As I
posted not long ago, my JASNA AGM presentation in early October of this year in
Southern California was about a theme which I see in the shadows of all of Jane
Austen’s writings, over a quarter century, from her juvenilia through her very
last novel fragment, letter, and poem written in 1817:
“I perceive an inspirational maternal presence
hovering over these expressions of the power of the strong mind over the weak,
and the accompanying duty to be useful in exercise of that power. That ghost is
the female author of genius who preceded Austen in publication, in
protofeminism, and in death --Mary Wollstonecraft, who throughout Austen’s
career, I will argue, seemed to call to her successor to remember her advocacy
for the power of the strong female mind. I believe Wollstonecraft electrified
the teenaged Jane Austen in late 1791 with her revolutionary Vindication. Then I believe Mary’s
death in childbirth in late 1797, and the ensuing misogynist attack on Mary’s
legacy, further radicalized the 22 year old Jane.
At the
2010 JASNA AGM, I argued that the late Mrs. Tilney was the symbol of Mary
Wollstonecraft and all the other victims of that uniquely female childbed
epidemic. I also believe Wollstonecraft’s tragic death inspired Austen to pick
up the pen dropped by her fallen idol, and to further the cause of
strengthening female minds, and to strive for gender justice, in innovative
fiction writing that even Wollstonecraft never dreamt of.”
In my AGM
talk, I presented a range of evidence that Wollstonecraft was a huge,
continuing inspiration for all of Austen’s writing, much more central and
pervasive than ever before recognized. Here is what I said regarding one strand
of such evidence:
“Wollstonecraft
also played a special role throughout Austen’s writing career, as a source of
scene ideas----snapshots in the
Vindication illustrating deplorable situations, such as the snobbish young
woman who disrespects an older lady down on her luck (long recognized as being
dramatized by Austen in the Box Hill scene in Emma) and the greedy couple cheating vulnerable female family
members out of inheritance (of course Fanny and John Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility). If you read the
Wollstonecraft synopsis alongside its Austen dramatization, in each case I
assure you there would be no doubt in your mind that Austen had Wollstonecraft
on the brain as she wrote her novels.”
Today I’m
back on that same point, because I just learned of still more echoes of
Wollstonecraft’s Vindication in
Austen’s writings. In an article hot off the virtual presses, “Human-Animal
"Mother-Love" in Novels by Olive Schreiner” by Valerie L. Stevens in English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920
61/2 (2018), I just read this:
“…In Mansfield Park (1814),
Jane Austen satirizes the novel's lazy and indifferent mother: "To the
education of her daughters, Lady Bertram paid not the smallest attention. She
had not time for such cares. She was a woman who spent her days … thinking
more of her pug than her children, but very indulgent to the latter, when it
did not put herself to inconvenience." While Austen renders her
critique in a playful tone, Mary Wollstonecraft and Frances Power Cobbe
present the bad mother as no laughing matter. Wollstonecraft's AVOTROW (1792) chastises "she
who takes her dogs to bed, and nurses them with a parade of sensibility, [but]
when sick, will suffer her babes to grow up crooked in a nursery," highlighting
the proximity of the pet as the mother's bedfellow, as well as the moral and
physical deficiency (crookedness) resulting for the child with such poor
upbringing. This behavior is represented as offensive, especially as it blurs
the lines between human and animal: "I
have been desired to observe the pretty tricks of a lap-dog, that my perverse
fate forced me to travel with. Is it surprising that such a tasteless being
should rather caress this dog than her children?”
That brief
quotation sent me back to The Vindication
to find the full excerpt which Austen had, as Stevens indicated, dramatized in Mansfield Park in her indolent ‘lady of
fashion’ cum ‘lap-dog’, Lady Bertram:
“The
lady who sheds tears for the bird starved in a snare, and execrates the devils
in the shape of men, who goad to madness the poor ox or whip the patient ass,
tottering under a burden above its strength, will nevertheless keep her
coachman and horses whole hours waiting for her, when the sharp frost bites, or
the rain beats against the well-closed windows which do not admit a breath of
air to tell how roughly the wind blows without. And she who takes her dogs
to bed, and nurses them with a parade of sensibility, when sick, will suffer
her babes to grow up crooked in a nursery.
This
illustration of my argument is drawn from a matter of fact. The woman whom I
allude to was handsome, reckoned very handsome, by those who did not miss the
mind when the face is plump and fair; but her understanding had not been led
from female duties by literature, nor her innocence debauched by knowledge. No,
she was quite feminine, according to the masculine acceptation of the word;
and, so far from loving these spoiled brutes that filled the place which her
children ought to have occupied, she only lisped out a pretty mixture of French
and English nonsense to please the men who flocked round her. The wife, mother,
and human creature, were all swallowed up by the factitious character which an
improper education and the selfish vanity of beauty had produced.
I do
not like to make a distinction without a difference, and I own that I have
been as much disgusted by the fine lady who took her lap-dog to her bosom
instead of her child; as by the ferocity of a man, who beating his horse,
declared that he knew as well when he did wrong as a Christian. This brood of
folly shows how mistaken they are who, if they allow women to leave their
harems, do not cultivate their understandings in order to plant virtues in
their hearts. For had they sense, they might acquire that domestic taste which
would lead them to love with reasonable subordination their whole family, from
their husband to the housedog; nor would they ever insult humanity in the
person of the most menial servant by paying more attention to the comfort of a
brute than to that of a fellow-creature.”
END
QUOTE FROM WOLLSTONECRAFT’S VINDICATION
So,
that clearly added yet another Austenian dramatization of a Wollstonecraft
story idea to my list. But I also noticed, in the first paragraph of that quoted
excerpt from the Vindication, the presence of two other female characters who Austen borrowed from Wollstonecraft:
“The lady…will nevertheless keep her coachman and horses
whole hours waiting for her, when the sharp frost bites, or the rain beats
against the well-closed windows which do not admit a breath of air to tell how
roughly the wind blows without.”
Of
course, in Pride & Prejudice that
is the unfeeling “abominably rude” Anne de Bourgh whom we see through Elizabeth
Bennet’s jaundiced, jealous eyes:
“La! my
dear,” said Maria, quite shocked at the mistake, “it is not Lady Catherine. The
old lady is Mrs. Jenkinson, who lives with them; the other is Miss de Bourgh.
Only look at her. She is quite a little creature. Who would have thought that
she could be so thin and small?”
“She is
abominably rude to keep Charlotte out of doors in all this wind. Why does she
not come in?”
“Oh,
Charlotte says she hardly ever does. It is the greatest of favours when Miss de
Bourgh comes in.”
&
“The
woman whom I allude to was handsome, reckoned very handsome, by those who did
not miss the mind when the face is PLUMP and FAIR; but her understanding had
not been led from female duties by literature, nor her innocence debauched by
knowledge. No, she was quite feminine, according to the masculine acceptation
of the word…”
And
that, in Emma, is Harriet Smith,
viewed through Emma’s imaginist, uncritical, decidedly non-Wollstonecraftian rose-colored
spectacles:
““She
was a very pretty girl, and her beauty happened to be of a sort which Emma
particularly admired. She was short, PLUMP, and FAIR, with a fine bloom, blue
eyes, light hair, regular features, and a look of great sweetness, and, before
the end of the evening, Emma was as much pleased with her manners as her
person, and quite determined to continue the acquaintance.
She was not struck by any thing
remarkably clever in Miss Smith’s conversation, but she found her altogether
very engaging—not inconveniently shy, not unwilling to talk—and yet so far from
pushing, shewing so proper and becoming a deference, seeming so pleasantly
grateful for being admitted to Hartfield, and so artlessly impressed by the
appearance of every thing in so superior a style to what she had been used to,
that she must have good sense, and deserve encouragement. Encouragement should
be given. Those soft blue eyes, and all those natural graces, should not be
wasted on the inferior society of Highbury and its connexions. The acquaintance
she had already formed were unworthy of her.”
And, as I browsed the rest of that
chapter in the Vindication, I
realized that one more Austen novel had taken up hidden residence in its
shadows. Recall that in the above quotation from my AGM talk, I asserted that Northanger Abbey is the Austen novel
which most pointedly and pervasively celebrated
and furthered the artistic, political, spiritual legacy of Mary Wollstonecraft.
In that light, I now have a challenge for you. Can you spot, in the following
passage, which appears in the Vindication
right before the Anne de Bourgh/Lady Bertram/Harriet Smith excerpt, the single sentence which Jane Austen turned into
not one but two of the most memorable
and thematically significant lines in Northanger
Abbey?:
“Humanity to animals should be
particularly inculcated as a part of national education, for it is not at
present one of our national virtues. Tenderness for their humble dumb
domestics, amongst the lower class, is oftener to be found in a savage than a
civilized state. For civilization prevents that intercourse which creates
affection in the rude hut, or mud hovel, and leads uncultivated minds who are
only depraved by the refinements which prevail in the society, where they are
trodden under foot by the rich, to domineer over them to revenge the insults
that they are obliged to bear from their superiors.
This habitual cruelty is first caught at
school, where it is one of the rare sports of the boys to torment the miserable
brutes that fall in their way. The transition, as they grow up, from barbarity
to brutes to domestic tyranny over wives, children, and servants, is very easy….”
END
QUOTE FROM WOLLSTONECRAFT VINDICATION PASSAGE
Did you
see it? It’s the last quoted sentence: “The TRANSITION, as they grow up, from
barbarity to brutes to DOMESTIC TYRANNY over wives, children, and servants, is
very EASY.”
I’ll
bet many of you now see or hear the two deliberate and significant echoes of
that last, short sentence in Northanger
Abbey, which I’ll now unpack one by one.
Here’s
the first such echoing passage in Northanger
Abbey:
“Delighted
with [Catherine’s] progress [in understanding principles of the picturesque],
and fearful of wearying her with too much wisdom at once, Henry suffered the
subject to decline, and by an EASY TRANSITION from a piece of rocky fragment
and the withered oak which he had placed near its summit, to oaks in general,
to forests, the enclosure of them, waste lands, crown lands and government, he
shortly found himself arrived at politics; and from politics, it was an easy
step to silence.”
At
first it may seem to you that this echoing of Wollstonecraft’s “easy transition”
by Austen, even if intentional, is superficial and trivial. What is there in common,
after all, between (1) Wollstonecraft’s straightforward description of the dreadful
progression from the cruelty of boys toward animals to the tyranny of powerful
men over the other members of their households, on the one hand, and (2) Austen’s
witty description of the progression in Henry’s lecture on the picturesque,
from specific landscape features up to the larger societal forces which
impacted the English rural landscape, on the other?
Only
everything! When we recognize the contrast between Wollstonecraft’s and Austen’s
approaches – logical argument vs. no apparent argument at all --- we can see
how they actually couldn’t be more congruent and interrelated. I.e., Austen and
Wollstonecraft take very different rhetorical paths in order to make the same
essential moral point. Wollstonecraft writes without irony about how, in a
patriarchal, sexist society, the child is father to the man, with the common
denominator being cruelty to those less powerful. Boys torture the nonhuman
animals within their power, but men tyrannize their entire family who are
within their vastly greater power. No ambiguity or unclarity there.
Whereas,
in Austen, the condescending Henry, waxing eloquent, thinks he’s just opening
Catherine’s eyes and mind to visual aesthetics. However, the knowing reader
recognizes that in Henry’s transition from visual details of the English
landscape to discussing enclosure and the role of the crown and the government
in shaping that landscape, he has unwittingly leapt to a true Gothic horror -- the
wholesale destruction and sealing off of the great natural commons from
ordinary, powerless people by “great men” like General Tilney, who care more about
the view from their mansion than for the lives of their poor neighbors and the
countryside they live in, which he has taken over.
Little
wonder, then, that when Henry finally transitions to politics, it is all too easy
for him to cop out and go silent. At that point in the novel, Henry is still
unable or unwilling to admit to Catherine that English politics, totally controlled
by those same powerful men who in Wollstonecraft’s analysis oppress their
families, are totally also corrupt and complicit in these society-wide evils as
well. It’s just the next all-too “easy transition” from (1) animal to (2) wife,
children and servants, to (3) the entire natural world and the society of
powerless people who make up 99% of the population. Henry is silent about that
oppression in exactly the same way as, later on at the Abbey, he cluelessly
lets slip, when he castigates Catherine and drives her to humiliated tears, for
her daring to suspect bad intent in the ruling national power structure which
allowed husband-father-masters to tyrannize their families without compunction,
restriction, or adverse consequences.
And
note also that in writing this scene at Beechen Cliff in which Henry Tilney
pretentiously lectures Catherine about aesthetics, while preferring to remain
silent about the horrors of what was lost in the process, Jane Austen surely
had in the back of her mind what she had written a quarter century earlier, at age fifteen, in her satirical History of England; when --- not coincidentally ---soon after the publication of
Wollstonecraft’s Vindication, Austen
tossed this savage satirical parting grenade at the quintessential male bully, Henry
VIII: “…nothing can be said in his VINDICATION, but that his
abolishing Religious Houses & leaving them to the ruinous depredations of time has
been of infinite use to the landscape.”
That
“vindication” is, I assert, a loaded tip of the hat to Wollstonecraft, which the
mature Austen revisited in greater detail in the scene at Beechen Cliff in Northanger Abbey.
And
that brings me to the second of my fresh Northanger
Abbey discoveries, which is actually the bookend to that first one – a veiled
allusion to that sentence of Wollstonecraft in the following passage which
literally ends her book!:
“To
begin perfect happiness at the respective ages of twenty-six and eighteen is to
do pretty well; and professing myself moreover convinced that the general’s
unjust interference, so far from being really injurious to their felicity, was
perhaps rather conducive to it, by improving their knowledge of each other, and
adding strength to their attachment, I leave it to be settled, by whomsoever it
may concern, whether the tendency of this work be altogether to recommend
parental tyranny, or reward filial disobedience.”
In
referring to “parental tyranny”, Austen is, I now see, winking broadly at
Wollstonecraft’s reference to “domestic tyranny” in that same sentence, and is
wittily leaving it to “whomsoever it may concern” (meaning, every single woman
reading the novel!) to figure out whether Austen is inciting them to rise up against
the kind of everyday “parental tyranny” symbolized in every possible way by
General Tilney.
Austen’s
point is that the General does not represent one aberrant “bad apple” among
English patriarchs; chillingly, he represents the norm, because it’s not just
about an evil man, it’s about a culture that fosters wrongdoing in ordinary men. In Northanger Abbey, as in all her other novels, Austen has done her
very best to further Wollstonecraft’s vision of a world with women and men
having equal powers and rights, by
teaching women what was worth knowing to assist that paradise to arrive sooner.
That worthwhile knowledge is that the system was rigged against women, and the
only rational option was for her female readers to teach themselves, using her
novels as tools toward enlightenment and spurs toward action, to vindicate
their own rights, since no one else was going to do that for them; except for
any male allies --- good but clueless men like Henry, who were capable of
learning that in some crucial ways Catherine was far wiser than he --- who
might join the struggle for equal rights for women.
And as
we look at very recent events in which women around the world today are
beginning to be listened to about horrid aspects of sexual oppression which, if
anything, must’ve even been far worse when Wollstonecraft and Austen lived,
perhaps these are real steps in a very difficult but very long overdue,
transition to speaking (rather than being silenced) about all oppression of
women, whether domestic or societal, which surely both Wollstonecraft and
Austen would be cheering for as the vindication of their protofeminist efforts!
And there’s more need than ever for good men to listen, learn, and then dive
into the struggle against “domestic” and all other tyranny over women.
So now
I defy the sagacity of those who continue to deny Austen’s strong, subversive feminism
to read Northanger Abbey in light of
all of the above, without sensing the ghost of Mary Wollstonecraft benevolently
hovering over the road to the Abbey, spreading enlightenment and perfume all
the way.
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
No comments:
Post a Comment