My frosty, spinsterly schoolmarm self has set herself down these past two evenings and churned out a treatise on Jane Austen. I can’t promise it’s excessively diverting, but some of you might find it of interest.
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Once in my high school English class, our teacher asked us all to name our favorite literary characters. I remember one girl, with a fondness for oversized Jackie O sunglasses and who often declared her career ambition to become a senator’s wife, chose Elizabeth Bennett of Pride & Prejudice. The reason was that Elizabeth, despite being rather poor and having an embarrassing family, “gets her MAN!!!” – a statement which sounded, as she expelled it like a bone from her throat, as if it were indeed all-caps, with three exclamation marks. For my high school self, then absorbed in manlier works like that of Hemingway and Henry Miller, this girl’s vapid girly-ness signified everything in literature I wanted to avoid. Her and Austen’s interests seemed the same: to secure a good match. In comparison to bullfights and endless boning, that all seemed like tween stuff.
It’s taken me eight years to appreciate Jane Austen. That appreciation does not spring from a sudden interest in romance; rather, I begin to understand that Austen isn’t really about romance. The novels may build inevitably toward a marriage, but love and passion themselves are restrained – not only by social constraints, but by her own marvelous tact. This tact is the focus of my exploration here: How does Austen regulate feeling, in what ways is this “masculine” or “feminine,” and what does her tact do?
I’ll begin with this portrait of Austen from one of her acquaintances, who observed that “until Pride and Prejudice showed what a precious gem was hidden in that unbending case, she was no more regarded in society than a poker or firescreen. … The case is very different now: she is still a poker – but a poker of whom everybody is afraid. … A wit, a delineator of character, who does not talk is terrific indeed!”
I can imagine with great pleasure a slight, yet formidable figure, amusing herself by taking mental notes of others’ foibles. The woman who once referred to herself as a “wild Beast” must have been a fierce thing inside, indeed. “Another stupid party last night,” she wrote in her diary. “I cannot anyhow continue to find people agreeable.” I believe W. H. Auden when he professes, “You could not shock her more than she shocks me, / Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass.”
And yet this was a caged beastliness. Austen “was trained in female reticence, which was designed to cover the springs and manifestations of anger,” as Peter Ackroyd suggests. Of whatever passions of love or rage ignited her, she left little evidence. What we know of her life suggests she’d had a romance or two, which ended quietly and without result.
In her books, the tone is even, sober, distanced so as to be almost disinterested. Despite the enthusiasm of dewy-eyed Twilight fans for Pride & Prejudice, the romantic scenes are few, and tersely or wryly worded. Mr. Darcy, on Elizabeth’s confirmation that she returns his affections at last, “expressed himself on the occasion as sensibly and as warmly as a man violently in love can be supposed to do.” No wild passions, no storms, no running across moors – just level-headedness and wit.
Certain social codes must be obeyed. Elinor, the “sense” to her sister Marianne’s “sensibility,” must politely contribute to trivial conversations with visitors much less intelligent than herself, while her sister moons over Byron, not deigning to feign an interest in etiquette. Elinor is an excellent model for Austen’s own morality and restraint. Her character is capable of deep feeling, but when lovelorn, conceals her unhappiness for fear of faltering in her self-command: “She was stronger alone, and her own good sense so well supported her, that her firmness was as unshaken, her appearance of cheerfulness as invariable as […] it was possible for them to be.” In the end, her sister, too, learns to regulate her once-wild emotions.
To be composed is not to be insincere, and Austen does not tolerate the pretentious. The vile Lucy Steele, Caroline Bingley, and Mary Crawford are allowed to preen and peacock, but Austen always deflates them with her rapier of a pen. Of fools and fops and flirts she makes only few deft strokes and they are rendered in all their stupidity: “She encircles them with the lash of a whip-like phrase which, as it runs round them, cuts out their silhouettes for ever,” Virginia Woolf writes. “But there they remain; no excuse is found for them and no mercy shown them.” Her morality is stringent, her wit, withering, and all delivered in perfect economy.
I find her tact all the more refreshing, reading her in a time which often looks on any constraint (formal technique or sexual or what have you) as a vestige of irrelevant, oppressive conservatism. It’s true, of course, that women’s voices have often been treated as unruly forces to be controlled. Literature is full of prattling, silly females, and ideas of women’s speech as something polluting goes back to the ancient Greeks (see Anne Carson’s brilliant essay “Dirt and Desire” in Men in the Off Hours). Often a woman’s speech has been collapsed with her body and sexuality into a single menace, in need of male society’s discipline. One 17th century treatise draws a connection from “this great indecency of loquacity in women” to its “symptom of a loose, impotent soul, a kind of incontinence of the mind”; another tract claims, “More shall we see fall into sinne by speech than silence.”
More recently, feminist theorists like Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray have also drawn connections between female bodies and speech in a more empowering way. Their writings, like Cixous’ “The Laugh of the Medusa,” tried to stake out a space for écriture féminine, a language that would come from women’s bodies rather than the rational, “phallogocentric” language which men have created. Irigaray made the connection more literal: Women need to speak, she urged, with both sets of lips. Language becomes something physical and visceral: Like Cassandra in Louise Bogan’s poem, “Song, like a wing, tears through my breast, my side.”
It is impossible to imagine feelings secreting from Austen or being torn from her body as in childbirth. There’s nothing violent or physical in her writing. But I make the comparison to écriture féminine because I’m highly invested in this question: What makes language “masculine” or “feminine”? Thus far in this rambling treatise of mine, it seems I’ve been trying to free Austen from associations of “girly-ness” by praising her tactics of control and constraint – traits which Western culture have often coded as masculine. Does this argument serve to, yet again, enshrine “male” language as superior?
I don’t have answers for all of these questions. We can only speculate on what kind of a writer Austen would have been, had she been granted travel, work, education, the world of men. But neither her content nor style need to be excused for any “false consciousness” born out of Regency values. Feeling and reason, freedom and restraint, make up any experience of being human; feeling is never an evil in itself, nor wholly separate from reason. My purpose here is not to deride emotion nor regulate it to a feminine realm. Instead, let me now turn your attention to how Austen’s tact makes feeling more potent for being quietly expressed.
My favorite of her novels is her last: Persuasion, and it is in Persuasion that we see a more pensive treatment of emotion. Anne is 28, older than the other novels’ heroines, more subdued than the spirited Elizabeth or Emma. Like Austen, she had a disappointment in love. In the seven years since she was pressured into breaking off an engagement (the prospects of the man in question were not deemed secure enough), she has drawn into herself, into poetry, reflection, regret: “She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older: the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.”
The satire in Persuasion is not so fresh and hilarious as before, but the quiet and reflection give it a new beauty. Anne has been through the worst, and now carries steadily on in its solitary aftermath. She, and Austen, remind me of something Bogan once said about writing feeling – that she did not write in the midst of intense emotion, but after it had passed, when she could see it clearly.
I want to quote Woolf again, because she’s written so beautifully on these novels: In comparing Austen to Greek drama, she writes, “There comes a moment – ‘I will dance with you,’ says Emma – which rises higher than the rest, which, though not eloquent in itself, or violent, or made striking by beauty of language, has the whole weight of the book behind it. In Jane Austen, too, we have the same sense, though the ligatures are much less tight, that her figures are bound, and restricted to a few definite movements. She, too, in her modest, everyday prose, chose the dangerous art where one slip means death.”
The moment, Persuasion’s soaring moment, comes in the argument about constancy, when Anne defends women from charges of their fickleness. “We certainly do not forget you as soon as you forget us,” she says, and here we must also hear the voice of Austen, now 40 and perhaps long accustomed to living with memory and solitude. “We cannot help ourselves. We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us. … All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one; you need not covet it), is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone.”
This is the poetry of Austen. The unsaid, the sorrow in silence, they are present. No effusions of feeling could achieve the same effect.
What is said is less important than how. A country ball, a letter, an embarrassment, a walk into town – this is not epic stuff. And yet here, too, in “modest, everyday prose,” in all the small choices and crises of real life, she gives us the sense that something larger is at stake: the task of being an authentic, moral person in a world not of one’s making. And that, if you’ll permit me a momentary lapse in tact, takes some serious balls.
