A Jane Austen Education(19)
In terms of cultural history, Austen was fighting a losing battle. The Romantic idea gave rise to almost all the great art of the last two centuries. It gave us Wordsworth and Byron, Whitman and Thoreau, modern dance, expressionist painting, Beat poetry, and much, much more. It has set the terms for the way we think and feel ever since the time of Austen, and in particular, for the way we think and feel about thinking and feeling. The most important word in popular music today is not “love,” it’s “I.” And the second most important is “wanna.” Popular music is one giant shout of desire, one great rallying cry for freedom and pleasure. Pop psychology sends us the same signals, and so does advertising. “Trust your feelings,” we are told. “Listen to your heart.” “If it feels good, do it.”
These can be the right lessons to learn at a certain point in life. They certainly were for me. I grew up in an Orthodox Jewish community: there were a lot of restrictions, a lot of rules. Don’t eat pork. Don’t play music on the Sabbath. Don’t go out with non-Jewish girls. Don’t stray outside the bounds of the group. Every action was prescribed by an ancient tradition, every choice circumscribed by the values of a tight-knit community. Keep your head covered. Say your prayers three times a day. Get A’s, go to a good college, make your parents proud. Learning that my feelings mattered—learning to figure out what my feelings were in the first place—was extremely liberating as I got older. I needed to realize that I could do what I wanted with my life and that I could do it just because I wanted to. Accepting that my emotions were valid and important and morally significant—that they should have a bearing on how I act—was a crucial part, at that point, of growing up.
Some of Austen’s heroines had to learn this lesson, too. They were inexperienced and needed to discover their feelings, or they were neglected and needed to stand up for them. But Elizabeth and Emma and Marianne had already figured out how to do those things. They trusted their gut. They listened to their heart. If it felt good, they did it. Their problem, like that of so many young people, was that they had too great a belief in their own feelings. They had achieved the relative autonomy of adolescence—learning to trust yourself—but now they had to take the next step, into the full autonomy of adulthood. They needed to learn to doubt themselves.
And that was what Elizabeth finally did. That was what happened when she read the letter that overturned her beliefs—and why she had to read it twice. Its arguments—its infuriatingly rational arguments—flew in the face of her feelings, and the first time through, her feelings rebelled. But the second time, her honesty forced her to listen—forced her to think. By telling us Elizabeth’s story, I saw, Austen was calling us to do something very difficult, something that violates our instincts and intuitions. But of course it does. She was telling us, precisely, to question our instincts and intuitions. She wanted us to override our emotions, which dwell within us and urge us to do what we want, and replace them with reason—with logic, with evidence, with objectivity—which stands outside us and doesn’t care what we want.
Learning this lesson was oddly liberating. Just because I thought that another person had done something to me, I was now forced to acknowledge, didn’t mean that I was right. I might be offended by something they had said, but maybe I’d misunderstood them. I might be mad because they were getting ugly with me, but maybe I had started it. Feelings are always about something, and that “something” is not itself a feeling. It’s an idea, a perception of a situation, just as Elizabeth’s feelings were based on her perceptions of certain situations. Everyone could see that Jane loved Bingley; Elizabeth’s family wasn’t really all that bad; Mr. Darcy was insufferably proud: these were the perceptions, the ideas, on which her feelings were based, and they all turned out to be wrong. And because ideas can be wrong, the emotions that are based on them can also be wrong. So now I had a way to let go of my feelings when they weren’t legitimate—when they weren’t correct. I could acknowledge my emotions, but I didn’t have to be controlled by them.
Needless to say, not everybody wants to hear that their feelings aren’t necessarily valid. In fact, a lot of people hate Jane Austen for just that reason. They see her as cold and prudish, a schoolmarm and killjoy. In graduate school, we split into two camps over the question—Jane Austen, pro or con—and emotions ran high. At a certain point, we were each expected to teach a class that included one nineteenth-century novel. Now, there are a lot of great nineteenth-century novels, but almost all of us chose one of only two: Pride and Prejudice or Jane Eyre. It may seem like a small matter, but great issues were felt to be at stake (as they always are in graduate school). The decision wasn’t just a pedagogical choice, it was a statement of faith, a declaration of self, for the books represented the strongest possible expressions of two diametrically opposed views of life.
In Pride and Prejudice, reason triumphs over feeling and will. In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bront?’s own typically Romantic coming-of-age story, emotion and ego overcome all obstacles. Those of us who chose Pride and Prejudice couldn’t imagine how you could stand to read anything as immature and overwrought as Jane Eyre. Those who chose Jane Eyre couldn’t believe that you would subject your students to something as stuffy and insipid as Pride and Prejudice. Our choices, of course, reflected our personalities. The Bront? people, we Austenites felt, tended to go in for self-dramatization and ideological extremism. We regarded ourselves as a cooler, more ironic bunch.