But seven years I suppose are enough to change every pore of one’s skin, & every feeling of one’s mind.
What did change, in Jane Austen’s art, in those seven years and more between Susan and Mansfield Park? The few attempts to differentiate the second “trilogy” from the first have been general and brief, yielding, in sum, only a disconnected series of distinctions: “a more intensified sense of the influence of place and environment on personality and action, a broader and more thoughtful social critique, and a much greater power of imagining … figures within the social and geographical spaces they inhabit”;2 a greater focus on questions of bodily health;3 a new emphasis on fulfillment through socially useful labor;4 a new insistence on the claims of desire;5 a deeper involvement with nature;6 a new “sense of hazard to the larger community”;7 and a new consciousness of the Napoleonic War.8
While these characterizations are, by and large, unobjectionable, they fail to add up to a coherent account of how Austen’s art matured. Nor do they go very far in explaining either our common readerly intuitions about the higher merits of the later novels—their greater emotional depth, artistic complexity, and psychological profundity—or our sense of the thematic developments and attitudinal shifts that mark those novels, as we note in critical shorthand, as belonging to the nineteenth rather than the eighteenth century.
A more thorough analysis is required. As the one I present in the ensuing pages argues, the differences between the novels of the major and early phases are both systematic, exhibiting a mutual coherence, and comprehensive, touching matters of narrative structure, characterization, language, and theme—touching, indeed, Austen’s fundamental beliefs about those issues central to her art, the nature of personal growth and of the mind.9 And my analysis indicates one more thing about these changes: that they are, to put it a bit too simply, Wordsworthian.10 The influences of Scott, Byron, and, of course, Coleridge (not always distinguishable from that of Wordsworth) can also be recognized, but as we make our way through this system of changes, we will find that attribute after attribute bears the unmistakable imprint of Wordsworthian ideas and concerns. And those that do not will be seen to have grown out of those that do, to represent a development, within a novelistic framework that necessarily introduces aesthetic considerations of its own, of those same ideas and concerns.
For in those seven years and more, much, indeed, had changed. English poetry had changed, with the appearance of the new poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge: a poetry of change, of the growth of the mind through the development of feeling; a poetry of memory and loss, interiority and solitude, ambivalence and openness—a poetry of process. And as the late novels make clear, Austen’s beliefs had also changed, about those very questions, the most important questions with which her art, and especially her late art, concerns itself. In their form, language, and themes, but more, in the very sense of exploration with which they proceed, the novels of Jane Austen’s major phase reflect her absorption of the new poetry.11
Of course, nothing of what follows should be taken as a disparagement of the early novels. Were they the only of Austen’s works that we had, her place in the front rank of English fiction would still be secure; as it is, Pride and Prejudice in particular remains central both to her popularity and to her critical reputation, and in many respects nothing in the major phase surpasses its achievement. What is in question here is rather the greater overall merits of the late novels, merits that, as I began this study by noting, critics have sensed from the very first and that can be connected, as I will argue, to Austen’s reception of the Romantic poets.
To begin with what has already been fairly well noted: Austen’s late novels display an entirely new receptivity to nature and attitude toward natural contemplation.12 In both Sense and Sensibility and Northanger Abbey, characters’ observation of nature serves only to exhibit and ridicule stereotyped modes of response. Henry and Eleanor Tilney survey the country around Bath in strict accordance with the principles of the picturesque, and Catherine, their all-too-apt pupil, proves “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” (99).
The more passionate Marianne Dashwood supplements picturesque conventions with effusions derived from Thomson, Cowper, and Scott, but she fares less well with her auditors, one of whom, Edward Ferrars, clearly represents Austen’s approved way of evaluating a rural scene at that point in her career. “[M]y idea of a fine country,” he says, is one that “unites beauty with utility … I do not like crooked, twisted, blasted trees. I admire them much more if they are tall, straight, and flourishing … I have more pleasure in a snug farm-house than a watch-tower—and a troop of tidy, happy villagers please me better than the finest banditti in the world.”13 Edward’s ideal, in fact, is more than a union of beauty and utility, it is beauty understood in terms of utility, of the health and prosperity of a country’s human inhabitants. As for Pride and Prejudice, it deliberately swerves away from an engagement with nature. Elizabeth and her uncle and aunt plan to visit the Lake District, for “[w]hat are men to rocks and mountains?”14 But because their trip is delayed they can venture no farther than Derbyshire, where their attention is indeed brought back, willy-nilly, to “men.”
The heroines of Mansfield Park and Persuasion, by contrast, display an attentiveness and spontaneous emotional responsiveness to nature that is in no way criticized or ironized. Though Anne, on the walk to Winthrop, “repeat[s] to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn,” her response has a relationship to poetry the very reverse of Marianne’s.15 The earlier heroine projects onto the landscape feelings derived from verse; Anne recollects lines of verse to express feelings the landscape spontaneously evokes. In her farewell to Uppercross, as has been noted, she does more.16 There, as in so many of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s best-known nature poems, observation and emotion, outer and inner worlds, interact dialectically.17 A mood of melancholy turns her attention to the dreary outer scene (that she looks out through misty panes reinforces the sense of a semipermeable membrane between self and world), which in turn prompts memories of her whole sojourn at the place—memories of pain as well as of reconciliation, but both modified under the influence of the scene, the ones softened, the others made melancholy. As in Wordsworth and Coleridge, feeling and observation are mutually reinforcing, mutually deepening. In the words of one critic, landscape in Persuasion becomes “a structure of feeling which can express, and also modify, the minds of those who view it.”18
Fanny Price’s interludes of natural contemplation, while not exhibiting the dialectical complexity of Anne’s, embody other important Wordsworthian-Coleridgian ideas. Gazing out at a brilliantly starlit night, “solemn and soothing, and lovely,” she is roused to feelings of tranquility and rapture and moved to profess the conviction that “there certainly would be less” “wickedness [and] sorrow in the world” “if the sublimity of Nature were more attended to, and people were carried more out of themselves by contemplating such a scene” (94–95). We might smile at this, especially as Fanny’s tone approximates the sentimental ardors of Marianne Dashwood, but neither here nor in connection with any of her other effusions (on memory, for example) does Austen give any hint of satiric intent. And we should remember that the morally healing power of immersion in nature is precisely Coleridge’s theme in “The Dungeon,” Wordsworth’s in “The Convict,” and Wordsworth’s again in the passage in “Tintern Abbey” that speaks of the influence of “beauteous forms”: “On that best portion of a good man’s life, / His little, nameless, unremembered, acts / Of kindness and of love” (23, 33–35).
Sometime later, sitting in the Mansfield Parsonage shrubbery, enjoying the “sweets of so protracted an autumn,” Fanny remarks on an example of the kind of human adaptation of nature that would have cheered Edward Ferrars—the fact that the spot had only three years before been “nothing but a rough hedgerow”—but her purpose is less to praise the utility or even the beauty of the transformation than to remark on the contrast between past and present: “and perhaps in another three years we may be forgetting—almost forgetting what it was before. How wonderful, how very wonderful the operations of time, and the changes of the human mind” (173–174). Alterations in nature, as Wordsworth explores most fully in “The Brothers,” become the yardstick for measuring alterations in the self.19 Indeed, as Austen has Fanny suggest—and this is an idea that lies at the heart of Wordsworth’s poetic encounter with the natural world—the life of the mind and of vegetation are not only parallel phenomena, they are, equally, natural ones, alike subject to “the operations of time”—persistence and decay, remembering and forgetting.
They are interlinked phenomena as well. Thus while Emma contains no scenes of natural contemplation,20 it embodies even more fully than the other late novels the more general principle of which the human interaction with nature—whether in Mansfield Park or Persuasion, Wordsworth or Coleridge, or Scott, for that matter—is ultimately only a particular instance: the shaping of the self by place.21 The second scene discussed above in connection with each of the other late novels—Anne’s leave-taking from Uppercross and Fanny’s reflections in the shrubbery—exhibits this same principle. Anne’s time at Uppercross has given new forms to her feelings and understandings, ones that—as that scene of mingled recollection and contemplation makes clear—are inseparably interwoven with the specific sensual textures of the place. Fanny’s rootedness at Mansfield is even more heavily emphasized, especially since she first comes there having been shaped very differently by a different place and her ultimate inseparability from Mansfield is revealed to her precisely by a return to that same place. As Edmund tells her apropos of Henry Crawford, whose courtship threatens to take her away to yet a third place, “before he can get your heart for his own use, he has to unfasten it from all the holds upon things animate and inanimate, which so many years growth have confirmed” (288).
The shrubbery scene makes the point, as points about Fanny are often made, by contrasting her with Mary Crawford. Responding to Fanny’s effusions, Mary declares that “‘If any body had told me a year ago that this place would be my home … I certainly should not have believed them!—I have now been here nearly five months!’” (175). Five whole months—hardly enough time for Fanny’s tears to have dried. Mary—like her brother, a creature of mobility and instability—feels no such attachments as Fanny’s; home, for her, is wherever she happens to be living at the moment. And yet, ironically, it is further evidence of the novel’s investment in the idea of place as the shaper of self that that very instability, along with everything else about the Crawfords, is a product of their upbringing in London.
And Emma? Emma’s rootedness to place is far less obvious than Fanny’s or Anne’s, because it receives no emphasis whatsoever. It does not have to: it is so fundamental that it helps constitute the very form of her novel itself. Alone among Austen’s works, the scene of Emma never shifts from the place in which it is set. Alone among her heroines, Emma never ventures away from that place, never even thinks of doing so. Highbury and its environs are as essential to her constitution as a character as Dublin is to Leopold Bloom’s; she is simply inconceivable without them, and everything she is she is because of them. Indeed, the story of the novel is, in one respect, the story of how Emma comes to recognize that very rootedness, her inseparability from and responsibility toward the community that includes Miss Bates, Robert Martin, and everyone else.
Elizabeth Bennet, by contrast, has no particular relationship to Meryton and its environs, owes nothing of herself to their influence, and is able to live very well without them. Much the same could be said of her novel; Pride and Prejudice could take place anywhere, or even nowhere—one of the reasons it has proven so adaptable to the stage. Northanger Abbey depends on certain social particularities of Bath and certain architectural ones of Northanger, but its characters have no essential relation to either locale, still less to Catherine’s home village.
Of the early novels, Sense and Sensibility is the one most concerned with place, as it is most concerned with nature, but as with respect to the latter theme, that circumstance in fact allows it to serve in drawing a sharper contrast between the two groups of novels. Willoughby’s moral failings, like the Crawfords’, are associated with London, but they are, precisely, only associated with it. They are revealed there, but the city has played no role in creating them. As for the novel’s depiction of the attachment to place, that attachment is purely a matter of sentiment and sentimentality. The Dashwood women are certainly sad to leave Norland, and Marianne apostrophizes it upon their departure in a storm of exclamation points, but it is essential neither to their constitution nor, as it turns out, to their happiness. Before long, both they and the novel have all but forgotten it.
As the foregoing discussion has already begun to make clear, the idea of place as the shaper of self is intimately connected, in Austen’s late novels as in the four poets, with the idea of home. “If any body had told me a year ago that this place would be my home …”; home, for Mary Crawford, is anywhere. For the mature Austen, as for the poets, it is one place only—the place that has made you who you are.22 Again, this is an idea essentially absent from the early novels. While each is intensely concerned with finding its heroine or heroines a suitable husband, in no case does that quest also involve finding them a suitable home, still less solacing them for the loss of a home they already have. Catherine Morland’s home all but doesn’t exist, while Elizabeth Bennet’s is, if anything, something to get as far away from as possible. The Dashwoods’ loss of Norland has just been discussed, and Barton Cottage, while a boon for them as a decent house, develops scarcely any resonance as a home. If anything, its proximity to Barton Park soon makes it almost as inhospitable to Elinor and Marianne as Longbourn is to Elizabeth.
The idea of home has similarly little relevance to the places in which the early heroines eventually settle. Henry’s parsonage is as briefly touched upon as Catherine’s childhood home. In settling Elinor and Marianne “almost within sight of each other” (323), Sense and Sensibility comes closest of the early novels to preserving for its heroines the home of their youth. Still, whatever Elinor’s love for Marianne, relations between the sisters have never been easy, and the novel’s final, disturbing note makes the mere absence of tension seem the highest blessing their relationship, and thus their common “home” (we never do get a glimpse of their actual houses), can hope for.23 The best candidate among the early novels for a house that is also a home may be thought to be Pemberley, the beauties and comforts of which are dwelt on at great length. But Pemberley functions in the novel as an estate, a socioeconomic unit whose condition bears witness to its master’s character. He has formed Pemberley, in other words; Pemberley has not formed him. At issue in its presentation is the way it has been managed, not the affective richness of the life that has grown up within it. For Elizabeth, it will be a place to be “mistress of,” not, per se, to dwell in (201).
What is new in the late novels—and may be new in the European novel altogether, though it is at least as old as Homer—is the idea of home as a psychic necessity, together with the correlative idea of the loss of home as an irreparable psychic wound. That home is vital to the emotional health of each of the late heroines—as it is for Wordsworth and so many of his characters (Poor Susan, Leonard in “The Brothers”), for Scott’s Lieutenant Brown in Guy Mannering, for Childe Harold—needs little additional emphasis. We have already seen how this is true for both Fanny and Emma, and for the former it is abundantly confirmed by her acute misery, first at leaving Portsmouth for Mansfield, then at leaving Mansfield to revisit Portsmouth. In Anne’s case the demonstration is almost wholly negative. As I will discuss more fully in my chapter on the novel, Persuasion is, to a great extent, a novel about homelessness and the effort to create a home away from home—for Anne, for the naval officers both at sea and upon their return to shore, even, in their own very limited way, for Anne’s father and elder sister.
While Anne finally finds that home-that-is-not-a-home, Fanny and Emma never even have to leave their homes.24 In Emma’s case, home is only slightly less important than husband, as her husband quickly finds out. But Fanny almost seems to cling to Edmund just because he can guarantee her continuation at Mansfield. (The interlude at Thornton Lacey is, tellingly, virtually elided.) Or rather, her loves for him and for Mansfield are inextricable, emotions of a single growth, and it is not at all clear which is the more important. At the novel’s close, we find her gazing not into her husband’s eyes, but out at the estate; it is really that “union” that the novel finally celebrates. So important has the idea of home become, in this late novel at least, that it overshadows the romance plot altogether.
There is good reason why the ideas of place as the shaper of self and of home as the place where the self has been shaped are absent from the early novels. In the early novels, the self is not “shaped” at all. Elizabeth, Marianne, and Catherine all change during the course of their novels, but as I will discuss more fully below, their alterations each involve an abrupt change of consciousness rather than a continuous modification of personality. More to the point at hand, who they each are at their novel’s outset is simply a given. Missing from the early novels, in other words, is another great Wordsworthian theme, that of childhood.25 That Elizabeth even had a childhood we can only guess, for there is no evidence she had any life whatsoever prior to the opening of her novel; she simply pops into existence on its first page.26 The opening chapter of Sense and Sensibility outlines the Dashwood family’s past, including the sisters’ childhoods, but those childhoods receive no elaboration and bear no relation to the characters sketched at the chapter’s end. That Elinor, at nineteen, possessed “strength of understanding,” “coolness of judgment,” and “an excellent heart” and that Marianne, at sixteen, “was sensible and clever; but eager in every thing” remain unexplained and—in line with what the younger Austen apparently believed, for it is true of the Bennet sisters, as well—seem to be matters of innate disposition (6). Of the early heroines’ childhoods, only Catherine’s is sketched. We watch her pass rapidly from ten to fourteen to fifteen to seventeen, but her development is devoid alike of particularity and emotional significance, instead mingling and playing with two generalized developmental paradigms: the physical and attitudinal changes of puberty and the reading program of a “female Quixote.”
At first glance, only Mansfield Park seems to differ from the early novels with respect to the significance of its heroine’s childhood. Fanny’s is dwelt on, not at the length that George Eliot, in her most Wordsworthian novel, would later devote to Maggie Tulliver’s, but enough to show how the patterns of behavior and feeling established then shape her actions and responses throughout the rest of the novel. Her transplantation to Mansfield at age ten, placing her in the company of four older cousins vastly her superiors in knowledge, confidence, and social standing, makes her into the timid and self-doubting creature who creeps through the next three volumes, concealing her desires, doubting her choices, and suppressing her resentments. But Fanny is not the only one in the novel decisively shaped by the treatment she receives as a child; both her cousins and the Crawfords clearly are as well, each of the six in ways that reflect differences not only in place and parents, but also in gender and birth order.27
Of the childhoods of Emma and Anne nothing directly is shown, but the summary information Austen gives on the first two or three pages of each of their novels is enough to show how their early treatments, too, have produced the young women who appear at the start of their narratives proper. In Anne’s case, this significant past includes not only her accession to Lady Russell’s pressure not to marry, but extends back well into her adolescence and indeed helped give rise to that fateful choice at age nineteen. If Anne’s life from nineteen to twenty-seven has been haunted by that choice, the previous six years had been haunted by her mother’s death. Austen’s presentation is uniquely understated here, but what she asks us to infer is clear: at a crucial point in her life, right around the onset of puberty, Anne, until then her mother’s favorite, became the family member most disregarded and disdained by her emotionally frigid father and equally withholding elder sister.28 That is, when she was at home at all, for the first consequence of that untimely death was Anne’s removal to a Bath boarding school for three gloomy years. Not only did her mother’s loss teach Anne an excessive reliance on Lady Russell’s advice, then, it also established her voicelessness and powerlessness within her family, her melancholic disposition, her distrust of her own judgment, and her tendency to put her own needs and desires last.
Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, could hardly be more different from the meek and marginalized Fanny and Anne, but her upbringing was no less unfortunate than theirs, precisely for giving her so unshaken a confidence in her own powers and prerogatives. Again, as with the other late heroines, the early loss of a mother is decisive. The death of Mrs. Woodhouse in Emma’s infancy left her younger daughter to the guidance of a weak father, a too-compliant governess, and a sister whom all acknowledge as her inferior.29 Where Fanny and Anne must learn to speak, to desire, and to will, Emma must learn to do less of all three. The early lives of Austen’s late heroines are not Wordsworth’s happy childhoods in nature, but unfortunate childhoods in society. All three young women struggle throughout their novels with the legacies of a misshapen upbringing.
Two further developments follow from this new emphasis on childhood, one interesting but minor, the other of the very first significance. Children become more prominent in the late novels, if not quite as much as in Wordsworth and Coleridge,30 and they acquire a specific new function relative to the heroine. The only children to appear in the first three novels, other than the Gardiners’ in Pride and Prejudice, who figure very briefly, are Lady Middleton’s brats in Sense and Sensibility, who seem to exist for the sole purpose of showing how revolting children can be. In each of the late novels, by contrast, the heroine has a significant care-giving relationship with a group of children within her own family—Emma’s nieces and nephews, Anne’s nephews, and Fanny’s younger sisters in Portsmouth. Not only are these children shown in a more positive (though far from idealized) light—their feelings taken seriously, as in Wordsworth—the fact that the heroine cares for them, and cares for them well, counts as important evidence to the goodness of her character.
Far more significantly—another way in which her childhood or adolescence shadows her young adulthood—each heroine’s life continues to be dominated by her relationship with a difficult, domineering father or surrogate father. (This is not a kind of relationship that much interested the poets, though Wordsworth’s “Anecdote for Fathers” is an interestingly subtle portrait of paternal tyranny, but it shows Austen working out the logic of ideas she drew from them along the lines of her own concerns and within the framework of her own literary form.) In the early novels, relations between the heroine and her parents may be easy or strained, but they are never particularly important. Their emotional texture is thin, even in the strongest case, that of Marianne and her mother, and parents play little or no role in their daughters’ courtship. Elizabeth may be embarrassed by her mother, but she is hardly influenced by her. These young women do more or less as they please, at least as far as their own families are concerned. Parental figures connected to the heroes do function more prominently in the early plots, but only as comedic blocking figures. Notwithstanding the subtle delineation of General Tilney’s tyranny over his children, these relationships, too, acquire little or no depth. Indeed, the early novels overwhelmingly concern relationships among the heroine’s coevals, be they siblings, friends, or potential lovers.
In the late novels, by contrast, parental and especially paternal relationships loom very large indeed. Fanny’s relationship with her uncle and Emma’s with her father are second only to those with their future husbands as their most important, emotionally fraught, and complexly negotiated. It is no surprise that at the end of their novels, they marry or settle in a way that very much pleases papa. For Anne, again, it is a matter of negatives. Deprived of her relationship, one way or another, with both parents, she clings to substitutes. Lady Russell is the obvious example, but the emotional pull Admiral Cross exerts within the narrative—on the reader as much as on Anne—points to his most significant symbolic function. He is the kind, loving, accepting father Anne has always lacked, and it is no accident that he replaces her real father as the caretaker of Kellynch, her lost home, as her protector (when she is taken into his carriage as well as when he escorts her through the streets of Bath) and—though this is far more pronounced in the first version of the novel’s ending—as the person who symbolically “gives her away” to her husband.
It has been noted that the late novels’ blocking figures all come from within the heroine’s family, but more to the point, they are all parental and, for the most part, paternal figures: Sir Thomas, Mr. Woodhouse, Sir Walter, Lady Russell.31 The early novels are, like Burney’s Evelina, stories of “a young lady’s entrance into the world.” In the late novels, the young lady is already in the world (Anne), never gets there (Fanny), or has no larger “world” to enter (Emma). In this phase of her career, Austen discovers an even more compelling narrative: the family romance itself.
This new attention to the shaping of the self in early life is only the beginning of the largest and most important difference between the two phases of Austen’s career. The late novels represent a complete transformation in Austen’s understanding of time: not simply in the depths of time they involve, but in their rendering of physical and social processes, of memory, of loss, indeed, of change itself. As time in all its ramifications may be said to be Wordsworth’s greatest and most persistent theme, so is it the great theme of Austen’s mature work.
We can begin by noting that the early novels not only occupy less time than do most of the late ones—this is trivial—but that in the former the very nature of time is different. Two passages from Pride and Prejudice may be taken as emblematic. The Netherfield ball has been announced, but five days remain before the big event, days that prove sadly inclement: the “younger Miss Bennets,” cut off from Meryton, are especially distressed, “and nothing less than a dance on Tuesday, could have made such a Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday, endurable to Kitty and Lydia” (75). Sometime later, with the Netherfield party gone, Charlotte married, and Jane in London, Elizabeth has little to do but write letters, and so, “[w]ith no greater events than these … and otherwise diversified by little beyond the walks to Meryton … did January and February pass away” (127). “Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday,” “January and February”: two stretches of time in which, narratively speaking, nothing happens: nothing changes, nothing develops, time itself has no effect on feelings, thoughts, or relationships.32
But there is nothing anomalous about these utterly blank intervals; rather, as I suggested, they are entirely characteristic of the younger Austen’s handling of time. Events in the early novels occupy time like beads on a string; they function as discrete entities the intervals between which have no significance and could thus be made arbitrarily greater or smaller without materially affecting the narrative. Nothing changes in Elizabeth’s story between Christmas and her arrival in Hunsford in March, and again nothing changes between her departure from Hunsford the following month and her visit to Pemberley in July. Had she and Darcy met in Hunsford in January and Pemberley in April, their story would have been the same. Austen clearly had aesthetic reasons for having both Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility occupy the space of twelve months, and there were circumstantial reasons, such as the winter season in London, for setting certain scenes at certain times of year, but nothing internal to the narratives, no matter of emotional development or personal change, would have prevented either novel from occupying two years or six months.
As for the deeper past in the early novels—for in each it eventually turns out that a crucial event took place during the prehistory of the narrative—it exists in a purely schematic relationship to the present, as if the time between it and the start of the narrative proper were as blank as the intervals we just looked at. At a certain point in each work, forward movement is suspended for the recounting of some lurid tale that, like the opening of a secret door in a Gothic mansion, throws a stark light on the dark recesses of the villain’s character and the hero’s hidden wounds: Darcy’s story of Wickham and Georgiana, Colonel Brandon’s of Willoughby and the two Elizas. (In Northanger Abbey, the one novel in which the secret story, that of Mrs. Tilney’s death, actually is told in a Gothic mansion, the satiric point is that neither is it lurid nor does it reveal dark secrets about General Tilney or his son.) But in each case, no organic relationship, no sense of continuity, connects past event and present moment. Each tale is framed and offered for inspection like a painting hanging on a wall. Indeed, in Pride and Prejudice, paintings hanging on walls become another way of gaining access to an isolated moment from the deep past—Darcy and Wickham’s appearance as they were eight years prior to the narrative present. The device suggests something I will deal with more extensively when considering the question of memory: that in the early novels, memory functions, as we might say today, like a camera, a recorder of isolated mental images that remain unchanged by intervening lapses of time. Again, time in the early novels progresses in discrete quanta, not along a continuum of constant change.
Any sense of the physical effects of time is similarly absent from the early phase. Wordsworthian examples include, most famously, Simon Lee’s swollen ankles and other signs of age and hard times, but also any number of others, including those that mark the old Cumberland beggar and Ruth. The early novels, to be sure, contain characters of all different ages, but other than Colonel Brandon with his rheumatism—an ailment that proves, precisely, no impediment to his marrying a woman a generation his junior—none is shown to have been physically affected by the passage of time. The counterexamples in Persuasion are too numerous to mention, for what with illness, injury, and simple aging, they include most of the characters in the book. In Mansfield Park, they include both Sir Thomas, who returns thin and worn from his two-years-plus in Antigua, and Fanny herself, who has blossomed during the same interval into an attractive young woman. In Emma, such effects are more subtle; we find no physical changes taking place during the span of the narrative, but we do find what we see nowhere else in Austen, the senescence of the elderly. Mr. Woodhouse is ostentatiously feeble. Mrs. Bates, as we are frequently reminded, is both hard of hearing and weak of vision. And Mrs. Churchill—continually ill, though no one will believe her, these past twenty-five years—bears witness to the ultimate effect of time on the human constitution and, doing what virtually no one else in the course of a Jane Austen novel does, dies.33
The late novels similarly display a new attention to social change. While such change is not absent from the early novels, it remains in the background. General Tilney’s modernization of Northanger, John Dashwood’s of Norland, the tension between Lady Catherine’s old-fashioned understanding of the distance between aristocracy and gentry and Elizabeth’s newer one—all these point to large-scale changes in English society that surround and contextualize the narratives. So too, at a smaller level, several of the novels’ figures are themselves in the process of changing social position, but in each case the change lies outside the main action of the novel in question. The Dashwood women suffer a sharp decline in fortune as their story starts, but only as it starts, as a precondition of the narrative proper. So too, Elinor and Marianne enjoy an elevation of wealth and status when they get married—that is, as their novel ends. Their social positions, however, like those of everyone else in the early novels, remain static during the main course of their narratives. In the early phase, change both large and small happens around the edges; it is not an intrinsic property of the stories themselves.
In the late novels, change becomes pervasive at both the national and personal scales. Among the poets, Wordsworth registers social change particularly in his more extended portraits of the dispossessed rural poor—“The Female Vagrant,” “Michael.” But its leading exponent, of course, is Scott. Most of the great historical novels would come after Austen’s death, but Scott anticipated their rendering of large-scale change in verse romances that likewise reflect on the passing away of old sociocultural orders and the rise of new ones, as the very title of the first of them, The Lay of the Last Minstrel, suggests—a point I will take up more fully in my chapter on Persuasion.
In Mansfield Park, the drama of small-scale change is embodied by the fortunes of Sir Thomas: imperiled enough before the start of the main action to necessitate his trip to Antigua to take personal charge of his estates; improving handsomely upon his return with the marriage of his eldest daughter to a wealthy young man and prospective marriages of his younger son and adopted niece to two more wealthy young folk; contracting suddenly at the end with the collapse of all three matches. As for larger-scale changes, the issue of the improvement of estates, peripheral to Sense and Sensibility and Northanger Abbey, becomes central. In Persuasion, social change involves both the rise and fall of personal fortunes—Wentworth’s and William Walter Elliot’s rising, Sir Walter’s falling—and, as I will discuss at length in the relevant chapter, the larger changes rippling through English society as it makes the transition from war to peace and, concurrently, from the leadership of the aristocracy to that of the professional middle-class.
In the virtually self-enclosed world of Emma, large- and small-scale social change are hard to distinguish; what counts in the other novels as small feels momentous here. Austen’s presentational techniques are at their subtlest in tracing these movements; by a myriad of small strokes, she charts the rise of Highbury’s second-rank families to greater prominence: the Coles, beginning to give dinner parties; the Perrys, thinking of setting up a carriage; and of course, the Eltons, intruding everywhere and talking up their wealthy connections at every opportunity.34 Add to them Mr. Weston, recent purchaser of an estate; Mrs. Weston, just risen from governess to mistress of that estate; Harriet Smith, learning new ideas about what she can aspire to; Robert Martin, a “gentleman farmer” “on his way,” in Lionel Trilling’s phrase, “to being a gentleman pure and simple”;35 and Miss Bates, sinking ever deeper into genteel poverty; and there scarcely seems a single person standing still in this supposedly timeless idyll. In Emma, then, as in all the late novels, change—continuous change—becomes the very groundwork of the narrative and of its characters’ existences.36
Of all that gives these novels their increased complexity and density as compared to Austen’s earlier works, this fact of continuous change is surely one of the most important. To use a mathematical analogy, a kind of narrative arithmetic sufficed for the sort of analysis that Austen undertook during the first part of her career, that of fixed characters within a fixed setting. For the novels of her maturity, in which both self and world exhibit continuous alteration, she had to devise a narrative calculus.
The corollary of the late novels’ insistence on the inescapable fact of physical and social change is the prominence they give to characters who resist change both within and without, figures willfully stuck in time. (This is not a type prominent among the poets, though Byron’s Giaour is an example.) Mr. Woodhouse—“a valetudinarian all his life”; “a much older man in ways than in years” (8)—seems never to have been young. Sir Walter Elliot, a freeze-dried version of what he was thirty years before, seems never to grow older. It is no accident that they both so vehemently reject the alterations going on around them; just as they stand still, so do they want their world to stand still. Sir Walter does his best to ignore the changes sweeping through English society in these “unfeudal” times, changes the most deplorable effect of which, in his view, is precisely the opportunity they give to persons of low birth to elevate their social status (152). Mr. Woodhouse resists all change whatsoever, but what he especially seeks to wish away are the changes consequent upon marriage. Having apparently never felt the longings of youth himself—for newness as little as for sex—he literally cannot seem to understand how anyone else could feel them.
The case of Sir Thomas, a more complex figure than these other two patresfamilias, is less obvious. Time has marked his body, his household, and his estates, and he does not seek to remain oblivious to these alterations. But his orientation is fundamentally conservative, and his way of dealing with these changes is to seek to reverse them: to restore his estates, recover his health, and, emblematically, remove every vestige of the theatricals that have so disrupted his household.37 But Sir Thomas’s desire to continue living in the past shows itself most importantly in his high-handed, authoritarian way of conducting himself as a father.38 Written and set during the Regency, a time when the British national household was headed by a disreputable prince filling the place of a father who had lost his mind, Mansfield Park documents an evolution in family life that has weakened paternal authority and strengthened the willfulness of children in resisting it.
Admiral Crawford, Mr. Price: fathers here are not what they used to be, and even if they don’t know it, their children do. Sir Thomas solemnly admonishes his eldest son for his extravagant ways, and Tom laughs in his sleeve. He cautions his eldest daughter not to enter into marriage with a man she cannot respect, and Maria practically cracks her gum in his face. Even Fanny, who buys into her uncle’s retrograde notion of the obedience due one who stands in place of a father, resists his commandment to marry Henry in favor of her own hidden desires. And so, because his authority will not bend, it finally shatters, his daughters breaking into open revolt. Resisting change, all three of these proud men cut themselves off from the people around them. To place oneself beyond the realm of change, in the late novels, is to place oneself beyond the realm of human connection.
Three proud men, three stern fathers. Given what we have seen about the hold these figures have over their daughters’ imaginations, it is no wonder that each of the late novels gives us a young woman with something of this same resistance to change. Each case is different. Persuasion’s is the least interesting, since the daughter in question is not the heroine, but her elder sister. Elizabeth Elliot’s freeze-dried quality exactly resembles her father’s. Emma is not nearly as bad as her own father, but as we have begun to see, much of what is wrong with the way she conducts herself—her snobbery, her obstruction of Harriet’s marriage to Robert Martin, her refusal to take her proper place within her community—stems from her resistance to the very social changes outlined above. And while she herself does change gradually throughout the novel, as I will discuss below, she does not see that she does, and indeed thinks that no alteration will ever be necessary on her part: “I am not only, not going to be married, at present, but have very little intention of ever marrying at all … I cannot really change for the better” (73). While the literal meaning of that last phrase refers only to a change of marital circumstances, its larger, unconscious implications point to the attitude embodied in Emma’s every infuriating display of imperturbable self-possession—her belief that she has nothing to learn and no more growing up to do. Like Elizabeth Elliot, though in a very different respect, Emma is stuck at a certain stage of emotional development.
But what of Fanny? In her social values, as I have said, she emulates her uncle’s conservatism, and in her visceral repugnance to any change in her personal circumstances, she approaches Mr. Woodhouse. If anyone would seem to constitute a counterargument to the idea that the late novels insist on the necessity of change, it is she. Doesn’t she resist it in just the way Sir Thomas, Mr. Woodhouse, Emma, Sir Walter, and Elizabeth Elliot do? No, she does not. The resistance to change we find in those five figures is, as we have seen, a willful rejection of it: a refusal to acknowledge or yield to it. But Fanny’s hatred of nearly every change that comes her way—her removal to Mansfield or, most poignantly, her recognition in Portsmouth that her parents no longer love her—is matched only by her resilience in accommodating herself to it.
The mature Austen does not insist that her characters like the changes happening to and around them, she only insists that they adjust to them. She never suggests that change is necessarily desirable, only that it is necessary. Each of the late novels, in fact, spends a great deal of energy exhibiting, examining, and evaluating the changes it documents. In each case, Austen chooses the middle way between the most radical agents of social change and its most conservative refusers: between Sir Thomas and the Crawfords, Mr. Woodhouse and Mrs. Elton, Sir Walter and William Walter Elliot. And in each case, that middle way is embodied, finally if not initially, by the hero and heroine.
The idea of change leads in turn to perhaps the most profound and important Wordsworthian idea of all, one that is also of the first significance for Byron and Scott: loss. As criticism has shown on a massive scale, the fact of loss and the attempt to come to terms with it is everywhere in Wordsworth, be it the loss of youth and youthful powers or the loss of beloved individuals. The lamentation for the loss of childhood places, friendships, and loves is the principal subject of Byron’s early lyrics, while the Turkish Tales are, one and all, stories of bereavement. Scott’s romances—as the conspicuous framing devices of the first and best of them, The Lay of the Last Minstrel and Marmion, make clear—mourn the loss of the very cultural and narrative traditions they memorialize.
But absent a true consciousness of change, Austen’s early novels are likewise innocent of loss. In each, the heroine must give up someone she once cared deeply about, but in every case, as she is made at great length to learn, the person in question turns out not to have been worth having in the first place. Even the pain of error is made perfectly good, and so happiness finally comes at no real cost whatsoever—surely one important reason the early novels, for all their splendors, feel so much less profound than do the later ones. For the later ones are saturated with loss. In fact, in two cases, the question of loss will be my main focus in the later chapters of this study. Fanny must give up nearly everything she loves, starting with her home in Portsmouth, and do without nearly everything she wants, being forced, in each case, to find substitute objects of affection or desire. Anne, like almost everyone else in Persuasion, is “widowed” of the person she most loves, and even if she retrieves him at novel’s end, the lost time remains lost, so many years of happiness replaced by so many of loneliness and self-reproach. And while the very structure of Emma works to conceal its heroine’s losses from us—precisely because she cannot see them herself—we should not doubt that they are heavy and continuous. Until her final release, Emma’s imprisoning egotism deprives her of nothing less than a full emotional life, true intimacy with those around her. That loss is embodied in Jane Fairfax, and by refusing to allow Emma a belated friendship with that young woman as the reward of her reformation, Austen tells us that things once lost cannot be recovered. In the late novels, time is real: too late is too late.
In discussing Austen’s understanding of time in the later novels, my focus thus far has been on externals: physical appearance, social position, the loss of beloved objects. But the most important, pervasive, and subtle manifestations of this great new theme lie in the inner realm: in matters of feeling, reflection, recollection, relatedness, and personal transformation. It is also in these matters that we will find the grounds on which the new complexity and density of the late novels most significantly develop. I will turn to this large set of questions in a moment. First, though, I would like to touch on several other, strikingly Wordsworthian characteristics of the mature novels, ones that seem at first remote from these issues but will soon lead us back to them.
Few characteristics of Wordsworth’s poetry in Lyrical Ballads and Poems in Two Volumes are more immediately striking than the attention it pays to the poor, the marginal, and the dispossessed. Many examples may be cited, including “Simon Lee,” “The Old Cumberland Beggar,” “Michael,” “Resolution and Independence,” and so forth. While such figures are entirely absent from Austen’s earlier novels, they appear in all of the later ones, often with a great deal of emphasis. Fanny’s family in Portsmouth may not be quite poor, but it is far down the economic scale from anyone in the early works. Miss Bates is poor, as is Mrs. Smith, and far poorer are the cottagers visited by Emma and Harriet.39 Servants and dependents are newly visible, as well—nurserymaids, valets, laborers, tenant farmers, bailiffs—as are shopkeepers and the members of the less lucrative professions. In the late works, Austen opens her imagination to a whole world of economic realities that lies below the lives of the country gentry.40
As several of these examples suggest, this expansion of focus involves, in particular, a new attention to what Emma thinks of as “the difference of woman’s destiny” (316). So too, most of Wordsworth’s pictures of the poor and dispossessed are pictures of women, including “The Female Vagrant,” “Goody Blake and Harry Gill,” “The Thorn,” “Her Eyes are Wild,” “Alice Fell,” and many others. Fanny, Jane Fairfax, Harriet, Miss Bates, Mrs. Smith, even Clara Brereton, Sanditon’s presumptive heroine (“[s]o low in every worldly view, as … to have been preparing for a situation little better than a nursery maid”)41—all women in circumstances and with prospects far below even those of the Dashwood sisters, with their thousand-a-piece. It is to the pressures of such lives, not to the marriage plots of the relatively well set-up, that the late fiction gives the bulk of its attention.
These women share another, related characteristic: marginality within their family or community. Elizabeth Bennet, Jane, Elinor, Marianne, Catherine and her friends—all young and lovely, all cynosures of their circle, all avidly courted. But the late fiction gives most of its attention to young women whom no one regards: Fanny and Anne, of course, and—because Emma is told through the eyes of its heroine, who is herself fascinated by two more such women—Harriet and Jane. Yet because no one regards them, they (with the exception of Harriet) regard everything. As Fanny says, “I was quiet, but I was not blind” (300). Aside from Elinor’s always-keen interest in Marianne, silent observation plays no significant role in the early heroines’ lives. Scarcely more does silent contemplation, for the younger Austen tends to stage deliberative episodes as dialogues—Elizabeth with Jane or Charlotte, Elinor with Marianne, Catherine with Henry. The lives of these heroines are almost entirely absorbed by social activity; scarcely ever do we see them alone, their moment of transformation being in each case the one important exception. But the late heroines, including Emma, are frequently alone, and when alone are invariably immersed in introspection. Austen has discovered, in other words, the great Wordsworthian theme of solitude, essential to the flowering of a dynamic and ever-evolving inner life, a life of recollection and reflection. It is to that life that we now return.
The element of the inner life most obviously involved with time is that of memory. Memory plays only one role in the early novels, and though it is a crucial one, arising in connection with each novel’s central scene, that of its heroine’s transformation, it also exhibits the narrowness of Austen’s conception of memory at this time in her career.42 Pride and Prejudice provides the clearest instance, for its heroine’s transformation, her self-recognition, is the most stunningly swift. Darcy’s letter forces Elizabeth to reconsider all her judgments about him and Wickham, a reconsideration that in turn forces her to remember her impressions of the latter. The result proves distressing: “She tried to recollect some instance of goodness … But no such recollection befriended her …” (169). She reads on, and her memory becomes more particularized: “She perfectly remembered every thing that had passed in conversation between Wickham and herself, in their first evening at Mr. Phillips’s … She was now struck with the impropriety of such communications to a stranger” (170, emphasis in the original). Her old judgments weaken, and only a paragraph later comes the catastrophe, the two dozen words on which the whole novel pivots: “She grew absolutely ashamed of herself.—Of neither Darcy nor Wickham could she think, without feeling that she had been blind, partial, prejudiced, absurd” (171). There are two things to note here. First, as I suggested above, the contents of memory undergo no change or decay from the moment of the event to the moment of recollection. Five months later, and Elizabeth still “perfectly remembered everything that had passed in conversation.” It must be so, else the second and more important circumstance could not be true: the function of memory here—the only function it performs in the novel—is that of moral self-correction. The heroine remembers what she did, thinks about it, is heartily ashamed of it, and resolves to do better.
This is one of those instances in which an idea implicit in Austen, or at least in the early Austen, is identical to one explicit in Samuel Johnson: “Memory is the purveyor of reason, the power which places those images before the mind upon which the judgment is to be exercised, and which treasures up the discriminations that are once passed, as the rules of future action, or grounds of subsequent conclusions.”43 And so it is in Northanger Abbey, when Henry’s rebuke opens Catherine’s eyes to the “extravagance of her late fancies” (173). And so it is in Sense and Sensibility, for Marianne undergoes her transformation, not because Willoughby jilts her, not because her grief over him makes her ill, but because her illness “has given me leisure and calmness for serious recollection”: “I considered the past; I saw in my own behaviour … I saw that my own feelings.… Whenever I looked towards the past …,” and so forth (293–294). Recollection, judgment, mortification, a resolution to judge and act better, and Marianne is cured in more than just the medical sense.
But because memory is confined to this one special role, its workings understood in so schematic a way, its potential impact on the sense of time in the early novels is negated. Time here is essentially Bergsonian temps—linear, unidirectional clock-time—with none of the thickening and deepening provided by those back-and-forth movements of consciousness that cause time present and times past to coexist in a complex temporal space. Compared with this mechanical understanding of memory’s operations and limited view of its functions, the multifarious roles it plays in the late novels represent an immeasurable advance. From being Johnsonian, Austen’s understanding of memory becomes Wordsworthian.44
So essential are the workings of memory to Mansfield Park and Persuasion, and so important will their exploration be to my chapters on these novels, that to give a full account of them here is neither desirable nor necessary. I will only touch on the most important points. We already began to see the ways in which memory operates for Fanny Price when we examined her response to nature in the shrubbery scene.45 As opposed to what we find in the early novels, but very much like we see in Wordsworth and Coleridge’s first-person lyrics, memory arises for her spontaneously. It also gives her a sense of rootedness in time, a way of understanding not only the past, but also the present. As in the greatest poems of memory Wordsworth published during Austen’s lifetime—“Tintern Abbey,” “The Brothers,” “The Two April Mornings”—the present acquires significance because of the way it both echoes and alters the past. Memory thus makes palpable the distance between present and past, helping give time the weight it so lacks in the early works. Late in the novel, we find Fanny sharing the Portsmouth parlor with her father: “And the remembrance of her first evening in that room, of her father and his newspaper came across her. No candle was now wanted. The sun was yet an hour and half above the horizon. She felt that she had, indeed, been three months there” (362, emphasis in the original).
This passage, like the shrubbery scene, also shows memory connecting the temporal rhythms of Fanny’s life to those of the life of nature, the passage of seasons and years (“five summers, with the length / Of five long winters! and again I hear /These waters …”). Another scene of recollection in Portsmouth suggests a deeper way in which the past gives meaning to the present through the action of memory. In a remarkable testament to the power of time to both alter and fix the affections, Fanny, greeting Mrs. Price for the first time in eight years, embraces a mother whose features she finds she “loved the more, because they brought her aunt Bertram’s before her” (313). It is not that she so loves her aunt’s features, as such; it is the electric charge of recognition, transmitted between memory’s two poles of “then” and “now,” that galvanizes her heart. The present is loved because it evokes the past, and the past is loved because it lives again in the present. Without the other, each is barren.46
But the supreme scene of recollection in Mansfield Park, as I mentioned in the previous chapter and will discuss at length in the next, is the first description of the East room, where Fanny, under the presiding emblem of Tintern Abbey, casts her glance about her and “could scarcely see an object in that room which had not an interesting remembrance connected with it.—Everything was a friend, or bore her thoughts to a friend.” But what these beloved mementos speak of, in the first instance, are “the pains of tyranny, of ridicule, and neglect.” Yet “almost every recurrence of either had led to something consolatory … and the whole was now so blended together, so harmonized by distance, that every former affliction had its charm” (126). Nothing could be more like Wordsworth, and especially the Wordsworth of “Tintern Abbey”: memory’s power, not to repeat the past, but to transform it, and in particular, to redeem experiences of suffering and loss.
In essence, the kind of temporal and therefore emotional depth Fanny experiences at particular moments undergirds the whole of Persuasion, constituting the affective ground bass of this, Austen’s lushest orchestration of feeling. The whole narrative is a “now” shadowed by a “then,” so that the novel itself may be said to remember: to possess a memory that grounds its sense of self, gives meaning to the present and weight to time, and finally redeems the past by bringing it again to life, immensely transformed. Of course, most of the novel’s remembering is focused through the consciousness of its heroine, for whom, as for James in Wordsworth’s “Brothers,” memory becomes an almost physiological process.47 Where Fanny courts memory, often her only friend, Anne has long suppressed hers, and so, when Wentworth’s reappearance calls it forth, it seems to push its way to the surface from the very depths of her body. The mere mention of his name evokes blushes and sighs, effusions of blood and breath, that send her hastening out for a walk in an attempt to regain control of herself. With his actual approach, “a thousand feelings rushed on Anne,”48 and with his appearance, her very senses rebel, rendering her scarcely able to hear or see (we can practically feel the blood pounding in her ears) and leaving her scarcely able to eat, her mind and body—if the distinction can still be maintained at this point—“resuming the agitation” that almost eight years “had banished into distance and indistinctness” (84–85).
We can scarcely speak of the past as being recollected here, because it seems never to have gone away. Both Anne’s habit of suppressing her memories of Wentworth and the force with which those memories reassert themselves once that suppression is overborne arise, of course, from the grief she feels at having lost him. In this novel, whose central theme is loss and grief, memory is always closely allied to both. For what is grief but memory made visceral, memories felt in the body, and felt the more sharply for being only memories, for belonging to that which can never come back in another form?
Memory is clearly less important in Emma than in the other late novels, primarily because Emma is so different a figure from the melancholy, introspective Fanny and Anne. Where their thoughts tend to turn back to the past, those of Emma, a creature of energy and will, are busy striding forth into the future. But Emma is not unmarked by its author’s new understanding of memory’s place within a full human personality. Indeed, the narrative proper, which begins on Emma’s governess’s wedding day, begins in a manner that strikingly, if only lightly, anticipates Persuasion: “It was Miss Taylor’s loss,” we read, “which first brought grief” (7). Alone that same evening, Emma has “only to sit and think of what she had lost”—in other words, to remember. “She recalled [Miss Taylor’s] past kindness—the kindness, the affection of sixteen years … but the intercourse of the last seven years … was yet a dearer, tenderer recollection” (8). Of the mother who had died in her infancy, we have already been told that Emma had no more “than an indistinct remembrance of her caresses” (7). As it is for Fanny and Anne, memory here is affective, even physical (those caresses seem more felt than anything else); helps ground the self by creating a sense of its history, including the different eras of that history (“sixteen years,” “seven years”); and helps form, strengthen, and reform the affections. Already Emma dwells more deeply in time than do the early heroines, and in so doing, possesses herself more fully.
In discussing the quality of time in the early novels, I noted that the intervals between events possess no narrative significance, that time itself is a neutral medium. To say this is also to imply something about the nature of characters and relationships in the early works, of the feelings people have about each other and the ways they negotiate them—how these occupy and are affected by time.
In the early phase, feelings remain precisely as they are, with neither change nor growth nor decay, until some specific event, some confrontation or recognition, shocks them into a new, equally static condition. Darcy snubs Elizabeth, and from then on, she hates him; she reads his letter, and from then on she esteems him and regrets her behavior toward him; she meets him at Pemberley—perceiving what the estate says about its owner and what his behavior says about his feelings for her—and from then on, she loves him. The same analysis may be made of any of the less central feelings in the early novels (Jane, for example, has never stopped carrying a torch for Bingley, as we eventually learn, nor he for her), as well as of the major ones in ‘Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility: Catherine’s for Isabella Thorpe and Henry Tilney, Marianne’s for Willoughby—this last moving through sharply demarcated stages of passionate love endlessly dwelling on itself, passionate grief doing likewise, and finally a letting go of love and grief that happens, as we saw above, in the space of just a few days. True, Marianne’s heart does “in time” become “as much devoted to her husband, as it had once been to Willoughby” (322), but this gradual transformation happens after the end of the narrative proper. The younger Austen may recognize that feelings can sometimes change with time and time alone, but she does not know how to dramatize that perception and for the most part disregards it. A graph of virtually any feeling in the early novels would resemble a set of stairs: a series of horizontal lines—steady states—linked by vertical jumps up or down—sudden shifts, as the personality that has hardened into one configuration is shattered by some dramatic event and instantaneously reassembles itself into a new one.
There are several implications and corollaries of this principle of sudden emotional transformation. Because changes in emotional state depend so much on confrontation and shock, melodramatic elements are much more prominent: stock events like Lydia’s elopement, Catherine’s ejection from Northanger, or those lurid tales Darcy tells of Wickham or Brandon of Willoughby; stock characters like the false, fortune-hunting female (Caroline Bingley, Lucy Steele, Isabella Thorpe) and the domineering dowager on the man’s side (Lady Catherine, Mrs. Ferrars, Willoughby’s Aunt Smith; General Tilney is a male version). We may also note, in this connection, how much more schematic are the early plots than the later ones, and how much greater is the family resemblance among them than among the later group. The younger Austen, having written out a certain narrative paradigm three times, had brought it to perfection; the mature writer clearly had no desire to repeat it, or in fact to repeat anything. Indeed, in trotting out Mrs. Clay, whose ambitions trouble Anne for about ten seconds, and William Walter Elliot, whose charms stand not the slightest chance of winning her over and whose perfidy she cannot finally be bothered to expose, Persuasion thumbs its nose at that very paradigm, with its lurid tales and its fortune hunters and its Mr. Wrongs.
With this relative simplicity of both emotional structure and narrative structure comes a relative simplicity of characterization. Complexity of character, to a great extent, is complexity of emotion. In many cases, in fact, figures in the early novels are not so much characters as caricatures, albeit brilliant ones. The late novels have their caricatures, too, but far fewer of them, and in far less prominent positions. We can see this deepening of characterization most clearly through a comparison of analogous figures. Collins and Miss Bates are both fools, but the latter is also a full human being, with complex feelings capable of being wounded, significant relationships, and a social role within her community, and that she is no mere figure of fun becomes, indeed, an extremely important idea at a certain point in the novel. John Thorpe and Yates are both “puppies,” but while the first is a one-line joke, the latter is plausible as a real, albeit limited, young man. As a villain, John Dashwood’s motives are as simple as his behavior is transparent; William Walter Elliot, to say nothing of Mrs. Norris, plays a more complex game, and for more complex reasons.
Just as the late novels are sparing of caricatures, so too do they abound in characters who are morally ambiguous. The early novels have none such; we know exactly what we are to think of everyone in them. But as the critical literature demonstrates, equivocal figures in the later works include, in Persuasion, Lady Russell, Mrs. Smith, and Captain Benwick; in Mansfield Park, the five most important figures at the very least—Fanny, Edmund, Mary, Henry, and Sir Thomas; and in Emma, pretty much everyone except Knightley and Mrs. Elton, the novel’s moral poles.
Just as emotions and motives are so much less complex in the early novels, so too are relationships. That this is so, that relationships between characters are similarly unambiguous and shift in a similarly step-wise fashion, is already largely implicit in what I have said, but it bears on narrative form in ways well worth exploring. The younger Austen—it is one of her glories—is extremely fond of what might be called the narrative set-piece. So many of her most memorable scenes belong to this type: Catherine and Henry’s teasing conversation during their first dance, Elinor and Lucy’s set-to in the Middletons’ parlor, Elizabeth and Darcy’s sparring matches while Jane is ill as well as during the ball at Netherfield. We can recognize a general likeness between these scenes, as well as the great importance of each to their respective novels, but how can we characterize this likeness more precisely?
Most obviously, these episodes are all markedly performative. Austen constructs them like little plays, carefully setting the scene and disposing the characters in their places. (This is especially notable in Elinor and Lucy’s encounter, where the break between chapters 23 and 24 functions as a kind of drumroll.) The scene set, she then withdraws, rendering the rest of the encounter almost entirely in dialogue. And the characters know they are performing—not for us, but for each other. The tension is high, because the stakes are high, too. Little plays, these set-pieces are also verbal fencing matches, impromptu debates—games, as Catherine and Henry’s encounter makes clearest, albeit with unspoken rules. One more analogy: in their plotted, patterned, performed quality, their precise architectonics and balancing of opposed units, the set-pieces of the early phase are the scenic equivalents of the Johnsonian sentence, the syntactic form most favored by the younger Austen. As such, they may be said to spread out not so much in time as in space; their quality is pictorial rather than narrative. They do not advance their respective plots so much as reveal existing attitudes and the tensions between them. Indeed, as a game fences itself off from “real life,” drawing a temporal boundary around itself, so do these scenes seem to arrest the narratives to which they belong, sticking out from their surface like rocks in a stream.
This last observation returns us to the relevance of the set-piece to the temporal quality of relationships in the early novels. Yes, Elizabeth and Darcy’s relationship changes, in a very important sense, as a result of the sudden changes in their feelings about each other. But in another, equally important sense, their relationship never changes. The reason these set-pieces are so important, and much of the reason they are so memorable, is that each defines, once and for all, a central relationship. That is why each occurs early in its respective novel: the set-piece was the younger Austen’s way of “pictorially” representing a certain crucial dynamic that would remain unchanged and would carry through the rest of the novel. This principle is less fully true in the case of Elinor and Lucy—their relationship is less central—but in the other cases the picture we get in those scenes—light-hearted, satiric Henry and wide-eyed Catherine; wickedly ironic Elizabeth and imperturbably forensic Darcy, at glittering daggers drawn—is the one we retain even after the narrative is over. However much these relationships may change during the course of their novels, what matters more is what they intrinsically, eternally are.
Set-pieces, stasis, sudden shocks and shifts—feelings and relationships in the late novels could hardly be more different. If events in the early works occupy time the way beads occupy a string, events in the later ones occupy time the way salt occupies water, so that it scarcely makes sense even to distinguish between “events” and “time.”49 Everywhere we find psychological states in continual flux, as characters respond to changing circumstances, not with stubborn rigidity or helpless collapse, but by means of gradual adjustments of feeling. This principle is everywhere in Mansfield Park, from Fanny’s slow, painful, carefully documented adjustment to her initial removal to the way she copes with the arrival of Mary, with her own emergence as an attractive and desired young woman, with the several shocks of her return to Portsmouth, and with just about every other change that comes her way. This ability effortfully to bring her feelings to a new state is precisely what underlies her resilience in accommodating herself to change. Nor are all these adjustments willed; some take her by surprise, especially those having to do with the Crawfords. In Portsmouth, she finds herself (“Here was another strange revolution of mind!”) glad to receive a letter from Mary (326); she even finds herself beginning to feel affection for Henry—just as he, to his great surprise, had once found that a similarly undiscerned shift in feeling had brought him to the condition of loving her. The prospect of another letter, from Edmund, surprises Fanny by evoking terror rather than delight, occasioning what we might regard as the novel’s thematic statement about change both inner and outer: “She began to feel that she had not yet gone through all the changes of opinion and sentiment, which the progress of time and variation of circumstances occasion in this world of changes” (309).
Emma and Persuasion take place in this same world. Persuasion, as we said, is about grief, a psychological process that by its very nature involves gradual adjustment, as we see most clearly, if perhaps too quickly, in the case of Captain Benwick. But such adjustments also lie at the very center of the narrative, in the slow dance Anne and Wentworth do toward each other. The process is not symmetric: because Anne has never stopped loving him, her feelings are really about his, and we learn of his through her constant attempts to divine them: “Her power with him was gone forever” (86), she first sees; then a little while later, “She understood him. He could not forgive her,—but he could not be unfeeling” (113); then later still, she finds him “turning to her and speaking with a glow, and yet a gentleness, which seemed almost restoring the past” (134), and so the gradual transformation and gradual discovery go until she reads the note in which he passionately professes his love.
Emma, by unsurprising contrast, seeks frequently to measure the state not of a young man’s feelings for her, but of hers for him, Frank Churchill. After his first departure from Highbury: “Emma continued to entertain no doubt of her being in love. Her ideas only varied as to the how much. At first, she thought it was a good deal; and afterwards, but little” (217). Later, hearing the news of his imminent return, she is set to “weighing her own feelings, and trying to understand the degree of her agitation, which she rather thought was considerable” (250), but a chapter later “[a] very little quiet reflection was enough to satisfy [her] as to the nature of her agitation on hearing this news of Frank Churchill. She was soon convinced that it was not for herself she was feeling at all apprehensive or embarrassed; it was for him” (261). Here not only do we see feelings changing day by day and even hour by hour, we see them changing under their own self-scrutiny, a minuteness of analysis on Austen’s part, and a frequency of it on her heroines’, absolutely foreign to the early novels.
Fanny and Anne experience no sudden recognition-cum-transformation—not, like Elinor, because they have nothing to reform, but because, like Wordsworth and Coleridge in their first-person lyrics, they practice a continual reappraisal of feeling and experience and are thus continually changing. Emma is not quite so heroic as these two creepmice, but her transformation is every bit as profound. Critics have long noted that, unlike those of the early heroines, hers involves not one but a series of recognitions, the moment when the truth of her love for Knightley darts through her constituting only the final one.50 But to reduce Emma’s transformation to her several moments of repentance and recognition is to flatten what is in fact a comprehensive maturation of personality by fitting it to the pattern of the mere changes of consciousness experienced by the heroines of the early works. When we read, for example, in the novel’s penultimate chapter, that Emma now feels that “[i]t would be a great pleasure to know Robert Martin” (389), we recognize that her transformation has involved not just an illumination of the mind, but an opening of the heart, a supplanting of snobbery by generosity and humility, a fundamental change of character that has been gradually, continually coming over her throughout the entire novel.
Because continuously evolving inner lives make for continuously evolving relationships, the major phase replaces the set-piece with what might be called the “serial scene.” If Darcy were the one who wanted to enter the ministry and Elizabeth the one who disapproved, the two would have one cracking go at it, one fireworks display, in which their antagonistic positions were fully set out, and that would be the end of it (until Elizabeth broke down, perhaps, and confessed how wrong she had been). Instead, Edmund and Mary worry the question over and over, at different lengths, in different contexts, from different angles, with different degrees of levity or vexation, and with differently adjusted feelings and hopes: in the Sotherton chapel (75), during the walk in the wilderness (77ff.), at Mansfield manor (91ff.), at the Parsonage (200ff.), at the ball (230), and so forth. Comparable serial scenes in Emma include Emma and Knightley’s long wrangle about the propriety of her behavior to those around her as well as Frank’s many-chaptered, subtly shifting game of double meanings and pretend-flirtation with her and Jane. Persuasion, as we just noted, is at its core a serial scene writ large, that of Anne and Wentworth’s many tentative encounters with each other. Like feelings, relationships in the late novels are in a constant state of reexamination and recalibration, with characters constantly repositioning themselves relative to one another.
That is why both feelings and relationships are often so hard to define. In the early novels, we always know where people stand with each other. But what is Emma’s relationship with Frank? And what is it with Knightley: brother and sister? friends? lovers? Wordsworth raises the same question about his relationship with his former schoolteacher in the Matthew poems. In fact, the issue of such “ambiguous relationships” will be the subject of my chapter on the novel. Again, how many shades of uncertainty and mutual misunderstanding must we account for in characterizing Fanny’s relationship with Edmund at any given moment, and how many different ones at the next? About Anne and Wentworth’s we needn’t undertake such an investigation—as we’ve seen, Anne does it for us.
It is no wonder that just as relationships in the late novels are so often ambiguous, feelings are so often, what they never are in the early works, ambivalent. And, as in the Romantic poets—for whom ambivalent feelings are their favorite feelings of all—they are incomparably stronger for being so.51 That this is the case in Persuasion has been noted more than once, specifically in connection with Byron as well as Keats and Shelley.52 Again and again, Anne’s encounters with Wentworth plunge her into agonizingly mixed states of mind, “compounded of pleasure and pain” (113) or of “agitation, pain, pleasure, a something between delight and misery” (185), the parade example occurring at the Musgroves’ lodgings in Bath, where, waiting for the chance to open her heart to Wentworth, she finds herself “deep in the happiness of such misery, or the misery of such happiness” (233). Fanny’s ambivalences tend to cluster around Edmund’s attraction to Mary, as jealousy fights against guilt and hope against hopelessness. As she listens to the account of his final conversation with Mary, one that has crushed his own hopes, she cannot help but feel both “pain” and “delight” (375) and be “almost sorry” to have made him speak at all (377). Emma expresses similar feelings not only with respect to Frank, but also after the proposal scene, as her love for Knightley conflicts with feelings of duty toward her father and guilt toward Harriet.
About feelings in general in the late novels as opposed to the early ones, we can say that they are not only far stronger for being conflicted and far deeper for being rooted in a denser matrix of personal history, but also far more various. The early novels work with the limited repertoire of emotions proper to the marriage plot: love, humiliation, dejection, hope, happiness. But the later novels, while still ostensibly presenting pictures of courtship, in fact de-emphasize the marriage plot to such an extent that it becomes merely the vehicle of narrative resolution, and generally a hasty resolution, at that. The later novels spend almost no time on what almost exclusively concerns the early ones: the conversations and events of the hero and heroine’s courtship. In the first two, in fact, the hero and heroine do not even discover that they are lovers until the very end, and in the third, they do not rediscover it until then.53 Instead, each of these novels opens itself to a broad range of social situations and psychological states, which is why each traverses such a broad range of feelings. To take only Fanny, and only the first volume of her work, we watch her experience loneliness, despondency, gratitude, shame, guilt, jealousy, self-pity, terror, and moral revulsion. The rest of her story adds other feelings, the stories of Emma and Anne, others still.
In all this, then—the slow shaping of the self in childhood and adolescence, the multifarious operations of memory, the continuous conquest of self-knowledge, the gradual evolution of feelings and minute adjustment of relationships—we see how central was Austen’s discovery of time in giving rise to the incomparably greater psychological complexity of her later novels. And we also see how unmistakably that discovery bears the imprint, in its central, structuring logic as well as in so many of its particulars, of the Romantic poets, and especially of Wordsworth.
We can go still further in delineating the impact of Austen’s new understanding of time on her ideas and her art. The conceptual landscape of the early novels is dominated by the abstract moral vocabulary Austen inherited from the eighteenth century: “pride” and “prejudice,” “sense” and “sensibility.” It is fallacious, of course, to see Elinor as personifying sense and Marianne sensibility (we are twice told of the latter’s sense in the very first chapter), but it is not fallacious to see the novel as organizing itself around a struggle between those two faculties. Pride and prejudice, in their novel, are rather mutually reinforcing than antagonistic, but they remain dominant terms of analysis. Nor are these the only important abstractions. In Sense and Sensibility, both characters and narrator spend a great deal of time identifying the story’s various single men as “amiable,” “agreeable,” or the reverse. Pride and Prejudice simply cannot be fully understood without a grasp of what Austen means by such terms as “gentlemanliness,” “respectability,” “elegance,” “dignity,” “grace,” “cordiality,” and “warmth” (not to mention “address,” “countenance,” “manner,” “air,” and “features”). A powerful categorizing intelligence is at work.
But by the late novels, Austen’s mind has grown into a far different shape. To be sure, the earlier mode of analysis has not been discarded, but it has receded into the background. The very titles point to the change, the paired abstractions having been replaced by names that may be understood as signifying, not collections of fixed qualities, but fields of possibility. How will Mansfield Park change? And famously, “[w]hat will become of” Emma? A phrase worth pondering, that: not only “What will happen to Emma,” but also, “What will develop from Emma?” and “What will Emma become?” (35).54 Become, indeed: from an artist of being, of static characters and abstract qualities, Austen becomes that most “Romantic” of creators, an artist of becoming.55
We can see it in her language. The greater “subtlety and flexibility of Jane Austen’s mature prose” has long been noted.56 At its worst, the language of the early Austen can practically drive itself dizzy with its Johnsonian juggling of paired and tripled abstractions. After Willoughby concludes his impassioned confessional monologue, “Elinor made no answer. Her thoughts were silently fixed on the irreparable injury which too early an independence and its consequent habits of idleness, dissipation, and luxury, had made in the mind, the character, the happiness, of a man who, to every advantage of person and talents, united a disposition naturally open and honest, and a feeling, affectionate temper” (280).
The late language displays its freedom most fully in the rendering of speech. Nothing can compare to Miss Bates’s free-associative monologues of broken fragments, but a comparable freedom from syntactic order is often essential to the reporting of Fanny’s speech, as well. This is a heroine whose first words are “‘no, no—not at all—no, thank you’” (14) and who responds to the news that it was Henry who had arranged for her brother’s promotion with, “‘Good Heaven! how very, very kind! Have you really—was it by your desire—I beg your pardon, but I am bewildered. Did Admiral Crawford apply?—how was it?—I am stupefied’” (247; emphasis in the original).57 Comparable examples from Anne’s speech are harder to find, since she does so little speaking at all, but they are not at all scarce in Austen’s notation of what passes through her mind. A scene discussed above, Anne’s first meeting with Wentworth, provides what has become the best-known example: “Her eye half met Captain Wentworth’s; a bow, a curtsey passed; she heard his voice—he talked to Mary, said all that was right; said something to the Miss Musgroves, enough to mark an easy footing: the room seemed full—full of persons and voices—but a few minutes ended it” (84–85).
As these last two examples suggest, the greater syntactic freedom of the late novels overwhelmingly serves one particular purpose: the moment-by-moment registration of feeling.58 And this attention to the flux of feeling points, as we will see, to a development of the very first importance, nothing less than a revolution in Austen’s conception of both the mind and the moral life. For even as we see the late characters’ feelings develop moment by moment, so, very often, do we see their thoughts simultaneously doing likewise, evolving in snatches of half-formed and provisional formulations as their feelings search for expression. Nothing could be more like the poetic practice of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and often also of Byron, than this.59
The early novels know no half-formed thoughts, no feelings groping to understand themselves. Indeed, as we just saw with Elinor, thought in the early Austen tends to crowd out feeling, the diction and syntax of categorization asserting itself even at moments of intense passion, as if the only valid responses were rational ones.60 But observe Emma’s soliloquy as she tries to determine the exact degree of her love for Frank: “‘I do not find myself making use of the word sacrifice … I do suspect that he is not really necessary to my happiness. So much the better. I certainly will not persuade myself to feel more than I do. I am quite enough in love. I should be sorry to be more … He is undoubtedly very much in love—everything denotes it—very much in love indeed!—and when he comes again, if his affection continue, I must be on my guard not to encourage it’” (217). This is thought evolving on the page as feeling seeks to discover itself—indeed, it is feeling itself evolving before our eyes through the effort of bringing itself to consciousness.
To cite examples from Persuasion would be arbitrary, since much of the novel takes this form. One of the most prominent instances in Mansfield Park enables us to make a closer comparison between the early and late works, for it occurs in Edmund’s long, tormented letter to Fanny about his prospects with Mary, a letter analogous in important ways to that of Darcy to Elizabeth. In each case, a young man speaks his mind at a moment of intense feeling, and because he is writing, speaks it in a way that enables him to monitor his thoughts as they take shape on the page. After a short introduction, Darcy’s letter begins thus: “Two offenses of a very different nature, and by no means of equal magnitude, you last night laid to my charge” (162). The passage offers a fair sample of the forensic language in which the whole letter is couched as well as of the forensic structure by which it is governed. Feelings may be at stake, but feelings are not permitted to enter into the letter itself; Darcy even makes a point of assuring Elizabeth that “my investigations and decisions are not usually influenced by my hopes and fears” (163).
Edmund’s letter could not be more different. To cite a passage from the middle of it:
I cannot give her up, Fanny. She is the only woman in the world whom I could ever think of as a wife. If I did not believe that she had some regard for me, of course I should not say this, but I do believe it. I am convinced, that she is not without a decided preference. I have no jealousy of any individual. It is the influence of the fashionable world altogether that I am jealous of. It is the habits of wealth that I fear. Her ideas are not higher than her own fortune may warrant, but they are beyond what our incomes united could authorize. There is comfort, however, even here. I could better bear to lose her, because not rich enough, then because of my profession. (348)
What we have here is not a structured argument, but a spontaneous outpouring of emotions: determination, desperation, hope, jealousy, fear, comfort. Indeed, very shortly after this, Edmund interrupts himself to say, “You have my thoughts exactly as they arise, my dear Fanny; perhaps they are some times contradictory, but it will not be a less faithful picture of my mind. Having once begun, it is a pleasure to me to tell you all I feel.” “Perhaps they are some times contradictory”—the mind is not, at bottom, a rational instrument. “You have my thoughts” as “[I] tell you all I feel”—it is, instead, constituted by emotion, with thought merely the form feeling assumes so that it may see itself.
The resemblance to the Romantics could not, again, be greater, and the change from Austen’s early work could not be more complete.61 In the early phase, feeling is dictated by reason, even (or especially), as Darcy’s letter reminds us, in the most important instances. Elizabeth misjudges Darcy, therefore she hates him. Once her mind changes, her heart changes too. That is why this revolution in Austen’s conception of the mental life is a revolution in her conception of the moral life. The ethical doctrine at the center of her early novels is the idea that feeling can and ought to be shaped, controlled, and educated by thought, a doctrine to which the flawlessness of their plots, the mercilessness of their irony, and the supreme self-assurance of their narrators give the inevitability of a mathematical demonstration. The errors of the early heroines are errors of reason; that is why each of the early novels can pivot on a single moment of clarified understanding, a sudden recognition of wrong thinking that opens the way for right feeling. The heroine changes by changing her mind: once, decisively, and forever.
But the late heroines, as we have seen, change continuously, and not by examining their judgments, but by discovering their feelings. The only sudden recognition the late novels give us is Emma’s, and what darts through her with the speed of an arrow has nothing to do with realizing that she has been thinking wrongly and everything to do with realizing that all along she has been feeling rightly, only she hasn’t known it. Elizabeth, Marianne, and Catherine must reform their minds; Emma must make herself “acquainted with her own heart” (335). And it is only then—right feeling opening the way for right thinking—that “[s]he saw it all with a clearness which had never blessed her before. How improperly had she been acting by Harriet! … What blindness, what madness, had led her on!” (335–336). In Mansfield Park and Persuasion the way is opened to the lovers’ union in precisely the same fashion, only there it is the heroes who at last become acquainted with their hearts.
Does this mean that the mature Austen believes, “Romantically,” that feeling, desire, is always right?62 Clearly not, in the sense that feeling must still be guided by principle. But it is true that none of the late heroines has to sacrifice her feelings or alter her desires, at least with respect to the man she loves.63 Other late characters clearly do have improper feelings and desires, but such matters no longer concern Austen much. The author of Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Northanger Abbey gave her opinion very decidedly for so young a person, but the mature Austen is no longer an artist of what ought to be, but of what is. She has become an explorer of emotions, an observer of fields of relational possibility, a connoisseur of process. Twelve years after Susan, she has turned her attention to the changing feelings of the mind.
One final issue. With her new belief in change, Austen faced a crucial narratological problem. How to bring to closure narratives that embody the ever-evolving nature of all things human? The answer she found, as has been pointed out in various ways, was to not bring them to full closure, to resist closure.64 This resistance takes three forms: the creation of interpretive confusion about how properly to judge characters and actions; the leaving open of narrative possibilities subsequent to the end of the action proper and/or the acknowledgment that possibilities have been left unexplored within it; and the construction of endings that create readerly dissatisfaction, the sense of the right outcome not having been achieved.65
The first of these figures only in Mansfield Park and Emma and has already been well explored in the critical literature. From the beginning, Mansfield Park has inspired a sharply polarized debate about whether its heroine embodies Austen’s moral ideals or rather an infantile prudery that we are meant to criticize—a confusion related to the question of whom she and Edmund should marry and thus to those other two forms of resistance, as we will see in a moment. As for Emma, the interpretive confusion it generates may be represented by Trilling’s observation that “[w]e never know where to have it,” never know “what it is up to”—a fact we already glanced at in noting that the novel contains hardly a single character whose moral worth can be determined with certainty.66
The second form of resistance, the opening of alternative, unexplored narrative possibilities, is most obviously present in Mansfield Park, where Austen not only tells us, around the middle of the novel, that Henry’s suit would have been successful had Fanny’s heart not been elsewhere engaged, but also, at the novel’s end, that it would have been anyway, especially once Edmund had married Mary. This news comes in the very last chapter, as Austen spins out the subsequent fates of her characters, and represents a stunning last-minute bifurcation of the plot: had Henry not eloped with Maria, everything would have turned out differently. And that does mean everything, since—to return to the issue of interpretive confusion—such an outcome would have required us to judge everything in the novel in a very different light. Of course, even the way things did turn out is left somewhat open, Austen famously “abstain[ing] from dates” (387) so that we may each imagine for ourselves the length of time required for the transfer of Edmund’s affections from Mary to Fanny—a gesture of incompleteness explicitly related to the indeterminacies of emotional process. Persuasion achieves this kind of incompleteness by carrying its story up to the present, and in a sly narratological turn, leaving one of its possibilities to be worked out in the “future.” Mrs. Clay and William Walter Elliot have run off together, “[a]nd it is now a doubtful point whether his cunning or hers may finally carry the day; whether … he may not be wheedled and caressed at last into making her the wife of Sir William” (252). We have already glanced at a different kind of unexplored possibility in Persuasion: that the novel leads us to expect that Anne will expose William Walter Elliot’s scandalous behavior toward Mrs. Smith, only to drop that narrative line as quickly as it had developed it.
This kind of resistance to closure, like the others, is most subtle in Emma, the most highly wrought and architecturally perfect of Austen’s late, indeed of all her novels. The first form it takes can be expressed by a question we looked at before, that of “what will become of [Emma].” As with none of her other heroines, Austen leaves us with the sense that even at the end of her novel, Emma still has a great deal of “becoming” to do—that this story is not the end of her story.67 It is a sense reinforced by the fact that she has yet to settle in her permanent home when the novel ends. Neither, for that matter, have Frank and Jane, nor has it all been decided whether Emma or Mrs. Elton will play the leading role in the future life of their community. Quite likely, they will continue to struggle over it, just as we imagine Emma and Knightley continuing to struggle over Emma’s behavior. But the novel’s most compelling unexplored possibility is Jane herself. Any number of critics have testified to what most readers surely feel, the continually evoked, never fulfilled longing to see Emma become better friends, dear friends, with this beautiful and mysterious and fascinating young woman—a longing surely related to our desire to become “dear friends” with her, intimate with her, to know something, finally, about her. She is the Austen reader’s great unrequited love.
As for the final form of resistance to closure, the arousal of feelings of dissatisfaction as to the correct outcome not having been achieved, I need hardly dwell on it in the case of Mansfield Park.68 There is surely scarcely a reader who would not have preferred to see Fanny marry Henry and Edmund Mary, at least the first time through the novel. Not only did Austen clearly connive at this reaction, she seems to have shared it, at least in part. The bifurcated ending we just looked at suggests as much, that Austen’s own heart tugged her at least part of the way in the other direction, as does her very rare use of the word “I” in the earlier of the two passages I alluded to in that connection: “although there doubtless are such incomparable young ladies of eighteen … as are never to be persuaded into love against their judgment … I have no inclination to believe Fanny one of them” (193).69 In Persuasion, dissatisfaction of a different sort inheres in the sense that even if Anne and Wentworth have found each other, justice has scarcely otherwise been done, and that the world in which they will have to live is soured and bleak.70 I will return to this point in my chapter on the novel; suffice it to note for now that the future of Persuasion is one in which Sir Walter will remain unshaken in his icy pride and vanity until his death, at which point Kellynch will be inherited by William Walter Elliot—and possibly, Mrs. Clay.
In Emma, we can hear the dark notes of the ending only if our ear has been properly tuned by the rest of the narrative. For who, at first glance, could see any reason for discontent in “the perfect happiness of the union” (396)? The only problem is that all three of those key words—“perfect,” “happiness,” and “union”—have been so ironized by the novel’s handling of them as to make it a matter of very grave doubt whether they are not rather to be avoided.71 The “union” of that last sentence echoes the language of the first, where “Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and a happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence” (7). This first union, as we have seen, is in fact the start of all her woe: the vanity of being handsome, the willfulness of being rich and therefore independent, and the blind certainty of being clever, each trait the worse for being “united” to the others.
“Happiness” and its derivatives are words that—aside from also being compromised right from the beginning by that talk of Emma’s “happy disposition”—belong, above all, to Miss Bates and Mrs. Elton. “Happy,” for the first, is the slogan of her diminished, dependent existence. “And yet she was a happy woman,” we are told upon first meeting her (20), and again, that “[s]he is a standing lesson in how to be happy” (210). This may sound admirable, but what is it but a pitiable making-do that forces her to lower her expectations to the level of her circumstances, no matter how far her circumstances have sunk? For Mrs. Elton, “happiness” is the name of the misery and false gaiety she inflicts on herself and everyone around her, with her “apparatus of happiness” at Donwell Abbey (296) and her outing to Box Hill, where, after the arrangements have been made, “[n]othing was wanting but to be happy when they got there” (303). Of the kind of happiness capable of being produced by the joint efforts of these two, by Miss Bates’s abasement and Mrs. Elton’s schemes, we get a fine sample in this picture of Jane after she accepts the position as governess: “She is as low as possible,” says her aunt. “To look at her, nobody would think how delighted and happy she is to have secured a situation” (312).
As for “perfect,” no word in the book is as insistently or emphatically undermined.72 Of the dozens of times it or its derivatives appear, almost none is without qualification or irony, the leading example being the conundrum devised by Mr. Weston, that moral imbecile, on the very heels of Emma’s cruelty to Miss Bates: “What two letters of the alphabet are there, that express perfection? … M. and A.—Em—ma” (306). To which Knightley gravely replies: “Perfection should not have come quite so soon” [emphasis in the original]. No—for a novelist of process, perfection can never come late enough. “[P]ictures of perfection,” Austen wrote at around this time, “make me sick & wicked.”73 Wicked indeed is the game Austen plays with us throughout the novel, flattering us with our ability to see past Emma’s blindness about Elton only the better to rub our noses in our own blindness about Frank, conjuring seductive appearances that continually giving way to hidden, hinted-at realities of a less pleasant nature. The logic of the novel’s language makes its final statement into just such another happy deception, one that leaves us with a story in which nothing gets settled, an apparently “perfect” work that terminates in nothing but loose ends, a novel that refuses to stop playing games with us.
In short, like poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge, the novels of the major phase are committed to notions of the ambiguous and continually evolving nature of human consciousness and human relationships, as well as to the use of exploratory and opened-ended processes in their own artistic construction. Indeed, in the major phase, as I noted above, the center of Austen’s attention has shifted away from the courtship plot altogether. The narrative machinery that brings the lovers together, then separates them and bars their way to each other, which in the early novels occupies so much space, is in Mansfield Park and Emma entirely absent and in Persuasion relatively incidental.74 The marriage plot now functions merely as the framework for deeper explorations from which the final unions emerge almost as epiphenomena. As my final three chapters will seek to explain, each of the novels of the major phase focuses its attention on one particular emotional structure or mode of relatedness that seized Austen’s imagination as essential to the story she wished to tell. Or rather, the story she wished to tell seems in each case to have been constructed, in part, so as to enable her to explore that particular structure or mode. Again and again we can feel her improvising with language and emotions alike, groping her way toward new recognitions and new powers. The precocious certainties of the early phase have given way to the maturer wisdom of doubt.
