Ellen
Moody posted the following today in Janeites/Austen-L about the recent death of
literary critic Nina Auerbach: “An obituary: she was an important
feminist woman scholarship; often wrote
of the gothic, has a book on DuMaurier, wrote
influentially from a feminist progressive
angry angle about Fanny Price”: http://www.legacy.com/ obituaries/nytimes/obituary. aspx?n=nina-auerbach&pid= 184181437
For
over a decade, I’ve been aware of Nina Auerbach’s having been a pioneer among Austen
scholars, in her early recognition of dark aspects of Austen’s radical feminist
critique of Regency Era patriarchy, a critique that (as I agree with her) lurks
in the shadows of all of Austen’s novels. So I think it a fitting memorial to Prof.
Auerbach today, to quote from her literary criticism written during the
Seventies, so that her own words can illustrate the prescience and evolution of
her subversive insights into the most high profile of Austen heroes —Mr. Darcy in P&P. In particular, vis a
vis my claim (since 2005) that all of Austen’s novels are double stories, I find
especially noteworthy Auerbach’s prescient insights into the doubleness of the
Austen hero who famously (and disingenuously) sneered: “But disguise of every
sort is my abhorrence.” As you’ll see, Auerbach didn’t quite believe him then,
and I don’t believe him today.
Auerbach
first dipped her critical toe into the deep waters of Mr. Darcy’s mysterious
character in 1972 in "O Brave New World: Evolution and Revolution in Persuasion, " English Literary History 39 at p. 120, with this passing
observation:
“…Elizabeth
was forced out of her childhood home by Mr. Collins, a horrible embodiment of
the power of form to stifle humanity, and her problem in the book was to find a
house she could live in. Wickham's ‘unhoused free condition,’ his world of
impulse and feeling, was an illusion, easily dissolved by the power of money.
Nature, growth, freedom, could survive only in the heavily fortified atmosphere
of Pemberley, presided over by the
equivocal figure of Mr. Darcy…To find this generosity of feeling, Elizabeth
Bennet… retreated into the past: Elizabeth ensconced herself in Pemberley…But
there were oppressive and equivocal elements in this protective world of
tradition. Darcy's resemblance to his
aunt, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, pointed to elements in his character of the
anti-human pride of his class, although at times Jane Austen ignored Darcy's
unpleasant side with skillful sophistry in order to maintain the light and
bright and sparkling tone of the book.”
I love Auerbach’s characterization of Austen’s “skillful sophistry” at somehow keeping things comic and tragic at the same time. Then, four years later, in “Austen & Alcott on Matriarchy: New Women or New Wives?” in Novel 10/1 (Autumn 1976) 6-26, Auerbach unpacked her much more fully developed thoughts about Darcy:
“Lady Catherine's final challenge throws Elizabeth
back on the female, matriarchal dream world she is trying to escape; in
asserting the primary reality of men and patrilineal inheritance, she comes
close to denying that she is her mother's daughter. Lady Catherine's
withdrawal, and the reassuringly ardent Darcy's quick appearance in her place,
suggests the salutary recession of the usurped power of all mothers before the
meaning and form only men can bestow. For the acknowledged center of power is
the shadowy Darcy. "As a brother, a landlord, a master, she considered how
many people's happiness were in his guardianship!-How much of pleasure or pain
it was in his power to bestow!- How much of good or evil must be done by him!".
Looking at Darcy as his portrait
immortalizes him, Elizabeth is overcome by a kind of social vitalism: she is
drawn not to the benignity and wisdom of his power but to its sheer extent as
such, for evil as well as good. What compels her in the portrait is the
awesomely institutionalized power of a man; a power that her own father has let
fall and her mother, grotesquely usurped. Loathing as she does the idea of any
kinship to her mother, Elizabeth will doubtless be content not to have her own
portrait displayed after her marriage. Thus Austen speculates: "I can only
imagine that Mr. D. prizes any Picture of her too much to like it should be
exposed to the public eye.-I can imagine he wd. have that sort of feeling-that
mixture of Love, Pride & Delicacy" (24 May, 1813). After the clamorous
anonymity of Longbourn, marriage waits for Elizabeth as a hard-won release into
a privacy only Darcy can bestow. But underneath this pervasive largesse Darcy
has as shadowy a selfhood as his aunt Lady Catherine. If Elizabeth's
childhood is obliterated in memory, Darcy's is a muddled contradiction. The man
who caught Elizabeth's eye before audibly insulting her was, according to his
"intelligent" housekeeper, a fount of virtue from the beginning of
his life. He was merely too modest to declare his goodness and Elizabeth too
prejudiced to see it…A good deal of
weight is put on this testimony, though it is oddly redolent of Mr. Collins
extolling the condescension of Lady Catherine; and it meshes neither with the
reliable Mrs. Gardiner's "having heard Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy formerly
spoken of as a very proud, ill-natured boy", nor with Darcy's own meticulous
diagnosis of his past…Darcy the man is as muddled a figure as Darcy the boy. Is
he indeed converted into humanity by Elizabeth's spontaneity and spirit, or was
he always the perfection that maturity allows her to see? Oddly, Elizabeth
herself prefers the latter interpretation, replacing her power over him with a
reassuring silliness: "And yet I meant to be uncommonly clever in
taking so decided a dislike to him, without any reason. It is such a spur to
one's genius, such an opening for wit to have a dislike of that kind. One may
be continually abusive without saying any thing just; but one cannot be always
laughing at a man without now and then stumbling on something witty". Elizabeth's selective memory serves her well
here by erasing the fact that she had, and has, several good reasons for
disliking Darcy; but she seems to need a sense of her own wrongness to justify
the play of her mind. In choosing to emphasize her own prejudice over Darcy's
most palpable pride, she can wonder freely at the power in his portrait while
her own (if there is one) will be closeted away, invisible to all eyes but her
husband's…
…Objectivity,
impartiality, and knowledge might endanger the cloak of invisibility which is
so intrinsic a part of Jane Austen's perception of a woman's life. The
sanctioned power of management with which she endows Darcy allows him to prove
his heroism in the third volume by taking over the mother's role: like the shadowy "Duke of dark
corners" in Measure for Measure, he moves behind the scenes and secretly
arranges the marriages of the three Bennet girls….In becoming the novel's providential
matchmaker, Darcy brings about the comic conclusion by an administrative
activity for which Mrs. Bennet and Lady Catherine were, and Emma Woodhouse will
be, severely condemned. In the end the malevolent power of the mother is
ennobled by being transferred to the hero; and the female community of
Longbourn, an oppressive blank in a dense society, is dispersed with relief in
the solidity of marriage. “ END QUOTE
Darcy
clearly continued to bubble around in Auerbach’s imagination thereafter, because
7 years later, we read, in “Jane Austen and Romantic Imprisonment” these additional
thoughts, which I believe are the last that Auerbach wrote about Darcy:
“…Elizabeth
Bennet in P&P is the simplest case: she assumes power by marriage to it,
and the novel arcs with her comic rise. Unlike Catherine Morland and Marianne
Dashwood, she falls back only in a muted, vicarious fashion through her sister’s
humiliating elopement. The double prison
quietly persists, however, in Darcy’s radically double character, his ambiguous
affinity with his tyrannical aunt making him as suggestive a redeemer/jailer as
Willoughby was. His humanization is so undefined a process that we can see the ‘shades
of the prison-house’ [Wordsworth] closing on Elizabeth forever at Pemberley.”
Given
that I ‘ve been writing for almost a decade now about the two Darcys that Jane
Austen created, and how the dark Darcy only pretends
to reform his character, I’d like to think that Nina Auerbach, who so long
ago felt intimations of that darkness, would’ve found my shadow story theories persuasive.
And if you were wondering how Auerbach’s subversive ideas about Darcy were received
way back when? Well, I will conclude this post with two reviews which show that
the world of Austen scholarship was definitely not ready for Auerbach’s radical
innovative thinking 3 or 4 decades ago—and perhaps is not much more ready
today:
Joel J.
Gold in Modern Philology, Vol. 80, No. 3 (Feb., 1983), pp. 313-316
“It is
difficult, for example, to harmonize the somewhat strained and subjective
readings of "Jane Austen and Romantic Imprisonment" by Nina Auerbach,
which presents Austen in "a special sort of agreement with her Romantic
contemporaries", with the judicious, balanced appraisal of Patricia Meyer
Spacks, who sees Austen's fiction embodying "values of the 18th and 19th
centuries alike". Auerbach's subjective approach leads to some dark corners:
she finds in both Sense and Sensibility
and Northanger Abbey "a similar
rhythm of a painful journey toward what looks like freedom but is in fact a deeper
prison of the mind”. Many readers have seen Marianne Dashwood's marriage to
Colonel Brandon in such terms, but Catherine's to Henry Tilney? Consider
Auerbach on the end of Northanger Abbey:
"The mechanical, even faintly zombie-like quality of the final
epithalamium-'Henry and Catherine were married, the bells rang and every body
smiled' . . . in which the smiles seem as non-human as the bells-recalls the
darker, enforced marriages of the unnatural in Romantic fiction, whose
contrivance (as in Frankenstein or Melmoth) murders the living nature marriage
claims to perpetuate". Not
surprisingly, with Auerbach as guide, "we can see the 'shades of the
prison-house' closing on Elizabeth forever at Pemberley" and Fanny Price
transformed "from being the prisoner of Mansfield to the status of its
principal jailer".
And a
few months after that, Margaret Ann Doody responded with similar skepticism in Nineteenth-Century
Fiction, Vol. 38, No. 2 (Sep., 1983), pp. 220-224:
“Nina
Auerbach gives us a different kind of historical Austen. "Jane Austen and
Romantic Imprisonment" rebels in Austen's name against the condescending
praise (by G. H. Lewes and others) for her limitations; she is too often seen
as "the artist of contentedly clipped wings". Auerbach sees in Austen
an impatience with "pinched horizons," a Romantic insight into a
claustrophobia Romantically evoked. This view has some merit as a reaction
against platitudes, but certainly not every reader will perceive Darcy as a
"jailer" or agree that "we can see the 'shades of the prison
house' closing on Elizabeth forever at Pemberley". If we try to see everything we want in an author, we may in the end see
nothing.”
Needless
to say, I don’t agree with Gold or Doody, and I especially don’t believe that
Nina Auerbach was guilty of “trying to see everything she wanted to see” in
Jane Austen’s fiction. Quite the contrary, I see Auerbach as having been a
clear-eyed, imaginative interpreter of the meanings hidden beneath the lines Austen
wrote, and I hope that one day my own scholarship will fulfill the promise of
the pioneering and still underappreciated insights of Nina Auerbach.
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAusten
on Twitter
1 comment:
I am not sure about these theories. Of course it has been (cough) quite a bit of time since I was in graduate school back in the 1970s. To me Austen had more of the Georgian about her novels than the later Romantic sensibilities. These critics seem to forget Darcy's self description of himself as a man who despised disguise of every sort. Yet, I also believe that he is a man who also does not know himself (gnothi seuton) in the classical sense. He states that he was given good principles, yet as he grew up he practiced these in arrogance and pride. He was never corrected. Thus, he had no stick by which to truly measure himself. He knows he is flawed; but, he hides it underneath a surface of sophistication. He disguises himself. He admires Elizabeth Bennet because she is what he is not. I could probably go on but I will stop for now.
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