Are Jane Austen novels comedies or tragedies?
There are very different, even contradictory, interpretations, of Jane Austen novels. The probably predominant group are the “Janeites”. They are fascinated with the rural gentry of Regency England. They admire the large and even the medium estates in the area, filled with many rooms and paintings and lush upholstery. They like the abundance of sheep and the dancing, and women are practiced at needlepoint or playing the piano. They like the courtliness by which people meet and marriages that allow women to improve their social station. Most of all, I think, is that people speak with reverence and also great civility. They treat social inferiors, s0c9al peers and social superiors with civility Janeites write articles about Regency cuisine and fashions. The Jane Austen world is like a Hallmark movie. A young man from the city moves to a small town and becomes acquainted with a local woman who is a doctor or a flower shop proprietor and becomes entranced and the two eventually marry, having to overcome some not very serious differences in backgrounds. Sexual attraction is there, but that is managed in a conventional way, which violates Lionel Trilling”s view that true love, as in “Lolita”, requires the romance to be outlandish and contrary to custom.
This Janite view is essentially conservative. It posits the necessity of subordination and any attempt to reform it is mischievous or malignant, a way to overthrow the applecart rather than deal with the way society has to operate. The rural homestead in the United States is of the same sort of place, something like “Oklahoma” ‘s Oklahoma. It is to be protected from urban pillage through upstanding moral people who like Lady Catherine De BurgesEnduring the tragedy that occurs with all things human is declined, just a few bumps in the road so as to provide the inevitable happy ending.
A key test for a Janeite is how to read the passage in “Pride and Prejudice” where Darcy announces that he has come to think of Elizabeth as quite handsome after the women in his family regard Elizabeth as plain or worse, knowing that Darcy is attracted to her but not knowing that she has rejected his first marriage proposal, A reader relying on the Austen reputation says that politer language would require people to let him down gently, with felicitous and carefully chosen euphemistic wording, words eloquently stating social solidarity. But consider what Miss Bingley, who is the sister of Datrcy’s best friend, says to Darcy. It is to insult both Elizabeth and Darcy.
“For my own part (Miss Bingley) rejoined, I must confess that I never could see any beauty in her. Her face is too thin; her complexion nas no brilliancy, and her features are not at all handsome. Her nose wants character. There is nothing marked in its lines. Her teeth are tolerable, but not out of the common way; and, as to her eyes, which sometimes have been called as fine, I could not report anything extraordinary in them. They have a sharp, shrewish look which I do not like at all, and in her air altogether there is a self-sufficiency without fashion which is intolerable.” It is to be noted that using looks as a way to evaluate character was not limited to Regency England, or that neither Austen nor Darcy offer an alternative description of her looks.
Though for millennia it has been in social life that members of a family or social circle have objected to a person who is joining their circle, especially through marriage, the disdain of Miss Bingley against Eliuzabeth so harshly and so crass that Darcy responds defensively and blurts out what he thinks of Elizabeth, Saying she is so handsome is an observation that anyone might notice, which is that people look more attractive when you get to like them, or something Jane Austen noticed most clearly, or something noticed most clearly for himself and of his continuing affection for her despite her having already rejected his proposal to her, Darcy thinking when he first met her that she was not handsome enough to take his interest even for just a dance. Jane Austen knew that sparks had to fly. But a Janeite would presume that Miss Bingley would be more delicate and mannerly and nuanced in saying such a thing and it is my experience in my supposed;u harsh language practices that friends and family would try to behave with greater tact. These Regency people just say what they think.
Not only are amateur readers of Jane Austen Janeites.That most subtle professional literary critic, Lionel Trilling, was a Janeite, as can be seen in some of his essays on Jane Austen. In his “Manners, Morals and the Novel”, he constructs a syllogistic argument that sums up the matter even if Trilling is known as well for his charming and felicitous writing style. The argument in this essay is this: a novel is a place of a specific social milieu filled with much dialogue where the dialogue constructs a way of talking that provides a set and a limit of good manners and those manners provide the moral guidelines of the society of the place described. So everyone is enjoined by decorum to behave as they do, except for those who don’t, and the violations of morality are just as obvious as they can be in the way the people talk. To cite the passage just alluded to, It is Darcy violating propriety to praise Elizabeth when she is not to be considered worthy of praise. Fanny Price, in “Mansfield Park”, is transparently transgressive when she remains silent during the disarrangement of the family and has always been subversive because she had always been prone to silence.Emma speaks out of turn and Mr. Knightly chides her for that. So Jane Austen novels seem full of sweetness and light despite the bad and even perverse feelings because there is justice in the world because people mean what they say and say what they mean.
A more roundabout way to arrive at the same conclusion is argued in Trilling's essay on “Mansfield Park” He argues that most Austen novels are ways to point out that life choices are guided by circumstances rather than by principles or deep passions and so there is comedy in boring people being merely human rather than lofty or deep. How could they be otherwise? Trilling says that “Mansfield Park” is the exception that proves the rule. He sees Fanny Price as a Christian heroine who is dedicated to character rather than the cult of personality that has become central to the age, glibness replacing awkwardness, when awkwardness is to be understood as a way to be moral rather than just suitable. So Fanny’s shortcomings are his virtues as is the life of the Mansfield Park estate, where rectitude is honored whatever happens elsewhere.
This subtle reading of Mansfield Park turns the tables on much of how to read the novel. Fanny is strong however much she is physically frail. The marriage with the curate is appropriate and a triumph rather than a drawing back from life. And Fanny is resisting the fanciful speculations of the Terror. But the fatal flaw of Trilling’s argument is that it weaves together abstractions and neglects the plot. Remember that Austen has little respect for clergymen and Trilling is treating them as Voleridge’s clerisy. Fanny is not grand but passive aggressive, rejected by her peers rather than separating herself from the debasing theatricals because of other higher virtue and anger at the Mansfield Park family when it disintegrates. There is no redemption, only ever more pronounced isolation. No sweetness and light even if disguised but a shambles of a person and a society.
The truth of the matter is that Jane Austen is not just sweetness and light, even if Trilling has rescued that by viewing Mansfield Park as based in the solidity of morality. Rather, the social system is also mostly on the dark side, chaos and disaster barely rescued through romances and those couples deeply troubled or perverse. Emma meddles when in fact she can only marry a man who is the close friend of her father and Mr. Knightley has made marriage possible by arranging not to separate Emma from her father. Darcy and Elizabeth are both awkward and obnoxious people better suited to one another than anyone else. Anne Elliot has missed her best chance at marriage and has over the years since spurning Wentworth has refashioned herself into a capable person and improbably gets a second chance, the gloom of the setting coming from the spectre of death for children and adults. In “Northanger Abbey” there is a satire on gothic novels but the novel also confronts the existential fact that first impressions can be deceiving and might mislead you all your life and not just when you are young. And so on. P. D. James imagines that Darcy and Elizabeth would live happily ever after. They might become insufferable and quite rude to one another, Or Fanny and Edmund become ever more isolated within themselves, which is not good advice from marriage counselors.
Remember that Austen shows Regency life to be fragile. A cold can turn deadly because there is not that much that can be done about that and a fall can also be fatal. Death is everywhere. People have to use rare opportunities to greet and socialize with one another so as to explore courtship because people are always moving about and have long interruptions to contend wit so that a misstep can break a possible companionability, Love in Regency England is not a quick arrangement whereby true love requires instant attraction, at least by the third date, the sparkle of today’s courtship when people have enough experience to know quickly who is the right one There are years between when Darcy and Elizabeth meet and finally resolve to wed and Fanny and Edmund had lived under the same roof and Emma and Knightly had been acquainted for years.
How is it possible to square the diametrically opposed views of the novels, that of the spirit of comedy and the spirit of tragedy? On the one hand, the novels are romantic comedies where very different people meet and find their way to stumble into love despite their clumsiness within the context of an appealing society and many humorous characters and an appealing society. On the other hand, couples pursue courtship for selfish or even perverse motives amidst people who are very self centered in a highly socially stratified society, and hoping the marriage will turn out well, the romance covering the tragedy of the human experience. What makes the Jane Austen world so compelling and attractive and dazzling is not the setting or the romance of the depth of feeling of the characters in that they are less impulsive than they are willfully self determined, each one finding a way to rationally express and manage their own particular natures and so really vehicles of their own free wills, each one in accord with and establishing their own natures, as different as each of them are. Mr Collins is an insufferable prig, an insult to Christian charity, forever fawning before social propriety and Charlotte puts up with that so as to get herself a respectable household, quietly accepting calculation while Elizabeth is resigned to never consummating her love because she had spoken too harshly to him, wounding him deeply because being impertinent is ever her weak point, she speaking her mind when she should remain silent and wish she had been. And Fanny Price is continually passive aggressive, cannot help being that way in matters big and small, while still maneuvering circumstances to gain her ends. So everyone is free rather than a victim nor a hero, because each one has a particular personality that abides as well as an independent input into reality and so undetermined. So Jane Austen is a true Romantic, not because it is about love but because of the Romantic Era’s preoccupation with the self, every one an engagement with their own terms on engaging the world. We all like to believe we are all as free as Jane Austen characters. Even Lady Katherine is her own woman, as unpleasant as she may be.
Austen was a deep reader of Shakespeare which meant among other things that like Shakespeare people were what they seemed to be and became what they always were. Othello is out of joint being a Moor who rises in European society and rises until he falls or is made to fall by becoming what he always said was better than his roots. Shylock is inherently Jewish in that he follows and falls into being about the letter of the law rather than the spirit of the law even though the justice awarded was through a subterfuge in that Portia had no right presenting herself as being a lawyer. Hamlet was both preening and morose before returning to Denmark after his father’s death. And the same is true of Aysten. Emma was always her father’s little girl. Elizabeth was always intemperate and the same is true of other figures like Mr. Collins, a stereotypical figure who fully embodies his type. It is perhaps only the greatest of artists who can manage characters who are fully themselves and also do things to make themselves and so presenting a paradox of character that is true of all people. And knowing that is liberating to the reader whether an Austen novel wears the mask of comedy the mask of tragedy.