In
the Janeites yahoogroup during the past two days, I’ve been engaged in a thread with Christy Somer and Nancy Mayer, which arose out of our discussing the behavior of Mr. Bennet in the beginning
of Pride & Prejudice, when he tricks
his wife and daughters into
believing he has not gone to greet the new eligible bachelor
in the neighborhood, Mr. Bennet, only to suddenly reveal that he did it
a while ago.
Christy
raised the question about the validity of describing Mr. Bennet as “passive-aggressive”,
suggesting that perhaps we might be guilty of anachronism, imposing a modern interpretation on a
200 year old novel. I responded as
follows:
Christy,
I may be misreading you, but you seem to be making a leap from the clear modernity
of the _term passive-aggressive to a shaky suggestion of modernity of the idea
and/or depiction of passive aggression. JA obviously never used the term “passive-aggressive”
in her writing (although she used the
word “passive” 3 times and “aggression”
once), but I think there is a
very powerful argument that she deliberately and memorably depicted what we
today call “passive –aggression” in not
just P&P but in several of her novels.
Not
merely Mr. Bennet, with his constant veiled jibes at his wife, and at three of his daughters, as well as other
characters in the novel, but also the mistress of bloodless but very painful
passive aggression, Lucy Steele,
who wounds Elinor at least a dozen times during S&S. And don’t forget the dyspepsia
of John Knightley and Mr. Palmer, who are sometimes directly rude, but
also sometimes indirectly, to those whom they resent. And I bet I have not
covered the whole list of passive aggressive Austen characters.
And I
am sure examples of this behavior can readily be plucked from most of
Shakespeare’s plays, as well as the fictions of other writers from before the
Freudian Age was ushered in a century ago. So,
does it matter what term is used to describe this behavior, as long as we are talking about the same behavior? Of course not!
Christy
then replied: "Even though `human nature' may be historically recognizable
at its core; and some of these fictional presentations may seemingly lend themselves
to modern analysis and diagnosis; today, our modern 'sense of self', and the
flexible relationship `rules' we live and play by, imo, do not ever truly
`harmonize' with the social and religious world of Jane Austen 2+ centuries
ago."
And I
in turn replied to her as follows:
I
believe we shall never agree, Christy, we are light-years apart on this crucial
point. Without having to address the mindset of the average English person
living in JA's era, and whether their way of living, thinking,
feeling, etc. would match closely with the average Western person in 2013, I
focus on the mindset and insights of the greatest premodern literary geniuses
like Shakespeare and JA (and Chaucer and a few others), and there I find no
real difference between them and us today, because they truly were centuries
ahead of their time (for Shakespeare, 4, for JA, 2) in terms of their insight
into human nature.
Put another way---we are reading novels written
not by some abstract entity, "the social and religious world of JA 2+
centuries ago", but by a single person, a great author, one mind, Jane
Austen herself, a genius who stood utterly apart (actually above) the rest of
her contemporaries, and whose fiction ought not be straitjacketed within the
societal norms of her era. She was a freak of nature, the worldclass once in a
century sort of genius. And most relevant, someone who made her own
idiosyncratic moral judgments on good and evil in her society, having freed
herself from the convention, cant, hypocrisy, and doubletalk that prevailed in
her world.
That
is precisely why the most intelligent and literate of modern day people can
read his plays and her novels, and recognize our own modern lives everywhere in
them. The greatest geniuses are truly timeless, and their wisdom will speak to
readers in the 25th century just as eloquently as they do to us Harold Bloom was right about one thing--Shakespeare
in many senses did invent the modern--and we might say that
Jane Austen reinvented it two centuries later. And they both are immortal
because of it.
I
suggest to you that I work from the fair implications of the words they actually
wrote, while you seem to start from an a priori assumption that what is implied
on the page simply cannot be.
Then
Nancy Mayer chimed in on Christie’s side
of the debate:
Nancy:
"Now, while I agree that the two were geniuses, I believe they were geniuses
within their own time period and that neither was a seer or a prophet."
I do
believe they each were, by the fair non-religious meaning of the word,
"prophets", ...and not minor prophets either. They were world-altering
prophets, both of them. That's why the two of them sit at the
apex of world literature today, around the world.
Nancy:
"They both knew human nature well but both were influenced by the mores
and beliefs of their world."
I
think they were both intellectual rebels of the best kind, their rebellion was
against the bad things in the world.
And
one other key point---a physicist, chemist, or biologist from JA's era would be
at a severe disadvantage in comparison to their modern counterparts, because of
huge paradigm-shifting progress in those sciences during the past 2 centuries. Whereas,
in the field, say, of music and the fine arts, it's entirely different. One
could plausibly argue that the summit of achievement in those fields occurred
centuries ago. I say that in the fields of psychology and moral philosophy, we
are much more in realms like music and art, than we are in hard sciences.
There's nothing that I attribute to Jane Austen or Shakespeare, in terms of knowledge
of human nature, that was not available to them simply by observing
their fellow human beings, and themselves, with their eyes and ears.
If
this were not so, why exactly do people
read the Bible, the Koran, the Hindu and Buddhist holy texts? Does anyone suggest that there has been some
startling improvement on the wisdom of the authors of these ancient texts that
can be found in the modern world?
These
same skills were available centuries
ago, to those geniuses who could truly think for themselves.
Nancy:
"I doubt Jane Austen would appreciate being described as a secular humanist,
for instance."
Well,
I actually think she was a radical Christian, who followed (and extended) the
precepts of Jefferson's Jesus, the one who hated injustice, and cared deeply
for the lowest and the last. I.e., the precise opposite of
the hypocritical Anglican Church of JA's era. And history documents that other
such radical Christians spoke out in her world---she was one of them, but her
speaking out was covert, and I do not judge her for that, she just did not have
a martyr complex.
I
think she wanted to extend Christian doctrine to embrace women as full equal
partners in society, and she wanted to warn women against the perils they faced
which the Anglican church was not about to warn them against.
That's
my Jane Austen, a woman of her time, and also a genius wayyyyyyyyy ahead of her
time.
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
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