Austen's edge

I decided to re-read Jane Austen's six novels this summer for fun, and it has been such a rewarding experience. I had thought I knew them all pretty well (except for Sense and Sensibility, which I was reading for the first time), but it's part of Austen's greatness that there's so much on a subtle and nuanced level to discover when you read the novels at different periods of your life. Honestly, there are aspects of Pride and Prejudice that stand out to me a lot more now, at 34, than they did when I read it as a teenager-- perhaps because I didn't take the time to unpack all the sentences as carefully then, or because I didn't fully understand a reference, or because this time around I simply paid more attention to different elements of the novel. Anyway: they have all been different reading experiences this time, with new shades of meaning emerging. I think I could probably reread them every year and see new angles in them. Mansfield Park remains a favorite of mine, for some perverse reason. (I'll just say that this time around, I was really struck by an almost gothic element of the plotline-- how terribly coercive Fanny's friends and family are in trying to convince her to marry Mr. Crawford-- not one single person on her side or supportive of her holding out. It truly is one of the darkest and most uncomfortable episodes in Austen, and it brought to my mind both the moral weightiness of Clarissa and the drama and terrors of the gothic genre, which Austen's not usually associated with, except in the parodic way of Northanger Abbey.) I think, also, that Mansfield Park contains some of Austen's most morally ambiguous and complex characters, making it very interesting to me.

I could go on forever about Jane Austen, but it's late and that's not what I intended in starting this post. I just wanted to make the point that she has some of the nastiest lines in the English language--the most wittily cruel, pomposity-puncturing, pitiless lines I've ever read, anyway. It's interesting because I know there is a tendency, sometimes, to think of her out there in the pop culture as a nice, homey Victorian lady (though she didn't write during the Victorian period, actually) who came up with pretty romances that took place in drawing rooms and that affirmed all that was sweet and good in the end, however bumpy the ride was to get there; her novels make people feel good. I don't exactly mean to argue with that last line, because they make me feel good, too, or at least that's one part of my response. I do find myself shrinking into my cocoon and feeling safe when I read her, despite the fact that there's a lot of unsafeness for her characters, really.

But, boy, could she write some mean lines when she wanted to. As I said, I could go on forever about this-- about her cleverly wicked descriptions of the annoying behaviors of children, for example-- but I just wanted to quote a few lines from Persuasion, which I think has the meanest lines I've come across so far. First, here's part of her description of poor Dick, the Musgroves' younger son: "the Musgroves had had the ill fortune of a very troublesome, hopeless son; and the good fortune to lose him before he reached his twentieth year"[.] Dickie "had been sent to sea, because he was stupid and unmanageable on shore," "had been very little cared for at any time by his family, though quite as much as he deserved; seldom heard of, and scarcely at all regretted, when the intelligence of his death abroad" reached them.

Then his mother is mocked for seeming to miss him so very much, now that he is dead and his death can be romanticized. Mrs. Musgrove is a large woman, and Captain Wentworth is to be commended for "the self-command with which he attended to her large fat sighings over the destiny of a son, whom alive nobody had cared for." THEN, most shocking of all to me, in the next paragraph the narrator says: "Personal size and mental sorrow have certainly no necessary proportions. A large bulky figure has as good a right to be in deep affliction as the most graceful set of limbs in the world. But, fair or not fair, there are unbecoming conjunctions, which reason will patronize in vain--which taste cannot tolerate--which ridicule will seize."

Maybe you can try to convince me that Austen means us to look skeptically her narrator's views here-- but I am going to need a lot of convincing. Basically, her reliable narrator is saying, "Hey, it may be unfair, but large people look ridiculous when they're crying. Grief looks much better on thin, attractive people."

This edgy sort of humor is only one aspect of the Austen reading experience, I know. But I thought I'd mention it because it so often seems to fall by the wayside in our popular cultural thoughts about Austen.