before her death (
Letters
, 155). Fanny had set a suitor, James Wildman, to read her aunt’s novels (without telling him the identity of their author) and he had evidently objected that her female characters were not exemplary. ‘I particularly respect him for wishing to think well of all young Ladies; it shews an amiable & a delicate Mind.’ So ‘faultless’ is a word for heavy irony. In Austen’s novels it is first used of a woman in
Mansfield Park
, and incredibly it is applied to Maria Bertram. ‘Maria was indeed the pride and delight of them all—perfectly faultless—an angel’ (I. iv). As a fragment of narration it seems extraordinary, but in context we see that it reflects Mrs Norris’s opinion, and probably her words: not just ‘faultless’, but ‘perfectly faultless’. The phrase dooms her. In
Emma
, it is Mr Knightley’s word for Emma, immediately after she has accepted his proposal. ‘He had ridden home through the rain; and had walked up directly after dinner, to see how this sweetest and best of all creatures, faultless in spite of all her faults, bore the discovery’ (III. xiii). Even at his most enamoured, Mr Knightley knows that it is a lover’s paradox. For has he not qualified to be her husband by being ‘one of the few people who could see faults in Emma Woodhouse, and the only one who ever told her of them’ (I. i)?

Austen’s interest in her heroines’ faults and errors was in itself something extraordinary in fiction. Yet the novelty went beyond this. She also developed techniques for showing the contradictoriness or even obscurity of her protagonist’s motivations. Here is a typical heroine of a late eighteenth-century novel by probably the most accomplished woman novelist before Austen. It is from the opening chapter of Fanny Burney’s
Cecilia
(1782).

But though thus largely indebted to fortune, to nature she had yet greater obligations: her form was elegant, her heart was liberal; her countenance announced the intelligence of her mind, her complexion varied with every emotion of her soul, and her eyes, the heralds of her speech, now beamed with understanding and now glistened with sensibility.
³

From ‘her countenance . . .’ onwards it is impossible to imagine Austen writing any of this. This heroine’s outward and inner self are, in a sense, the same. She looks as she is. Her every feeling is apparently legible. And because she has to possess in fullest measure the qualities of a heroine – ‘understanding’ and ‘sensibility’ – we get all that beaming and glistening. Cecilia has much to endure before she manages to marry the man she loves, but, like most heroines before Austen, she never has to endure discovering that she has been fooled by her own feelings. Austen gave her readers an entirely new sense of a person’s inner life, but through new kinds of narrative rather than new insights into human nature.

Nothing is more important in fiction than the means by which a novel renders a character’s thoughts.

The managing of the attraction between Elizabeth and Mr Darcy, for instance, is a triumph of technique as much as of psychological subtlety. Elizabeth Bennet is an unprecedented creation not just because of her wit and ‘archness’, but because Austen is able to give us a sense of her self-ignorance. At the ball at Netherfield she is disappointed by Wickham’s absence and dances first with Mr Collins and then with one of the officers.

When those dances were over, she returned to Charlotte Lucas, and was in conversation with her, when she found herself suddenly addressed by Mr. Darcy who took her so much by surprise in his application for her hand, that, without knowing what she did, she accepted him. He walked away again immediately, and she was left to fret over her own want of presence of mind. (I. xviii)

‘Without knowing what she did’. It is the most innocent of phrases, but read one way directs us to perhaps the most important fact about
Pride and Prejudice
for most readers: the strong current of attraction between two characters who are superficially at odds. Elizabeth does something despite herself and by accepting the character’s own version of what has happened – fretting over ‘her own want of presence of mind’ – the narrator encourages the reader to imagine another explanation. She does the same thing with Mr Darcy.

He wisely resolved to be particularly careful that no sign of admiration should
now
escape him, nothing that could elevate her with the hope of influencing his felicity; sensible that if such an idea had been suggested, his behaviour during the last day must have material weight in confirming or crushing it. (I. xii)

That ‘wisely’ is exquisite. You could call it Austen’s irony, as she commends the self-control that will eventually turn out to have been a self-delusion. But it is also something like Mr Darcy’s self-commendation, for the sentence clearly adopts his own stiff and self-important turn of phrase: ‘nothing that could elevate her with the hope of influencing his felicity’.

‘Till this moment, I never knew myself,’ Elizabeth famously cries when she has read Mr Darcy’s letter and reflects on her own folly at having believed everything Wickham told her (II. xiii). Austen’s most powerful innovation was to realise this lack of self-knowledge in the very voice of the narration. In
Emma
she concentrates this effect as never before, narrating almost entirely from her heroine’s point of view and bending reality to match her preconceptions. We hear Emma, as we heard Mr Darcy, commending her own judgement. As Harriet Smith’s visits to Hartfield become ‘a settled thing’, Emma congratulates herself: ‘. . . in every respect as she saw more of her, she approved her, and was confirmed in all her kind designs’ (I. iv). That ‘kind’ is Emma’s complacent thought about her own motivations; the approval is not so much for Harriet as for herself. Emma’s self-delusions are not the subject of the narration, they are its very substance. Here she is with Frank Churchill, who has been summoned back to Yorkshire, and who she thinks is on the verge of a marriage proposal.

He was silent. She believed he was looking at her; probably reflecting on what she had said, and trying to understand the manner. She heard him sigh. It was natural for him to feel that he had
cause
to sigh. He could not believe her to be encouraging him. A few awkward moments passed, and he sat down again . . . (II. xii)

We pass easily from what Emma supposes, to what she hears, to what seems to be fact. The cause of his sighing is not at all what she thinks. The drama of the moment is all in her imagination: he is, we later discover, considering telling her of his engagement to Jane Fairfax. Yet the narration behaves as if ruled by her consciousness.

Much later, in the twentieth century, critics came to call this technique ‘free indirect style’. It is the most important narrative technique of novelists like Gustave Flaubert, Henry James, James Joyce and Franz Kafka. A third-person narrative takes on the habits of thought or even speech of a particular character. It is a style in which, as one admirer of Austen’s formal daring has put it, ‘the narration’s way of
saying
is constantly both mimicking, and distancing itself from, the character’s way of
seein
g
’.
⁴
Nothing is more important in fiction than the means by which a novel renders a character’s thoughts. This is what novels were designed to do. ‘The real world becomes fiction only by revealing the hidden side of the human beings who inhabit it.’
⁵
The critic who wrote this, Dorrit Cohn, acknowledged Jane Austen as ‘the first extensive practitioner’ of what she calls ‘narrated monologue’ – her name for free indirect style.
⁶
There is some disagreement about how easy it is to find earlier examples of the technique. David Lodge acknowledges Austen as the first great pioneer of the technique, while finding some sparse examples in Fanny Burney’s later fiction.
⁷
Jane Spencer detects glimmerings of free indirect style in the fiction of Austen’s most notable contemporary, Maria Edgeworth, and something like the germ of the technique in the same novel that Lodge scrutinises, Fanny Burney’s
Camilla
(1796).
⁸
Certainly it is possible to find contemporaries of Austen who inserted the thoughts of their characters into the narrative without quotation marks. Here is Laura Montreville, the heroine of Mary Brunton’s
Self-Control
, after she has been propositioned by the ‘impetuous’ Colonel Hargrave: ‘He might now renew his visits, and how was it possible to prevent this? Should she now refuse to see him, her father must be made acquainted with the cause of such a refusal, and she could not doubt that the consequences would be such as she shuddered to think of.’
⁹
Yet this is close to the omniscient reporting of her thoughts by the narrator. There is no room to doubt either what she is feeling, or what the reality of her situation is.

Extraordinarily, Austen not only discovered the possibilities of free indirect style, she produced in
Emma
an example of its use that has hardly been matched. So confident did she feel about her control of the technique that she made her plot depend upon it. When Harriet tells her that there is another man to whom she is becoming attached, Emma thinks she knows just what her protégé is saying. After the debacle of the Mr Elton misunderstanding, she imagines that she is being self-controlled when she tells Harriet that they will not actually mention the man whom she wishes to marry: ‘Let no name ever pass our lips’. In fact Emma is condemning herself to the most painful of errors. Her mistakenness is dutifully followed by the narrator, who shares with her the illusion that Harriet wishes to marry Frank Churchill. So committed is the narration to this error that there is no room for any other perspective. When Emma meets Harriet after both women have learned of the death of Mrs Churchill, we have this: ‘Harriet behaved extremely well on the occasion, with great self-command. Whatever she might feel of brighter hope, she betrayed nothing. Emma was gratified, to observe such a proof in her of strengthened character, and refrained from any allusion that might endanger its maintenance’ (III. ix). To wonderfully comic effect, the narration copies Emma’s confidence. Utterly wrong-headed as is this vision of events – Harriet is in fact entirely apathetic about the consequences of Mrs Churchill’s death – it is also unwavering. It serves the plot of the novel because it is quite likely that a first-time reader will not even discern that this passage is revealing Emma at her most deluded. For the reader who does see this, there is the deeper pleasure of seeing how Emma is working against herself. Harriet has her eyes on Mr Knightley and Emma has encouraged her. All that queenly pleasure at her own influence (‘Emma was gratified, to observe . . .’) means she is heading for a fall.

One of the qualities of
Emma
is that the warping of reality by its heroine is at its least obvious when it is at its most complete. This would not work so well if there were not passages where Emma’s thinking is more directly dramatised. ‘The hair was curled, and the maid sent away, and Emma sat down to think and be miserable.—It was a wretched business indeed!—Such an overthrow of every thing she had been wishing for!—Such a development of every thing most unwelcome!—Such a blow for Harriet!—That was the worst of all.’ The exclamation marks are the sure sign that we are following the movement of Emma’s thoughts. Indeed, attending to this punctuation mark should help guide us past some of the pitfalls for critics, who might mistake Emma’s judgments for the author’s. Here, from near the end of the novel, is the revelation of Harriet’s parentage.