Rage: Blog #3

Fairy Tale vs. Picaresque

I have always been disappointed by Woolf’s judgment with regard to the relative accomplishments of Charlotte Brontë and Jane Austen, not by the fact that she preferred Austen, whom I’ve always loved, but by her curt dismissal of Brontë, whom I consider a towering genius among English novelists, and whom, given my respect for Woolf’s own genius, I wanted Woolf to recognize as every bit the artist I felt she was. Brontë’s tower, I’d argue, is higher than her sister’s but, as for out-towering Austen, that’s hard to say. Making such a determination would be like trying to determine who was the greater composer, Beethoven or Bach. Given how different their artistic premises were, and how brilliant each was in his compositional play with those premises, why even attempt to rank them? It should be enough to say they’re approximately as good as each other in capitalizing on the possibilities inherent in their different harmonic and dynamic approaches.

If you’re fascinated by the art of syntax, Jane Austen is a writer you’ll read with unstinting pleasure, and this is probably truer of her than of Brontë, whose brooding sentences may be felt to plod from time to time. Austen never plods. Her finest sentences have the peaks and gildings of those splendid edifices Christopher Wren designed after the great London fire. They scintillate in the English sun. Even in the rain they gleam and inspire. Conversely, too, many of Austen’s sentences are like rabbit warrens. They go underground a little, chuting you left, then right, then up, then down, then back up to a kind of half-light in a very different place. In either case, the words she chooses, the ways she arranges them, the light they cast on one another—well, if irony has a sheen that can be seen most clearly when purged of sarcasm or disapproval, Austen’s tonalities glister like woven gold. What fun, then, to read a book like Pride and Prejudice, but not because of the action—there isn’t any. What action there is filters in through letters and hearsay. The fun comes from its verbal refinement, its connotative perfumery.

The paucity of action in Pride and Prejudice is necessitated by the fact that the novel’s heroine is, well, a heroine, a woman, in a cultural context in which the height of female nobility, so to speak, had to do with something more like virtue than assertiveness, involving calm detachment, un-self-assuming discernment, knowing deference to male prerogative, those sorts of things. Women lived in a kind of busy stasis, bustling perhaps within the four walls provided them by their worldly betters, but not projecting themselves beyond those walls. Elizabeth’s adventure to Netherfield early on in the novel is instructive in this regard by virtue of the disapproval it garners her from the snobbish Miss Bingley. Action, then, takes the form of dialogue, and a woman as gifted in self-expression as Elizabeth is well suited to her leading role, employing her wit the way a male hero might flash his cutlass. While a male hero’s success with his chosen weapon might build a sense of his stature, dialogue engenders the development of character and, besides its impeccable linguistic fabric, Pride and Prejudice is particularly remarkable for the intelligence with which the author limns character and thought in relation to the struggle against so many obstacles to selfhood.

Elizabeth Bennett, of course, is an amazing character, as she needs must be to bear the weight of an entire novel on her shoulders. No wonder her self-sidelined father loves her best, above even her intelligent angel of an older sister, Jane, whose refusal to think badly of even the worst human specimens in her world is not naïvete but an act of will. That is, it is existential and therefore in its own right heroic, a fact which only Lizzy, perhaps, fully appreciates. Lizzy may laugh at Jane from time to time, but the laughter is thrilled with admiration and love.

Lizzy and Jane are memorable and believable quintessences. In the hands of a lesser author, they would be almost too fine to be true and their stories would seem more in the mode of fairy-tale than of real life. Their storylines, in fact, real and believable as they are—and that due to the author’s painstaking attention to detail—make proximate Cinderellas out of both of them, rescued by their respective princes according to the logic of poetic justice, the most humanly compelling of the various logics. It is because they steer their courses through the eddies of their social worlds with such intelligence and such discernment that the fairy-tale endings they both enjoy seem not so much willfully super-imposed upon them by an idealistic author as, simply, fortuitous and deserved. In their cases, Austen’s art, in its weaving together of language, thought, and event, is flawless.

Their lives, however, are taxed by instances of female emotion more perverse than they are, expressed by characters perhaps less perfectly drawn, characters, that is, more along the lines of Cinderella’s step-mother and step-sisters. These, of course, are the fretful Mrs. Bennet and the three younger sisters, Lydia, Kitty, and Mary, coarse and boorish all, riddled with pettiness and greed, so much so that the reader finds it no wonder there isn’t a prince in any of their cases to be enthralled by them. Most commentators on Pride and Prejudice focus on Lizzy and secondarily on Jane, and with good reason. The embarrassing fact is that there’s not much to say about the other three sisters or their tediously grasping mother. They are flat characters, and appropriately so in that their mode is picaresque, and, significantly, more by way of what has eventually become the realist mode so triumphantly embraced by our own era in its depletion of spirit. In general, a reader cannot help harboring a measure of smug satisfaction vis-a-vis these lesser characters’ deserved outcomes to go along with her or his elation at Lizzy’s and Jane’s happier destinies. Lizzie’s and Jane’s outcomes, because believable, offer some positive relief from one’s awareness of the pervasive cruelty of modern life. That cruelty belongs to the lesser world of the sisters and the mother, one feels, the former doomed to live out trivial, loveless lives, and the latter condemned to be always an embarrassing expression of human ignorance and stinginess of soul.

Their failure to rise above anxiety and fear in the face of their disenfranchisement comes off as grotesque and undignified. How shallow and crude it seems that they have allowed the entailment of their father’s property to a distant male heir to reduce them to connivance and bile. Women who allow the meanness of patriarchy to engender in them an equal meanness, one feels, should be, well, ashamed of themselves. They’ve become shallow and embarrassingly redundant, not just as people, which is their right, but, less forgivably, as characters in a novel written by a genius struggling against such meanness herself, struggling, that is, to achieve the kind of aesthetic integrity that cannot admit of such distortions of character and event. One might well bask in Austen’s beautifully symmetrical sentences, and one might glory in Lizzy’s and Jane’s good fortunes so well deserved, but upon considering their less admirable sisters and mother one might become aware of something pecking away in the back of the brain, some little birdling of dissatisfaction, first with oneself and one’s smugness in judging them, and then, as it pecks and pecks, with certain choices on the part of the author.

Even a member of the prerogatived gender like me can imagine that these lesser female Bennets might not in fact be to blame for their unhappiness. What, I wonder, would I have become if born into a household in which all the worldly wealth my parents had received had been placed beyond my reach by virtue not of some rakish Wickham-like thing I had done, but by my very identity as a man? Suppose some old aunt—let’s call her Aunt Patricia, say, or Aunt Bernadette—who didn’t like men or thought them unstable and dangerous repositories for her wealth, inclined like so many men those days (think of Branwell, Charlotte Bronte’s dissolute brother) to gamble or drink it all away—suppose that aunt had decided to entail my mother’s inheritance on a female cousin of mine? How might such a fact affect my childhood experiences, my self-esteem, my view of money, my security in a world in which money is, in fact, everything? Suppose, too, that my two older brothers, similarly disenfranchised by matriarchy, had decided to sidestep their rage at this atrocity of an entailment via saintly purity or the scintillations of satire, leaving me holding the bag? Where rage is warranted it has to be felt by someone, doesn’t it? Questions such as these can lead one to feel some partisanship on behalf of Mrs. Bennett and her clucking younger daughters, emotionally abandoned by the mister of the house, wagged at by their superior elder sisters, and, fate worse than death, dryly despised by the highly cultivated narrator who, if she has any discourse with the author, should know a thing or two about rage.