A Jane Austen Education(25)

When my professor asked a question, it wasn’t because he wanted us to get or guess “the” answer; it was because he hadn’t figured out an answer yet himself, and genuinely wanted to hear what we had to say. Just so, Henry’s whole “dancing equals marriage” thing didn’t really have a point, a specific lesson or message. He simply wanted to get Catherine’s mind moving so the two of them could have an interesting conversation—a conversation more stimulating than, “Yes, my dear, it is very uncomfortable indeed,” or “This is my favourite place; it is so out of the way,” or “I defy any man in England to make my horse go less than ten miles an hour.” A conversation in which both he and she had a chance to actually learn something, and so in which a real mental—and therefore emotional—connection between them could be made.





My professor was like Henry, but of course, as I quickly realized, they were both like Henry’s creator. Playful, impish, provoking: this was Austen exactly, and never more so than in Northanger Abbey. Austen used the novel to make us her students. Henry was her surrogate, and Catherine was ours, and she went about teaching just the way that he did. In fact, she taught, in part, through him. Everything he said to Catherine she was also necessarily saying to us. When Henry ridiculed the conventions of polite chatter, it was the empty gestures of our own conversations that we inevitably thought of. When he rearranged Catherine’s mental categories, it was our sluggish ideas that started to wake up and stir.

But she also did far more than that. Henry taught, in that first scene, through impersonation. He pretended to become someone else—set smile, softened voice, simpering air—and proceeded to act that character out in a way that revealed the character’s folly to Catherine, his audience. Austen did not pretend to become someone else, but she certainly did impersonate any number of characters. “Yes, my dear” and “This is my favourite place” and “I defy any man in England”: these were the equivalents of Henry’s “Have you been long in Bath, madam?”—satiric performances meant to call our attention to behavior we normally take for granted. Austen, like Henry, taught by showing—which means, by arousing. By putting something in front of us and expecting us to think about it.

She wrote novels, not essays, and more than just about any other author, she refused to mar her novels by putting essays into them. She never lectured, never explained: never interrupted her stories to hold forth on what she wanted us to think they meant, or deliver her opinions on the state of the world. She also never tampered with her characters by putting her own ideas into their mouths. Writing to her sister, Cassandra, upon the publication of Pride and Prejudice, she sketched out her philosophy about these matters, albeit in the ironically inverted way in which her letters often spoke of serious things. “The work is rather too light & bright & sparkling,” she now professed to think about the novel, “—it wants to be stretched out here & there with a long Chapter—of sense if it could be had, if not of solemn specious nonsense—about something unconnected with the story; an Essay on Writing, a critique on Walter Scott, or the history of Buonaparte.” A cackle of authorial delight, followed by a glance at the degenerate practices of lesser novelists.

Austen was never didactic, and she didn’t like didactic people, either. In Pride and Prejudice, Mary Bennet was fond of quoting heavy books, and Mr. Collins was fond of reading them aloud, and both of them were held up as fools. Henry never “told” Catherine anything—except once, and then Austen gently laughed at him, too. He and Catherine and his sister, Eleanor, who had also befriended the heroine, were taking a walk to the top of a hill overlooking the town of Bath. The Tilneys, “viewing the country with the eyes of persons accustomed to drawing,” were soon deciding “on its capability of being formed into pictures.” Austen was referring here to the contemporary vogue for the “picturesque,” landscapes that conformed to a certain idea of visual beauty: moody skies, gnarled trees, ruined shacks, and so forth, all arranged according to the laws of pictorial art. But Catherine knew nothing of this, so Henry was only too happy to fill her in:She confessed and lamented her want of knowledge, declared that she would give anything in the world to be able to draw; and a lecture on the picturesque immediately followed, in which his instructions were so clear that she soon began to see beauty in everything admired by him, and her attention was so earnest that he became perfectly satisfied of her having a great deal of natural taste. He talked of foregrounds, distances, and second distances—side-screens and perspectives—lights and shades; and Catherine was so hopeful a scholar that when they gained the top of Beechen Cliff, she voluntarily rejected the whole city of Bath as unworthy to make part of a landscape.





In fact, as we know from her family, Austen was a great devotee of the picturesque herself, just as she loved the gothic novel. But she understood that any art or idea or pattern of behavior, left unexamined, hardens into cliché. Once you begin taking it too seriously, you’re only a step away from taking yourself too seriously, and before you know it, you start to sound like Mr. Collins, “lecturing” and “instructing” instead of laughing and surprising. Your students, in turn, their minds improved by your enlightened guidance—“she voluntarily rejected the whole city of Bath as unworthy to make part of a landscape”—start talking nonsense.