What Matters in Jane Austen?: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved (8 page)

A more subtle impertinence is his sister’s addressing Fanny as ‘my dear child’; it is a form of would-be endearment that is precisely calculated by the author. It catches Mary Crawford’s fundamentally condescending attachment to Fanny, but it also shows us how unaware she is of Fanny’s feelings. Fanny has grown into a womanly rival for Edmund’s affections, no child any longer. The impertinent endearment is only used elsewhere in Austen by one other character, Mrs Elton, who addresses the powerless and humiliated Jane Fairfax as ‘my dear child’. She takes possession of Jane Fairfax by calling her ‘Jane’, to Frank Churchill’s evident surprise and distaste (II. ii). When he writes his long letter explaining his actions to Mrs Weston – and thus to Emma too – he expresses his anger at Mrs Elton’s ‘system of . . . treatment’ of Jane Fairfax, and his protest focuses on her use of his fiancée’s Christian name. ‘“Jane,” indeed!—You will observe that I have not yet indulged myself in calling her by that name, even to you’ (III. xiv). ‘Think, then, what I must have endured in hearing it bandied between the Eltons with all the vulgarity of needless repetition, and all the insolence of imaginary superiority.’ And this is the point: Jane Fairfax is certainly not going to call Mrs Elton ‘Augusta’.

As narrator, Austen shares the sensitivities of her characters in the matter of names. So she has the peculiar habit of referring to a character formally and informally in the same stretch of narrative. When Charlotte Lucas sets about luring Mr Collins into a marriage proposal, we are told ‘Charlotte’s kindness extended further . . . Such was Miss Lucas’s scheme’ (I. xxii). The first statement seems to take us sympathetically into the character’s thoughts; the second to view her with a colder detachment. ‘Charlotte had been tolerably encouraging . . . Miss Lucas perceived him from an upper window . . .’: these are in almost adjacent sentences. ‘Miss Lucas, who accepted him solely from the pure and disinterested desire of an establishment . . . Charlotte herself was tolerably composed . . .’ The reader is hardly conscious of the narrator’s movement back and forth between formal and familiar names, but it conditions our odd mix of sympathy and horror at what the character is doing.

Formality can be painful, never more than in
Persuasion
, when Captain Wentworth addresses Anne as ‘madam’ in his first words to her that are actually quoted in the novel (I. viii). Then, in the crisis after Louisa Musgrove’s fall, she overhears him exclaim, ‘but, if Anne will stay, no one so proper, so capable as Anne!’ (I. xii) It takes her a moment ‘to recover from the emotion of hearing herself so spoken of’ – and the emphatic use of her Christian name, twice, is partly what causes this emotion. The modern reader knows that Captain Wentworth is acknowledging her competence and care, but the name-sensitive reader knows that, by calling her ‘Anne’, he is releasing the energy of pent feelings. In the cancelled manuscript Chapter x, he exclaims ‘Anne, my own dear Anne!’, but in the finished novel he is never heard actually to address her by her Christian name. The avoidance of a name can be powerful too. After their first meeting, in a passage where Anne is thinking about Captain Wentworth, he is called by his name and title. At a certain point, however, Anne starts avoiding his name in her thoughts, so the narrator starts avoiding it too. When Anne is introduced to Mr Elliot, we hear that ‘his manners were so exactly what they ought to be, so polished, so easy, so particularly agreeable, that she could compare them in excellence to only one person’s manners’ (II. iii). That ‘one person’ is Captain Wentworth, but his name is suppressed. Or again, when Mr Elliot recalls looking at her at Lyme ‘with some earnestness’, ‘She knew it well; and she remembered another person’s look also.’ The avoidance of ‘Captain Wentworth’ is a concession of feeling on the part of the heroine. Perhaps she once called him ‘Frederick’ and now declines the formality of his title and surname when she thinks of him. It is the comparison with Mr Elliot – the resexualisation of the heroine – that forces the suppression. When Lady Russell invites her to consider herself as the future Lady Elliot, she knows that she cannot accept Mr Elliot – partly because ‘her feelings were still adverse to any man save one’ (II. v). So much is in a name that the narrator, in imitation of the heroine, has to omit it. It is just too potent a word.

FOUR

How Do Jane Austen's Characters Look?

‘She is a sort of elegant creature that one cannot keep one's eyes from. I am always watching her to admire . . .'

Emma
, II. iii

Jane Austen aficionados like to share their mild outrage at the casting in some of the many film versions of her novels, especially the casting of the actresses who play the heroines. Sometimes this is prompted by the film-makers' provocative neglect of Austen's characterisation – the choice, for instance, of Billie Piper, energetic action girl, as Fanny Price in an ITV
Mansfield Park
– but often the offence is a matter of looks. Could Gwyneth Paltrow be Emma, as she was in the 1996 Hollywod film? Her accent was less a worry than her looks. Not only the wrong-coloured eyes (blue instead of Emma's ‘true hazle') but also a willowy frame that seemed not to match Austen's insistence on her heroine's physical robustness. And how could the thin and delicate Keira Knightley be chosen for Elizabeth Bennet, famous for her three-mile walk down lanes and across loamy fields? Such casting is often an affront to our presuppositions about how Austen's heroines look. The affront is telling, for these presuppositions are founded on so much that is only implicit in the novels themselves. We do not know, for instance, even the colour of these heroines' hair. How people look is often suggested rather than specified in Austen's novels. Why should she not tell us?

Perhaps because she would have us, like Laurence Sterne in
Tristram Shandy
, imagine an attractive woman to meet our own requirements: ‘Sit down, Sir, paint her to your own mind—as like your mistress as you can—as unlike your wife as your conscience will let you.'
¹
But Austen wants us to think not so much about how characters look, but how they look to each other. Her sparing use of specification when it comes to looks is striking when looks can be so important. Think of the Bennet girls, who must rely on their personal attractions to win them some kind of financial security and social standing. When Jane Bennet becomes engaged to Mr Bingley her mother exclaims, with embarrassing glee and yet also honesty, ‘I was sure you could not be so beautiful for nothing!' (
Pride and Prejudice
, III. xiii). There is the sense confessed quietly throughout Austen's narrative that looks are hugely important (thus those words used so frequently about characters when we first meet them: handsome, pretty, gentlemanlike, elegant). Austen herself is too honest not to mention a character's looks when he or she is introduced to us. And yet there is often the sense for the reader that looks are difficult to catch, elusive, unspecifiable. This is partly because Austen wants to avoid the strained formulae of other novels. For most novelists of Austen's age and earlier, a heroine's looks belong with her predictable parcel of virtues. In the first chapter of a novel that Jane Austen certainly read, Mary Brunton's
Self-Control
(1810), we find that the heroine, Laura Montreville, is possessed of ‘consummate loveliness', ‘cheerful good sense' and ‘matchless simplicity'. There is a ready vocabulary of superlatives for any novel heroine, for her virtues and for her attractiveness. Austen needed to escape such a vocabulary, and thus came her interest in the indefinability of some of her most important characters' looks. (One of her tricks is to save her precise descriptions for minor characters.)

The elusive qualities of Elizabeth Bennet's looks are explicitly discussed in
Pride and Prejudice
, taken up by Mr Darcy when he responds to Miss Bingley's sarcasm about adding her to the portraits in Pemberley: ‘“. . . what painter could do justice to those beautiful eyes?” “It would not be easy, indeed, to catch their expression, but their colour and shape, and the eye-lashes, so remarkably fine, might be copied”' (I. x). The difficulty of catching the ‘expression' of Elizabeth's eyes is evidence of their beauty, and the detection of this difficulty is proof of Mr Darcy's attraction to her. Later he talks to Elizabeth about her trying to ‘sketch' his ‘character', and she talks of trying to ‘take your likeness', as if the most appreciative judges of other people – especially other people to whom they may be attracted – are those who know how hard it is to render a likeness.

Elizabeth's eyes in
Pride and Prejudice
captivate Mr Darcy. We remember finding out in Chapter vi that she does not please Mr Darcy's taste. ‘But no sooner had he made it clear to himself and his friends that she had hardly a good feature in her face, than he began to find it was rendered uncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression of her dark eyes.' That ‘made it clear to himself' is wonderfully satirical: he convinces himself against the pressure of an unstated allure. The eyes have him. Mr Darcy's judgement also alerts us to the feature of a woman that we are most likely to find out about throughout Austen's fiction. We are told of Anne Elliott's ‘mild dark eyes', and of Fanny Price's ‘soft light eyes' (to be preferred by any properly discerning male judge to Mary Crawford's ‘sparkling dark ones'). Catherine Morland's eyes are not specifically described like this, though in the opening pages of
Northanger Abbey
we are told of her transformation from tomboy to ‘interesting' young woman, how, as she grows through her teens, ‘her eyes gained more animation'. Marianne Dashwood's eyes naturally reveal her personality, but also have an unusual colour that makes her allure singular: ‘in her eyes, which were very dark, there was a life, a spirit, an eagerness which could hardly be seen without delight' (I. x).

When we come to the looks of the Austen heroine whom we know best of all, Emma Woodhouse, eye colour is the one particular of which we can be sure. Emma is ‘handsome', we know this from the first sentence, but we know rather little about her appearance, beyond her former governess's enraptured description. ‘Such an eye! the true hazle eye—and so brilliant! regular features, open countenance, with a complexion! oh! what a bloom of full health, and such a pretty height and size; such a firm and upright figure. There is health, not merely in her bloom, but in her air, her head, her glance' (I. v). Mrs Weston's appreciation may be a little too exclamatory for comfort, but it is not in itself unusual, for how people appear in Austen's novels is inseparable from how they are looked at. And looking at others appreciatively – judging the attractiveness of their features – is a proper aesthetic activity. There is a kind of connoisseurship of looks in Austen.

Take Harriet Smith in
Emma
. ‘She was a very pretty girl, and her beauty happened to be of a sort which Emma particularly admired. She was short, plump and fair, with a fine bloom, blue eyes, light hair, regular features, and a look of great sweetness' (I. iii). This is a description, but through Emma's eyes. Harriet's appearance is caught through Emma's appreciation of it. We soon know that she is so caught up in her own appreciativeness that she can readily mistake as intended for Harriet Mr Elton's later compliment about the ‘soft eye' of a ‘lovely woman' in the ingratiating rhyme that he composes. Emma flatters herself on the score of her powers of discrimination, and this includes her connoisseurship of looks. Her appreciation therefore runs to Jane Fairfax, whom of course she does not like, but whose looks she has to admire in an aesthetic way.

 

Jane Fairfax was very elegant, remarkably elegant; and she had herself the highest value for elegance. Her height was pretty, just such as almost every body would think tall, and nobody could think very tall; her figure particularly graceful; her size a most becoming medium, between fat and thin, though a slight appearance of ill-health seemed to point out the likeliest evil of the two. Emma could not but feel all this; and then, her face—her features—there was more beauty in them altogether than she had remembered; it was not regular, but it was very pleasing beauty. Her eyes, a deep grey, with dark eye-lashes and eyebrows, had never been denied their praise; but the skin, which she had been used to cavil at, as wanting colour, had a clearness and delicacy which really needed no fuller bloom. It was a style of beauty, of which elegance was the reigning character, and as such, she must, in honour, by all her principles, admire it:—elegance, which, whether of person or of mind, she saw so little in Highbury. (II. ii)