A Jane Austen Education (4 page)

 

 

Tales of India and France, high-seas adventure and high-society scandal—godsends, it would seem, for any novelist in search of material. Yet Austen turned them all aside with a polite smile. Rather than Warren Hastings and Elizabeth Capot de Feuillide, she preferred to write about people like Mr. Woodhouse and Harriet Smith. Instead of Napoleonic battles and clandestine torture, she chose the dramatic possibilities of card parties and country picnics. She knew what she was about, and refused all temptations to wander from her course. After
Emma
was dedicated, at his own invitation, to the prince regent—Great Britain’s acting monarch during the senility of his father, George III—Austen heard again from the prince’s librarian, a pompous clergyman named James Stanier Clarke, who had been serving as the regent’s intermediary. (The prince did not of course deal with Austen himself, even if she was one of his favorite writers.) Clarke took the liberty of inflicting upon her that common torment of successful authors: he gave her an idea for a book. “Any Historical Romance illustrative of the History of the august house of Cobourg,” the German noble family whose youngest son was about to marry the Prince’s daughter, “would just now be very interesting,” he helpfully explained.

“I am fully sensible that an Historical Romance . . . might be much more to the purpose of Profit or Popularity, than such pictures of domestic Life in Country Villages as I deal in,” Austen replied (“romance” here meaning something like “saga”)—Her own way was to make art out of the very things that absorbed her attention in her own life. No one was closer to her than her older sister, Cassandra, with whom she shared a room until the end of her life. The two exchanged hundreds of letters during their periods of separation, filled with exactly the kind of gossipy detail that Austen shaped so gloriously into her novels:

And so on and so forth, for pages at a time of wit, silliness, high spirits, family news, gowns, weather, dances, and colds. Jane Austen’s life may have
seemed
uneventful compared to her aunt’s or cousin’s or brothers’, or indeed, compared to just about anyone’s. Her genius began with the recognition that such lives as hers were very eventful indeed—that every life is eventful, if only you know how to look at it.
She
did not think that her existence was quiet or trivial or boring; she thought it was delightful and enthralling, and she wanted us to see that our own are, too. She understood that what fills our days should fill our hearts, and what fills our hearts should fill our novels.

 

 

If I was so slow to catch on to all this, there was, of course, a very good reason. I’m a guy, after all. We aren’t exactly taught to pay attention to “minute particulars.” Gossip, we’re told, is for women. The very word is feminine, derogatory, trivializing. Like Emma and Mrs. Weston, or Jane Austen and Cassandra, it is women who are supposed to spend half hours, and more than half hours, gabbing with their girlfriends about every little thing. We are expected to preserve a manly silence, or speak only of impersonal matters—in other words, girls, gear, and sports or, if we take ourselves very seriously, politics and public affairs.

Things were not any different in Austen’s day, as the way she used that very phrase “minute particulars” made a point of underscoring. Mr. Knightley, a family friend, was telling the heroine some very interesting news about Harriet Smith. But when Emma pressed him for the juicy details, Knightley threw up his hands in masculine exasperation. “Your friend Harriet will make a much longer history when you see her,” he said. “She will give you all the minute particulars, which only woman’s language can make interesting.—In our communications we deal only in the great.”

The last word was a joke—Knightley was not that self-important—but other than that, he meant what he said. Women make “long histories,” long stories, but men do not. Austen meant it, too, but she also meant, I realized as I read the scene, a lot more than Knightley could know. I was only about a dozen pages from the end of the novel, and she was using him, I saw, to expound her artistic theory and declare her artistic triumph. “Women’s language”—the idiom of everyday conversation—was exactly the language in which
Emma
was written, and making those minute particulars interesting was precisely what Austen had done. She had given us a long history of private matters, of what Emma had called, many pages back, “woman’s friendship and woman’s feelings.” She had gossiped with us for four hundred pages, made us her girlfriends, told us of “little affairs, arrangements, perplexities, and pleasures,” and we had listened and understood, because she had been always interesting and always intelligible.

She had shown us, in other words, what it means to see and think and talk like a woman. The very idea that those things might be worth my while would have been ridiculous to me before I encountered her. Just the previous semester, in fact, I had loudly and proudly expressed the general male attitude toward “chick lit.” It was in a seminar in popular fiction run by a famously macho professor—an aging Clark Gable lookalike, six foot three with a cigarette rasp, who told stories about hanging out in the Village back in the jazz days and getting punched in the stomach by Norman Mailer. After weeks of boyish fun—
Frankenstein
and
Dracula,
Sherlock Holmes and Edgar Allan Poe,
I, the Jury
and
The Maltese Falcon
—we got to Daphne du Maurier’s
Rebecca
(the book that inspired the Hitchcock movie), a chick-lit novel if there ever was one. As soon as the session started, the professor sensed the torpor in the room.

“What’s the matter?” he asked the class of mostly guys. “Didn’t you like it?”

“I don’t know,” I said, always the first to volunteer my opinion. “I can’t really relate to it. It’s kind of—girlie.”

The guys responded with a murmur of assent, while one of the female students noted that although women learn to crossidentify with male heroes—out of necessity, if nothing else, since that’s what literature mainly gives you—men are only ever asked to identify with other men.

But there I was, just a few months later, soaking up the girliest novelist of all, the godmother of chick lit. Austen had shown me what it meant to act like a woman, and she’d also made me recognize why it was worthwhile. She had taught me to listen to people like Mr. Woodhouse or Miss Bates, not just because they deserved the same respect as everybody else, and not just because their feelings were as real and as deep, but because I might actually have important things to learn from them. Indeed, once I started paying attention to those two, it slowly dawned on me that however silly they might be, they each possessed a vital piece of wisdom—each embodied, in fact, one of the very lessons the novel itself was trying to teach.

Mr. Woodhouse may have been overbearing, with his obsessions about health and food—“Mrs. Bates, let me propose your venturing on one of these eggs. An egg boiled very soft is not unwholesome. Serle understands boiling an egg better than any body”—but they grew from a genuinely tender concern for the well-being of those around him. Here he was, “the kind-hearted, polite old man,” talking to Jane Fairfax, Miss Bates’s niece, “with all his mildest urbanity”:

This was magnificently sweet, among the most touching moments in the book, and as an argument for simple human kindness—the concern for other people’s feelings that Emma so conspicuously failed to show, and that I was so clueless about myself—impossible to disagree with.

As for Miss Bates, she lived the novel’s highest lesson of all. Here was how Austen introduced her:

Emma, who had it all, was forever discontented with the world around her—just like me, in my perpetual fog of resentful gloom. Instead it was Miss Bates—scraping by, facing a lonely old age, dependent on everybody else’s goodwill—who was the happy one. If her speech bubbled and flowed in an endless stream of little matters, that was only because, like Austen herself, she found everything around her so very interesting.

 

 

To pay attention to “minute particulars” is to notice your life as it passes, before it passes. But it is also, I realized, something more. By talking over their little daily affairs—and not just talking them over, but talking them over and over, again and again (the same story in brief, then in full, the same stories in one house, then another)—the characters in
Emma
were doing nothing less than attaching themselves to life. They were weaving the web of community, one strand of conversation at a time. They were creating the world, in the process of talking about it.

Yet again, it was Emma herself who had trouble with this. She loved to gossip with her special friend Mrs. Weston, of course, but when Miss Bates started in, she couldn’t get away fast enough, and Jane Fairfax’s letters were a fate worse than death. She was the cleverest and best-looking person around, and richer and more wellborn than just about everyone else, and she thought she deserved a more interesting life than the one that was on offer in Highbury. Like a bad reader, she was looking for intrigue and adventure, but all she ended up doing was cutting herself off from the people around her. And as a result, she cut herself off from herself. The fun of
Emma
was the way that the heroine, with her supreme confidence in her own judgment, was always screwing up, but the reason wasn’t that much fun at all. Like me, she was numb. She couldn’t feel what she felt, or know what she wanted.

But Emma finally learned that everyday life is not only more joyful—and more dramatic—than she could have imagined, it is also more joyful and more dramatic than anything she
did
imagine, any of her plots or daydreams. With those, she just played at feeling. But dull old, trivial old everyday life—that is where feeling truly lies. Finding that out, she found out whom she should marry, and I found out that this was where the novel had been heading all along. It really
had
had its heroine’s romantic future on its mind, but its mind turned out to be very, very deep. In the end
Emma
didn’t lack a plot; its plot was so clever that it could keep itself hidden until the very last, when all of its disparate parts leaped into order in a single instant, like iron filings around a magnet.

Emma’s life finally became real to her, and in reading about her life I felt mine finally becoming real to me. Sleepwalking through my days just wasn’t going to cut it anymore. Reading
Emma,
being asked to take the lives of characters like Harriet Smith and Jane Fairfax as seriously as they did themselves—not the exciting lives of heroes and heroines, which were so enjoyable to identify with, or the glamorous lives of celebrities, which were so much fun to read about, or the impressive lives of whatever big shots I happened to be remotely acquainted with, which made me feel so important, but the everyday lives of ordinary people, which matter for the sole reason that they
are
lives—made me finally begin to take my own life seriously.

Not that I hadn’t always taken my plans and grand ambitions seriously—of course I had. What I hadn’t taken seriously were the little events, the little moments of feeling, that my life actually consisted of. I wasn’t Stephen Dedalus or Conrad’s Marlow. I was Emma. I was Jane Fairfax. I was Miss Bates. I wasn’t a rebel, I was a fool. I wasn’t floating in splendid isolation a million miles above the herd. I was part of the herd. I was a regular person, after all. Which means, I was a person.