In 1687,
Isaac Newton published his laws of motion and universal gravitation, which reigned
supreme in physics for over 2 centuries, until more and more experimental
phenomena were found not to obey
Newton’s laws. It took Einstein and his theories of relativity, and then the giants
of quantum physics, to generate a paradigm shift, and demonstrate that Newton
had not been entirely wrong, only incomplete. Einstein
& Co. showed that Newton’s laws worked
perfectly well enough to explain the physics of ordinary human life, hence their long
intellectual hegemony---but when more powerful technology revealed special conditions
under which Newton’s laws of time did NOT work, outside the box thinking like Einstein’s
was required, to explain it all. He famously illustrated his radical new
theories with thought experiments, such as inviting readers to imagine
themselves chasing light beams—and thereby kindled the imagination of lay
people, enabling us to hypothetically enter into another point of view, a radical
new perspective from which the special validity of his theories could be
grasped.
So,
why do I, a lawyer who blogs about Jane Austen’s fiction, lead off with a brief,
highly oversimplified history of modern physics? Because as I began to write this post about an
error in point of view which has held sway in Austen studies for the past 150
years, I realized that there was an instructive parallel to be drawn between the
hidden structure behind Jane Austen’s novelistic scenes, and the hidden
structure behind time and space. As I’ll show you, both involve a radical
change of perspective, required in order to see a bigger picture. And now I’m
ready to tell you about the (relatively) universal heroine-present scenes in JA’s
novels.
POLLOCK’S
LAW: One of the most often cited memes
in the history of Austen scholarship was first stated in 1860 by Sir William Frederick Pollock (2d Bart.), a passionate Janeite whose
grandfather was saddler to King George III, and whose writer brother Walter
Herries Pollock was a close friend of Wilde, Kipling, Stevenson, and other
famous authors. Pollock’s article
published in Fraser’s Magazine included this influential praise of JA’s
authorial scruples:
“Miss
Austen never attempts to describe a scene or a class of society with which she
was not herself thoroughly acquainted. The conversations of ladies with ladies,
or of ladies and gentlemen together, are given, but no instance occurs of a
scene in which men only are present.”
END QUOTE
Over
the past century and a half, Austen scholars have universally cited this dictum
as gospel—so much so, that it’s fair to call it Pollock’s Law, because it has never been challenged, either as to the factual
accuracy of Pollock’s textual observation, or as to JA’s presumed motivation
for this universal limitation; and also because it purports to explain a major feature
of Austenian fictional structure.
Well,
it has never been challenged…until now. I’m here today to revise Pollock’s Law,
and to show that Pollock, like Newton, was not wrong so much as incomplete, in
failing to see a larger context than the absence of male-only scenes in JA’s
novels. I.e., I suggest to you that those men-only scenes are actually only a
subset of a larger whole, i.e., scenes where her (always female) protagonist
was present. Pollock’s claim that JA scrupulously refrained from writing about scenes
she had not actually witnessed herself in real life failed to explain why there
are also (almost) NO scenes with
women-only, or with both men and women present, but sans the heroine. In Vonnegutian terminology, the men-only scenes
are a granfaloon, but the
heroine-always scenes are a karasses,
i.e., the group that really matters.
It’s
easy to see why Pollock’s explanation has prevailed for so long. As many Austen
scholars have pointed out, his claim is quite consistent with the authorial
coaching JA famously gave to her writing niece Anna in an 1814 letter, about
not writing about the manners of a locality she had never lived in herself.
Now, I
could question Pollock’s unspoken but dubious assumption that Jane Austen, who
grew up as the younger sister of 5 older brothers in a small rural household, never
eavesdropped on boys-only talk in another room while she was growing up. As a
little girl, she might well have been invisible to Revd. Austen, James, Edward
and Henry, the way Fanny Price is invisible to Tom, his parents and aunt. JA
was a born writer, and writers are notorious eavesdroppers, so it’s clear to me
that JA was not averse to sometimes listening to conversations she was not
supposed to hear.
However,
let’s go with Pollock on this one for argument’s sake, because even then, I have a much better
explanation for why there are no Austenian men-only scenes: JA’s novels are
extremely unusual, because all six are told almost entirely (meaning, over 97%)
from the unitary point of view of one character--the protagonist—who, obviously,
is female in each novel!
There
are only a tiny handful of narrative exceptions, when we’re unambiguously privy
to:
Darcy’s
thoughts and feelings about Elizabeth in P&P;
Knightley’s
thoughts and feelings about Frank and Jane in Emma;
Charlotte
Lucas’s courtship strategizing in P&P; and
a couple
of other briefer windows into other secondary characters’s minds.
Otherwise,
the only thoughts and feelings we ever have clear, unambiguous access to,
unmediated by some other character’s perceptions or words, are those of JA’s
heroines.
So,
what Pollock never realized, and no Janeite who adheres to Pollock’s Rule (even
if they had no idea who originated it) has ever realized, either, is the
crucial fact is the absence of men-only scenes is only one special subclass
within a larger class, which is the (near total) absence of scenes in JA’s
novels in which the heroine is not present!
Put
another way, let me now restate Pollock’s Rule, using his phraseology and
showing my changes in ALL CAPS:
“ALMOST
NO conversations of ladies with ladies, or of ladies and gentlemen together,
are given, UNLESS THE HEROINE IS PRESENT AS WELL.”
I
added that “almost” because I am pretty sure that there are only four scenes in
the entire canon of six Austen novels which violate this otherwise universal
rule, and they are ALL mixed-gender. Which means that there are also NO scenes
in Austen’s novels in which it is women (other than the heroine)-only!
So
it’s understandable that Pollock was seduced by the complete absence of
men-only scenes into believing it was The Answer. It made him fail to realize
that four scenes out of, say, over a hundred scenes (has anyone ever counted
exactly how many enacted scenes there are altogether in the six novels?) is a
very small percentage—i.e., 4% has a lot more in common with 0% than it does
with, say, 25%!
But I
cannot repeat too often the crucial, overarching fact which Pollock has failed
to see as connected to his discovery, and that is the near universality of
heroine’s point of view. It’s what turns that 4% into 0%, for all practical
purposes.
And as
I began writing this post, I also recalled that I had actually posted three
years ago about three of those four scenes where the heroine is not present:
Chapter
2 of S&S, when Fanny & John Dashwood have a tete-a-tete in their
carriage, and discuss the welfare of John’s sisters and stepmother.
Chapter
5 of Emma, when Mrs. Weston and Mr.
Knightley have a tete-a-tete at Randalls, and discuss Emma.
Chapter
1 of MP, when Mrs. Norris and Sir Thomas (with Lady Bertram present but not
speaking much) have a tete a tete at Mansfield Park.
Read
my linked post for my inferences at that time about the striking parallelism
between these three passages, parallelism that no other Austen scholar has still
ever taken note of. But I now see how that pattern fits within the larger
pattern of Pollock’s Law, as revised by me. I.e., it reflects that JA has very
consciously chosen one very early scene in each of those three novels, in which
to break her otherwise uniform rule of heroine-must-be-present. And each of those scenes is a revelation of
Machiavellian planning by powerful family members of the heroine, planning to
which the heroine is not privy at all.
Which
leaves the one other scene I can recall from JA’s novels, where the heroine is
not present, and that is at the end of Chapter 45 of P&P, when Darcy,
Georgiana, Caroline and Mrs. Hurst are left after Elizabeth and the Gardiners
leave Pemberley, and Darcy and Caroline speak about Elizabeth. Again, we can
see its value for JA, in allowing the reader to hear Darcy say to others what
we’ve previously learnt from his reported thoughts, in terms of how attractive
he finds Elizabeth. Even though others are present, it is essentially a
semi-private tete-a-tete, as only Darcy and Caroline actually speak.
Have
I left any other such scenes out, in particular from NA and Persuasion? Even if so, it doesn’t materially change the pattern.
CONCLUSION: Aside from those four tete-a-tetes, my revision
of Pollock’s Law stands. What matters most is not that there are no men-only
scenes in JA’s novels, but that there are (almost) no non-heroine scenes in
JA’s novels. Pollock’s Law has been
accepted as gospel among Austen scholars for more than 150 years because it
actually seems to provide a complete explanation. But I hope you’re now convinced
that this superficial appearance , paradoxically, was a mask, which obscured
the more refined, accurate, complete, and powerful formulation I’ve provided.
My revision
of Pollock’s Law makes it clear that it is the overwhelming predominance of scenes
enacted in the presence of the heroine that is the main point of JA’s
scrupulous structures. By pretty much never allowing the reader access to the
thoughts and feelings of characters other than the heroine, JA has given
herself the freedom to construct elaborate, coherent shadow stories. How, e.g.,
could readers be kept unaware (consciously, at least) of Jane Fairfax’s
concealed pregnancy, if they were given access to her thoughts and feelings?
But
just as Newton, monumental genius that he was, never imagined physics at the speed
of light, so too Pollock, close reader but also a 19th century man
thinking like one, never imagined fiction so mind-bendingly original as JA’s,
and how she pulled off the greatest stunt in the history of literature,
creating two parallel fictional universes in the same novel---a trick not even
Einstein could have managed!
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
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