..continued..
So Woolf’s delight in Austen’s confident style and rancor-free mind is tempered by her feeling that, after all, there is something slight and unweighty about Austen’s work, so that her significance, though real, may owe much to her role as a Missing Link between Fanny Burney (a great early success story among female novelists in the generation before Austen’s, and still a good read) and, well, Woolf’s own more open, enlightened, liberated generation.
Alas, poor Jane gets it from both sides here, since the traditional manly man’s reaction to her novels also tends toward the “where’s the blood, where’s the action?” school. Even childbirth very definitely occurs off-stage in a Jane Austen novel. Recall also Elizabeth Bennet’s anxious nursing of her sister Jane’s common cold (though anxiety over fairly wimpy complaints can more easily be forgiven when we remember that there were no antibiotics to handle wimpy complaints that deteriorated into things like pneumonia). And then there is Louisa in Persuasion, whose entire personality is permanently altered by a fall she suffers while jumping down the steps at the seaside resort of Rye. She is stunned, perhaps by some sort of concussion, but by the time she fully recovers (after more anxious nursing by most of the females in the novel), she has become markedly more timid, easily startled by noise, and fond of quiet.
There is another more forgiving, more admiring strand of feminist reaction to Austen, which seizes on her sometimes cool, acerbic humor and ironic detachment from most of her characters as evidence that she was satirizing society and the social conventions of her day. To be sure, she was doing that, to some extent. But from what angle, and with what purpose, was she laughing at people like Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Mrs. Bennet, Mr. Collins, Sir William Elliot and his daughter Elizabeth, or the insufferable clerical couple in Emma?
Some revisionists would like to believe that Austen was in some sense “deconstructing” her society as busily as she was constructing her characters — that she allowed them to condemn not only themselves, but by extension the entire world to which even her heroes and heroines comfortably accommodate themselves. In this ingenious way feminists can snuggle up in an armchair with Emma or Pride and Prejudice while deploring almost every convention, value, or article of faith that Austen herself not only was reared in but also accepted as her own.
C. S. Lewis wrote an essay on Jane Austen in which he called her the daughter of Samuel Johnson, thinking of the clarity and sharp edges of the moral vision they both shared. The feminists have got some of the picture right — Jane is the antithesis of treacly nineteenth century sentimentalism and its romantic descendants. Yet this is not because she rejects the conventions of society.
In fact, she was reared in the last years of that eighteenth century Johnsonian society against which the Romantics rebelled. The Romantics were the great individualists of their day, the ones who argued against general laws from an egocentrically particular vantage point (“I must follow my star! I have a right to be happy!” — that kind of thing). Austen’s Anne Elliot, the most mature of all her heroines, did not believe she had a right to be happy either at someone else’s expense or at the expense of societal conventions, even though they doubtless seemed sturdier then than they do now. Anne wished very much to be happy — as who does not? — yet denied herself the right to do so even at the relatively small cost of her godmother’s disapproval of the dashing and impecunious yet respectable naval officer she loved.
…to be continued…