A Jane Austen Education (11 page)

Now Henry was coming at Catherine from a different direction, and for a different reason. He was still using humor, but it was a humor of paradox, not imitation, and instead of provoking Catherine to question social conventions, he was asking her to examine her mental categories, rethink her conceptual boxes. Marriage is one thing, dancing something else, but are they really so different? Sort of and sort of not—and Henry was challenging her to sort out how. The earlier scene had been a performance: he mimicked, she laughed. This one was a dialogue. Now he was inciting her to speak, then pretending to misunderstand her, even at the risk of looking like a dunce, in order to force her to fight her way back to what she meant—and thus, to figure out what she really thought in the first place.

 

 

And that’s when I realized what I had been looking at the whole time, and what I was doing wrong as a teacher. Sly, impish, ironic, willing to play the fool for the sake of getting someone to think—a little quirky, a little abrupt, but always exciting to talk to: that was Henry Tilney, but it was also my professor. What made my professor such a great teacher was not that he was brilliant, or that he had read everything—though he was, and he had—but that he forced us to think for ourselves, just as Henry did to Catherine, and provoked us to reconsider our assumptions, just as he did to her: all the conventions about what you were supposed to say about a work of literature, all our mental categories for understanding novels and characters and language.

We were ourselves a bunch of Catherines, after all, we graduate students, stepping uncertainly into a new phase of life. No, that actually gives us too much credit. At least Catherine knew that she was naïve, even if she didn’t understand just how naïve she was. We were really a bunch of Thorpes, young people coping with feelings of insecurity in an intimidating new world by pretending to know more than we really did, and being rather competitive about it, to boot. My professor was the opposite. He pretended to know less than he did, refused to play the role of wise man or sage. Or rather, he
knew
that he knew less than he did, because he recognized that everything he knew—all his own assumptions and conceptions—was subject to constant reappraisal.

He taught by asking questions, and so did I, but only now did I see how utterly different our questions were. Mine were really only answers in disguise, as if I were hosting some sadistic form of
Jeopardy!
I wasn’t a teacher, I was a bully. My
students
were the Catherines, coming to the marvelous world of college, bustling with new sights and possibilities, just as she had come, wide-eyed, to Bath. But I wasn’t Henry; I was Isabella. I wasn’t helping them; I was manipulating them—and doing so, to a far greater extent than I wanted to admit, in order to gratify my own ego. I
was
telling them what to think, even if, by trying to get them to say it first—that is, by putting words in their mouths—I was pretending not to. I was trying to turn them into little versions of me, instead of better versions of themselves.

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

 

 

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

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

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

Austen was never didactic, and she didn’t like didactic people, either. In
Pride and Prejudice,
Mary Bennet was fond of quoting heavy books, and Mr. Collins was fond of reading them aloud, and both of them were held up as fools. Henry never “told” Catherine anything—except once, and then Austen gently laughed at him, too. He and Catherine and his sister, Eleanor, who had also befriended the heroine, were taking a walk to the top of a hill overlooking the town of Bath. The Tilneys, “viewing the country with the eyes of persons accustomed to drawing,” were soon deciding “on its capability of being formed into pictures.” Austen was referring here to the contemporary vogue for the “picturesque,” landscapes that conformed to a certain idea of visual beauty: moody skies, gnarled trees, ruined shacks, and so forth, all arranged according to the laws of pictorial art. But Catherine knew nothing of this, so Henry was only too happy to fill her in:

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

Now I understood why the novel had to begin in the odd way that it did. “No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy,” the first sentence read, “would have supposed her born to be an heroine.” The line was a joke about the conventions of gothic fiction, one that the rest of the first chapter went on to elaborate. Catherine’s father “was not in the least addicted to locking up his daughters,” “there was not one family among their acquaintance who had reared and supported a boy accidentally found at their door,” and so forth. That much was obvious. But now I realized that the first sentence was also a way of calling attention to the fact that this novel, too, would necessarily trade in conventions. A heroine and a romance, a Mr. Wrong and a Mr. Right, perils and misunderstandings, conflicts and complications, revelations and reversals, and at last, a happy ending: these were the conventions that Austen herself employed in every one of her novels, and she could not have done without them any more than a detective novelist can do without a corpse. Yet she didn’t want us to get sucked in by her conventions, either—didn’t want us to let ourselves be lulled into the trance of gullibility that readers are always falling into, mistaking an artificial version of reality for the genuine article. Stay awake, Austen was telling us. Don’t take things for granted, not even the things I’m telling you myself.

In other words, pay attention. And pay attention, above all, to your own feelings, because the world is always trying to get you to lie to yourself about them. “‘Very agreeable indeed,’ she replied, vainly endeavouring to hide a great yawn.” Our feelings, Austen was saying, are sometimes impolite and often inconvenient for the people around us. Friends and relatives are apt to tell us, instead, what we
should
be feeling—what we supposedly
are
feeling—if only to make their own lives easier or more exciting. This was Isabella, talking to Catherine about Henry, whom at that point the heroine had met only once:

Isabella, remember, was the one who had introduced the heroine to all those romantic novels. She wanted her friend’s life (her own, in other words, by proxy) to be full of the same extravagant emotions she had been reading about, even if they ended up making Catherine unhappy—or rather, especially if they did.

But Henry behaved in exactly the opposite fashion. In a scene much later in the novel that Austen made a point of pairing with this one, Henry and Catherine conducted the same kind of dialogue about Isabella herself. By this time, Isabella had shown her true colors as the false schemer she really was, and the girls’ friendship was at an end:

Henry was drawing on the same pool of emotional clichés that Isabella had—for there were clichés about friendship as well as romance then, in life as in art, in life because of art, just as there are today (the “frenemy,” the “bromance,” the “BFF”). But instead of telling Catherine what she must have been feeling, he simply asked her to pay attention to what she actually was feeling. And by that point in the novel, with his help, she had learned to do exactly that.

“You feel, as you always do,” he now replied, “what is most to the credit of human nature. Such feelings ought to be investigated, that they may know themselves.” In
Pride and Prejudice,
Elizabeth had learned to put thinking above feeling, and so did I, by reading about her. Now I learned a more complex idea about the relationship between the two. It is good to be in touch with your feelings, but it is even better if you also think about them. Feelings, Austen was saying, are the primary way we know about the world—the human world, anyway, the social world, the people around us. They are what we start with, when it comes to making our ethical judgments and choices.