Last
week in Austen L and Janeites, Anielka Briggs challenged the groups to come up
with examples of the rare instances in which Jane Austen’s narrative voice
intrudes to the point of disrupting, if only for a moment, the flow of the
story. I responded in a series of posts, which I will summarize here:
First
I responded to a post by Deb Barnum where she wrote: "I have never forgotten this unexpected
sentence in S&S that just jumps off the page and think that Austen perhaps
did not catch it in the final edit...in Vol. II, ch. XIV - the 6th paragraph
begins: "I come now to the relation of a misfortune which about this time
befell Mrs. John Dashwood..." The "I" is quite unexpected! and
the only one I believe in the text as from the narrator - perhaps a vestige of
an original letter format?" END
QUOTE
My
gut tells me that it's not so much a vestige of an original letter format
(although that is a possibility worthy of serious consideration), as it is a reflection of the chatty, winking narrator
of S&S, who often reminds
me (probably not by accident) of Mrs. Jennings.
And
Deb's catch prompted me to search the word "misfortune" in S&S globally,
which, by my lucky guess, led me to the following narrative passage in Chapter
32 (4 chapters earlier than the one Deb found):
"To
give the feelings or the language of Mrs. Dashwood on receiving and answering
Elinor's letter would be only to give a repetition of what her daughters had
already felt and said; of a disappointment hardly less painful than Marianne's,
and an indignation even greater than Elinor's. Long letters from her, quickly
succeeding each other, arrived to tell all that she suffered and thought; to
express her anxious solicitude for Marianne, and entreat she would bear up with
fortitude under this misfortune. Bad indeed must the nature of Marianne's
affliction be, when her mother could talk of fortitude! mortifying and
humiliating must be the origin of those regrets, which SHE could wish her not
to indulge!"
While
the narrator has not used the first person, and has not explicitly referred to
the reader, those exclamation points, as well as the gratuitous explanation for
not repeating what the Dashwood girls
had already
felt and said, is pretty intrusive, and comes close to breaking the fictional
dream.
Then, the next day, I could not resist
some further sleuthing and came up with two other Austen authorial
intrusions, which each appear in the final chapter of their respective novels.
Like the one that Deb found in Ch.36 of S&S......
"I
COME NOW to the relation of a misfortune which about this time befell Mrs. John
Dashwood..."
....and
the oft-cited one that begins the final chapter
of MP:
"Let
other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I QUIT SUCH ODIOUS SUBJECTS AS SOON AS I
CAN, impatient to restore everybody, not greatly in fault themselves, to
tolerable comfort, and to have done with all the rest."
.....they
are each a sudden solitary eruption of first person narration:
First
this one in Ch. 61 of P&P:
"Happy
for all her maternal feelings was the day on which Mrs. Bennet got rid of her
two most deserving daughters. With what delighted pride she afterwards visited
Mrs. Bingley, and talked of Mrs. Darcy, may be guessed. I WISH I COULD SAY, for
the sake of her family, that the accomplishment of her earnest desire in the
establishment of so many of her children produced so happy an effect as to make
her a sensible, amiable, well-informed woman for the rest of her life; though
perhaps it was lucky for her husband, who might not have relished domestic
felicity in so unusual a form, that she still was occasionally nervous and
invariably silly."
And
then this one in Ch. 24 of Persuasion:
"Who
can be in doubt of what followed? When any two young people take it into their
heads to marry, they are pretty sure by perseverance to carry their point, be
they ever so poor, or ever so imprudent, or ever so little likely to be
necessary to each other's ultimate comfort. This may be bad morality to
conclude with, but I BELIEVE IT TO BE TRUTH; and if such parties succeed, how
should a Captain Wentworth and an Anne Elliot, with the advantage of maturity
of mind, consciousness of right, and one independent fortune between them, fail
of bearing down every opposition? They might in fact, have borne down a great
deal more than they met with, for there was little to distress them beyond the
want of graciousness and warmth."
And
then, another day later still, I came up with this one from Chapter 20 of
Emma:
"With
regard to her not accompanying them to Ireland, her account to her aunt
contained nothing but truth, though there might be some truths not told. It was
her own choice to give the time of their absence to Highbury; to spend,
perhaps, her last months of perfect liberty with those kind relations to whom she
was so very dear: and the Campbells, whatever might be their motive or motives,
whether single, or double, or treble, gave the arrangement their ready
sanction, and said, that they depended more on a few months spent in her native
air, for the recovery of her health, than on any thing else. Certain it was
that she was to come; and that Highbury, instead of welcoming that perfect
novelty which had been so long promised
it -- Mr. Frank Churchill -- must put up for the present with Jane Fairfax, who
could bring only the freshness of a two years absence."
This
famous passage in Emma does not contain an explicit first person authorial intrusion,
but there is a strong implication that the narrator knows a great deal about
those truths not told about why Jane F does not go to Ireland but goes to Highbury
instead, and also knows a great deal about which of three unspecified motives
led the Campbells to agree to Jane's extended visit to Highbury. A narrator who
explicitly hints at unrevealed motivations in this way, not once but TWICE in the
same paragraph, as to what turns out to be the central plot twist of the entire
novel, is pretty intrusive--the role of objective reporter has been temporarily
but explicitly undermined--the narrator is not only keeping an important secret
from the reader, she's taking pains to tease the reader about that secret, to
be sure to pique the reader's curiosity. The narrator is no longer a
mind-reading robot, the narrator is a person---the author-- keeping teasing
secrets from her readers!
I
have always read that passage as the broadest possible hint to the alert,
curious reader to try to discern what those unstated truths and motives might
be. But the most important word in the whole paragraph is "treble",
because it suggests to the REreader of Emma that there might be a third interpretation
of Jane's coming to Highbury, one which was not driven by a secret engagement
to Frank, but by ANOTHER secret
motivation, one which is not explicitly debriefed in the novel text. And of course
you know that my opinion since early January 2005 has been that this secret motivation
is Jane's concealed pregnancy.
And
then, finally Linda Thomas wrote:
“Here's a possible one from P&P, though
it's not in the first person. Does this qualify?
"It is not the object of this work to
give a description of Derbyshire, nor of
any of the remarkable places through which their route thither lay: Oxford,
Blenheim, Warwick, Kenelworth, Birmingham, etc., are sufficiently known. A small part of Derbyshire is all the present
concern. To the little town of Lambton..."
What's interesting to me is that, at the same
time the narrator's intrusion forces the reader to step outside the fictional
construct for a moment, the narrator
pretends that the novel is not a novel, by presenting Lambton and Pemberley as
real places on a par with well-known ..” END QUOTE
To which
I replied: Bravo, Linda, I think it's a classic example, because it fits one of
JA's repeated
patterns--the
narrator stepping out of the shadows, ironically, to tell us what she's NOT gonna tell us! ;)
We
saw it in the guilt and misery passage at the end of MP, we saw it in the Emma passage
I quoted earlier today about the treble motives not stated. JA uses her authorial
soapbox very sparingly, and it seems one key purpose is to jar the reader into
thinking about events that might be happening offstage---sorta like the old saying
about telling people not to think of a pink elephant and then of course you HAVE
to think of the pink elephant!
I
believe JA was above all interested in point of view and in particular in sensitizing
the reader to thinking about point of view as they read, and to open the possibility
of multiple points of view on the same text. She knew that was the path to
wisdom.
I bet
there are a few more of them scattered through the novels.
And
that’s more than enough for one post.
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
P.S. added 10/19/12 at 1 am EST:
I just did a little more checking, finding it hard to believe that no
Austen scholar had previously systematically addressed this question
before Anielka posed it earlier this week, and, sure enough, I found that
John Mullan, in his 2012 book _What Matters in Jane Austen?", has
entitled Chapter 19 as shown in my above Subject Line.
In that chapter, Mullan covers ALL of the first person authorial
intrusions which have brought forward during this recent discussion, as
well as some others, and he gives plausible, insightful explanations for
them.
I saw nothing in the parts of his chapter that I could access online that
in my estimation would support Anielka's theory of the novels as having
been plays in earlier stages.