Pride and Prejudice: Not as Universally Adored as we Believe

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In a hilarious compilation, Linda Rodriguez McRobbie lists seven well-known people who hated Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.  I had to smile; the reasons these people give are as full of holes as Jane Austen's writing, and her elucidation of the motives of her characters.  With the motives of women, she is on fairly firm ground.  With young men, she hasn't a clue.

The literary form of the Novel may never be completely encapsulated, but there are some things that we have come to expect:
* We expect a certain substance and length.  A novel must be long enough, and substantial enough, that we are able to immerse ourselves in the world of the story, and in the minds of at least one of the characters.  (In modern novels, it has become almost compulsory that there are few points of view, ideally just one.)
* There may be incidental, inexplicable acts of god in the story, and a certain minimum of coincidence.  But the story must be driven by motives that are understandable, or at least a substantial proportion of the motives of the actors must be plausible.  If too many of the things people think and do are inexplicable, I think it is bad writing, but perhaps interesting to some perversely because of the inexplicable goings on.
* We have come to expect that the story occupies a sufficient span of time, so that we see characters grow, and age.  If the characters never evolve in response to the action or their interaction, or time, or if there is insufficient time for this to happen, the piece of writing might be a thriller, or a short story, but we would prefer not to categorize it as a novel.  Several months of intense eventfulness, or several years, must transpire.
* A novelist must be, almost essentially, an observer of human nature.  If not so, we are given the wisdom of events entirely inside the author's head, whose interest will truly be limited.  To the extent that the novelist can draw upon the experiences of his or her audience, his or her writing will be so much more persuasive.  In addition, the novelist must understand her fellow-man.  If a novelist has little insight into the minds of his fellow men and women, he is truly handicapped.

So how does Jane Austen fall short?

Of the seven celebrities and authors who criticize Jane Austen, not one offers a critical analysis of her art.

Charlotte Bronte is simply unmoved by Jane Austen's writing.  She conflates, justifiably, the sensibility of Elizabeth, the protagonist of the story, with the sensibilities of Jane Austen herself, and finds fault with her cultural values, or her attitudes towards the speech and the thoughts she encounters, and submits the story itself to the same critical examination, and declares that Elizabeth (or Jane) would have sneered at it.  But wait.  If we make allowances for the world in which Elizabeth lives, and the world in which Jane Austen moved, we have to see that nothing more could be expected.  Jane Austen did not have Charlotte Bronte's experiences against which to measure her world, and Charlotte Bronte doesn't realize that she is expecting Jane Austen to use Bronte's own yardstick.

Churchill and Emerson, too, criticize the world of Austen for being too narrow, and too preoccupied with manners.  What can we do?  Manners was the biggest game for Austen and Elizabeth; Elizabeth was able to see her hero in a positive light only after she was able to reconcile his manners with his circumstances, and his perception of her circumstances.  She accepts him only after realizing that, according to her rules, she deserved to be taken to be a hussy.  Once everybody knew everybody else wasn't an asshole, everything was fine.  By our lights, of course, none of these misunderstandings make any kind of sense, but we have to take the story in context, and honestly, it was not an exciting context in which to set a story.

Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence try a lot harder to look at the story and the author objectively.  Virginia Woolf deplores the milieu, for obvious reasons; in her time, they had put Jane Austen's time behind them, and Virginia Woolf probably should have realized that little written in that time was worth reading, for her.  She was trying to see why everybody else found Austen so compelling.  Austen did not have the heart that Woolf saw in the Brontes.  She concedes that Jane Austen was a great literary craftsman, but that doesn't save her.  D. H. Lawrence deplores the literary (and cultural) trends of the times.  The morality of earlier times had given way to a sort of moral objectivism, as I understand Lawrence, and he says that it left nothing against which to measure a person's actions, except that of behavioral "correctness", or manners.  Unfortunately, not being familiar with his writing, I'm not in a position to understand what he says with the exactness that it no doubt deserves.  But he compares her to Henry Fielding, who is credited (by English-speaking authorities) with being one of the creators of the Novel form, along with Daniel Defoe (of Robinson Crusoe fame), to her detriment.  Most of us can identify with this comparison, because Fielding and Defoe are nowhere nearly as objective and restrained as Jane Austen is (though, as we have seen, Austen's protagonist is nothing if not critical of everyone around her; but criticism is not passion).

I, too have a criticism of Jane Austen; and that is, that (in my humble opinion, of course) she simply could not understand the mind of a man.  Today, all around us, women and men think a lot more alike than they did back in Austen's day, where each sex was trained to think in certain ways.  That fact led to a lot of interesting novels and stories, but the best stories were by authors who could put themselves into the minds of either gender.  Dickens, for instance, had hardly a clue about what went on in the mind of a woman, but he gave it a jolly good try.  But, I'm sorry, Jane Austen's Darcy was impossible for a man to identify with.  He was just a robot, programmed with the manners of the day.

There's obviously a lot that is difficult for modern men or women to understand about the psychology of people of Jane Austen's time (1775-1817), which makes my complaint somewhat irrelevant and impertinent.  Just as I feel that the seven critics in the article I linked to don't make very valid points, I'm on shaky ground myself.  Mark Twain simply says that Jane Austen makes him mad.  It does seem as though, even as long ago as when Virginia Woolf was writing, Jane Austen's preoccupation with manners was annoying; let's face it: it is.  Screw manners, is the phrase that springs to the lips.  So it is nothing short of miraculous that we can enjoy Pride and Prejudice to whatever degree we do, despite this disconnect.  It is a little like Science Fantasy: A Comedy of Manners in the Society of Proxima Centauri.

Afterword: I enjoyed Emma and Sense and Sensibility a lot more than Pride and Prejudice.  If Mark Twain were to attempt to beat Jane Austen with her own shinbone after reading those two books, especially Emma, I would have to ask him to step outside.

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