…continued..
Years later, after Anne has secured a hard-bought sense not of happiness but of contentment with her place in life and the fulfillment of her duties to friends and family, she continues to believe she would have been happier married to her young naval officer, but not at the expense of violating the forcefully expressed views of her godmother. How much more conventional can you get? How less free to follow your star?
It is preposterous to conclude that because Anne’s godmother gave her bad advice, Austen meant to call into question the entire traditional family and social structure, any more than we are to believe that because Pride and Prejudice’s Mrs. Bennet is silly and superficial, her children should feel free to mock and disobey her.
No, there is another reason (besides, of course, Austen’s sharp eye and sense of fun) why Jane Austen’s heroines are presented with so many silly authority figures. In their quest for an adult romantic destiny, issuing in a fruitful, stable, and, sustaining married life, her heroines are confronted with the female, bourgeois, early nineteenth century equivalent of hardships to undergo and dragons to slay to grow in wisdom and virtue and prove their worthiness. When Jane Austen temporarily deprives her heroines of the men they love, she is not only engaging in a suspense-building device, but demonstrating her heroines’ worth, as they repent of bad choices and ill-chosen words, if need be, and commit themselves to better ones.
If this sounds almost as solemn and humorless as a feminist tract, we all know that Austen’s novels easily avoid the comparison. They are acutely witty, since Austen delights in the manifold foibles and interactions of human creatures. Yet she is not afraid to judge her characters in very clearly defined moral terms, even as she skewers them as comic objects of derision.
One of the most striking examples of Austen’s willingness to judge occurs during the excursion to Box Hill in Emma, where Emma becomes intoxicated by her own wit and the playful attentions of Frank Churchill, and directs a cuttingly funny remark at the garrulous and simpleminded but good-natured impoverished gentlewoman Miss Bates. Emma’s own properly formed conscience convicts her of insensitivity and impiety toward an elder, but she also suffers the privately expressed condemnation of a shocked and offended suitor, Mr. Knightley.
This scene marks the moral and educational turning point for Emma, as she faces the need to put aside childish things — her play-acting of the lady of the manor and regional matchmaker — and accept her real power to harm or help those around her. Only then, as a woman aware of responsibilities, consequences, and human limitations, can she qualify as a fit wife for Mr. Knightley. (Note, by the way, how many of Austen’s heroines grow up without a mother’s guidance, or hampered by a silly mother. They are left to look for role models among friends and relations who embody the best virtues of society. Only Anne Elliot, in Persuasion, seems to have no peer in judgment around her, though her godmother is, within the limitations of her worship of status, a good woman.)
The Box Hill episode is burned into my mind with special force because I first studied it in college when I and those around me were in much the same stage of development as Emma and Frank Churchill: vying for our places in a young, exuberant society, and intoxicated by the witty remarks that no sooner made their way to our brains than they were transmitted to our lips. Hurt feelings and misunderstandings were common, and so the real damage Emma did to Miss Bates — as real as the bullet that entered Prince Andre in War and Peace, though less fatal — was clear to me.
Unfortunately for the feminists, Jane Austen is neither a lightweight prisoner of her benighted times nor a deliciously devious mole bent on undermining her social system. She is a virtuoso novelist whose bedrock seriousness permits her to play entertainingly with the faults and foibles of those around her. The proof of her moral maturity is that she treats stupidity married with immorality (as in Lydia Bennet’s elopement with Whickam) very sharply, while stupidity married with generous good will receives the warm sunshine of good-humored ribbing from this worthy daughter of an Anglican clergyman.
This article orginally appeared in the Winter 2000 issue of The Women’s Quarterly.