“tu-ru-ut u-ni-we-er-sa-al-li ak-nu-le-eg-ge-ed”
Did that sound a bit familiar? It is, transliterated as if it were phonetic ancient Assyrian, Pride and Prejudice’s “truth universally acknowledged.” Austen’s opener is such a cultural touchstone that Oxford Assyriologists set beginning students the task of understanding “the impossibility of writing adjacent consonants in a syllabary” and focusing “attention on the lack of ‘o’, ‘f’ or ‘j’ in cuneiform.” Irving Finkel, the Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian script, languages, and cultures at the British Museum, pooh-poohs such gimmicks. But he too, in getting us to imagine a murky past, draws on Austen:
Take Pride and Prejudice. In their outer wrapping, the characters within it do look a bit odd from a very contemporary perspective, with their social mannerisms, codes of behaviour and religious practice, but their motives, behaviour and humanity are in every way familiar. So it must be as one vaults backwards in time, and so it is with Shakespeare and Chaucer, and the Vindolanda tablets in demotic Latin, and Aristophanes, and there we are, BC already. One species in myriad disguises.
Gilgamesh and Pride and Prejudice: siblings under the skin?
Sometimes a view backward can help bring the past—or parts of it, at any rate—into perspective, although it is tempting to reinterpret that past into our own image, constructing “just so” stories that make our current values not only look or feel good but seem inevitable and “natural.” With narrative works of art like Austen’s—that is, time artfully shaped—the choice of where and when to stop time frames our judgments about whether an ending is, crudely, happy or not. If Austen had stopped Pride and Prejudice at the end of volume 1, the Bennet girls would be left back at their unmarried beginning: Charlotte has got Mr. Collins, and the departure of Mr. Bingley and Mr. Darcy has left the neighborhood of Longbourn once again bereft of single men in possession of a good fortune. But while Austen could have chosen to write more subdued endings—ones more similar to her and her sister Cassandra’s romantic fates—she did not.
Austen’s endings are Inger Brodey’s focus in her new book, Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness.[1] Brodey acknowledges that Austen’s six finished novels conform superficially to the Miss Prism school of fiction: “The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.” But Brodey’s real starting point for her inquiry is her own teenage uneasiness, even dislike, of Austen’s endings, not at the Miss Prism level of plot, but due to a vaguer, niggling sensation.
As a teen reader of Austen, I relished the flush of pleasure at the union of star-crossed lovers at the end of her novels. Yet I was also annoyed and puzzled by the way Austen distances herself from her happy endings, laughs her readers out of romance, and speeds us through the final longed-for events in a blur of narration. . . . I wanted, as I think most readers do, to suspend disbelief and immerse myself in the glorious resolutions, attributing all the choices to the characters themselves. I did not want to be reminded that I was reading falsehoods—the product of someone’s imagination, that I was subject to the whims of its author.
Brodey’s earlier self has a lot of company. Almost every television or film version of Austen smooths out Austen’s final difficulties of plot or tone so we can end still floating in a soft-focus feel-good world. For instance, 2005’s Pride & Prejudice has Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen chillaxing at what looks like Pemberley’s infinity pool; 2007’s Persuasion ends with poor-little-rich-girl Sally Hawkins being surprised by her new husband Rupert Penry-Jones’s wedding present of her beloved family estate, Kellynch Hall; and as for Mansfield Park, the 2007 version’s vibrant and active tousle-haired Billie Piper gets a picnic wedding, and the 1999 version ends with the already married Jonny Lee Miller and Frances O’Connor going over the details of her first book deal.
These endings indulge us. They offer unrealistically utopian unctions; Austen puts the flies back in the ointment. For instance, Pride and Prejudice reminds us that marriages are not solipsistic unions but remain firmly embedded in communities. Elizabeth and Darcy, no matter how happy they might be together, still have a future that includes the tugs of family demands, including Elizabeth’s sister Lydia’s begging letters and Darcy’s aunt Lady Catherine’s insults. (Not all tugs of the heart are bad, of course: Austen ends the novel with a nod to the happily married couple who helped bring Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy together, her Aunt and Uncle Gardiner.) The films’ falsified endings also crudely simplify, returning to stock Cinderella endings that seriously misinterpret their source. Austen’s Persuasion, for instance, is importantly about Anne rejecting the superficial values of Kellynch Hall which will be inherited by her morally corrupt male cousin whose romantic overtures she has also rejected. She has instead chosen the anxious happiness of being a naval officer’s wife in wartime, one that by its nature will be both physically and emotionally unsettling. Worst of all, the movie endings also tend to flatter our values. Austen’s Fanny is physically small, timid, and easily overlooked; she tires easily and is outwardly so subservient and nonconfrontational that she has been called an “Anglican doormat.” Drawing on the novel’s potential for capturing interiority, Austen confronts us with a kind of heroic goodness that is, indeed, easy to overlook. From the beginning, many readers have found Fanny a difficult heroine to value—goodness is boring!—but both movie Fannys are examples of (to borrow a phrase coined by one of Brodey’s students) “Elizabeth Bennetification.” Brodey asks, “Why must today’s heroines be vivacious, charming, and rebellious? . . . Modern audiences have trouble tolerating a heroine who doesn’t assert herself.”
Some movies manage the hat trick of combining utopian, Cinderella, and contemporary wish fulfillment. 2007’s Northanger Abbey ends with Henry Tilney (JJ Feild) confessing that Catherine (Felicity Jones) was completely right in every particular. Not only is Catherine vindicated, but rewarded: in its final narrative voiceover (Geraldine James, billed as “the voice of Jane Austen”), the film silently kills off Henry’s older brother, so that the happy couple (and their dynasty—they now have a baby) will be inheriting Northanger Abbey when the isolated and miserable General finally dies. The novel does none of these things. In general, Brodey finds, the movie endings expand what Austen has artfully contracted and omitted: “Sentimental and explicit film dialogue stands in for Austen’s more understated words; exaggerated romantic declarations take the place of Austen’s tantalizingly omitted ones; copious attention to details of dress and hair make up for the paucity of detail in Austen’s descriptions; and romantic love eclipses all political, social, and ethical considerations.”
But why are Austen’s endings so truncated and, arguably, unsatisfying? What one critic describes as the “formulaic patness with which everything is wound up” is a problem that many frustrated critics have tried to explain away. Perhaps, speculates one, Austen’s “botched ending[s]” have a psychological component grounded in her spinsterhood: “Surely by now, at thirty-eight, she had realised that she would never play such a scene herself.” Her “over-hasty desire” to “get the thing over with” was because “it was too painful for her to invent one.” Others credit Austen with some self-control; the problem wasn’t herself but her aesthetics. In Sense and Sensibility, for instance, Austen trapped herself into squishing her ending together because her thematic structure demanded “overriding geometry.” Or is she aesthetically too timid, feeling herself beholden by genre to conserve the appearances of the “happy ending”? Since Austen can, however, be innovative, even radical, both in her techniques (such as free indirect style) and in her politics (such as questioning the patriarchy), her failures at the close might be moral: Does she perhaps allow her heroines to fall into the conventional marriage plot at the last post even though it compromises her vision because she could not muster the courage to face criticism for her views in the real world? Perhaps she was just bored? Perhaps she just wasn’t that good a writer? One critic even floats the idea that Jane Austen, of all people, can’t cope with ambiguity. Brodey has written the first book-length study of Austen’s endings and takes as her starting position the idea that Austen is an artist in control of her materials. Brodey argues that Austen chooses to turn “the lights on in the theater a bit earlier than we would like, so that we can be self-reflective about what we have witnessed.”
To see the “artificial, gratuitous, and anti-romantic” techniques of an Austen ending at work—and to recapture the feeling of how they work on us—I’d like to take some time to focus on the ending of Northanger Abbey. The novel is quite short—211 pages in my Penguin—and its plot moves straightforwardly, taking Catherine from her unassuming childhood as the oldest daughter of a country parson on a journey first to the fashionable watering place Bath, then to stay with her new friends, the Tilneys, at their grand country house, Northanger Abbey, until their father, General Tilney, who has hitherto been almost fawningly considerate of her, casts her out. The last three chapters serve the function of bringing Catherine home, resolving the romantic plot, and tying up the loose ends to get them hitched.
Way back at the beginning of the novel, Austen wrote: “No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be an heroine.” At that point, this sentence seemed both to set up a confident and arch narrator with a slightly derogatory attitude to her own heroine and to enlist her audience as complicit, somewhat detached observers. But as Catherine’s adventure darkens, that tone has receded, and we have become invested. Chapter 29 begins with us readers embedded in poor Catherine’s thoughts and feelings on her forced and perhaps slightly dangerous solo eleven-hour trip home—she is “too wretched to be fearful.” Halfway through the chapter, however, the narrator jerks us back to that first sentence with a more discursive editorial comment on heroineship, storytelling, and audience desires.
A heroine returning, at the close of her career, to her native village, in all the triumph of recovered reputation, and all the dignity of a countess, with a long train of noble relations in their several phaetons, and three waiting-maids in a travelling chaise-and-four, behind her, is an event on which the pen of the contriver may well delight to dwell; it gives credit to every conclusion, and the author must share in the glory she so liberally bestows.—But my affair is widely different; I bring back my heroine to her home in solitude and disgrace; and no sweet elation of spirits can lead me into minuteness. A heroine in a hack post-chaise, is such a blow upon sentiment, as no attempt at grandeur or pathos can withstand. Swiftly therefore shall her post-boy drive through the village, amid the gaze of Sunday groups, and speedy shall be her descent from it.
Austen places the narrative voice on a gimbal, gyrating between narrative power and powerlessness, fiction and reality. On the one hand, as a self-confessed “contriver,” the narrator knows perfectly well how romantic stories with heroines are supposed to end and how authors benefit from them. On the other hand, the narrator is suggesting that, no matter how much she wishes it were otherwise, she is powerless to change the actual plot: Catherine’s “solitude and disgrace” (including the disgrace in the eyes of her father’s congregation of breaking the Sabbath by traveling on Sunday) can’t just be contrived away. Apparently, these facts have the fixity of the real world. On some third hand, however, the narrator can control the manner in which she relates those facts. Thus here she chooses to move swiftly, including some details (not all of them, a reader might have thought, strictly necessary) but able to omit others. For readers, being pushed through the narrator’s thought process is a bit vertiginous. For the rest of the chapter, however, we are back in the flow of the narrative, safely in the point of view of Catherine whose mind can’t stop thinking about Henry Tilney: “Catherine was silently reflecting that now Henry must have arrived at Northanger; now he must have heard of her departure; and now, perhaps, they were all setting off for Hereford.”
It will surprise no experienced reader of fiction that Henry arrives in the next chapter. In fact, the 2007 film stages his arrival with Catherine adorably romping outside with her little brothers and sisters supplying a bit of family comedy. What is surprising is Austen’s choice to de-dramatize her hero’s entrance at the romantic denouement. Austen, as a lover of plays, is an excellent choreographer of action; here she almost anticipates a film technique of exploiting the limited point of view of a single camera. Catherine’s mother leaves the room to fetch an improving book. In the course of the few sentences where we follow her on her household errands, she and we have missed Henry’s arrival; a “young man whom she had never seen before” is already sitting in her parlor. The reader here is in an odd position: intimate enough to be one step ahead of all the characters, but caught flat-footed by the narrator.
Austen’s narrator further frustrates us with omissions. She relates no direct dialogue at all—including Henry’s proposal and Catherine’s acceptance: “She was assured of his affection; and that heart in return was solicited.” Then the narrator grants us a shockingly cool insight into Henry’s heart:
though Henry was now sincerely attached to her, though he felt and delighted in all the excellencies of her character and truly loved her society, I must confess that his affection originated in nothing better than gratitude, or, in other words, that a persuasion of her partiality for him had been the only cause of giving her a serious thought.
Like students looking on as the surgeon wields the scalpel, we now know something that not only does Catherine not know, but that even the perceptive Henry might not know about himself. As the novel draws to a close, Austen, through her narrator, is working to detach us from it.
And then we come to the final chapter—barely over three pages in my edition. And yet there is still quite a lot to resolve: while Henry and Catherine have declared their love for each other, and he has an “income of independence and comfort” with the hope of more, General Tilney still remains an obstacle. But to whatever degree we may have sympathized with them to this point—and as we’ve seen Austen has been at some pains both to enlist our sympathy and distance us—now Austen has her narrator step in again to remind us that our feelings cannot be entirely identical to theirs:
The anxiety, which in this state of their attachment must be the portion of Henry and Catherine, and of all who loved either, as to its final event, can hardly extend, I fear, to the bosom of my readers, who will see in the tell-tale compression of the pages before them, that we are all hastening together to perfect felicity.
Brought back to earth with a bump, we’re reminded that we inhabit different worlds, one in which the feel of how many pages are left in the book, and the foreknowledge of the genre of story the characters are embedded in, are unknowable to them. The effects of this knowledge are twofold: on the one hand to separate us even further from Catherine and Henry, and on the other to bind us into a new group: a band of readers with a shared but now more skeptical interest in “perfect felicity.” And yet again, while we might be flattered to be in this select, knowing group, it’s also a chastening reminder that we are not unique and that the narrator, one step ahead of us, finds our responses predictable.
My final example will be the final sentence, the sentence that fulfills the “moral of the story” function: “I leave it to be settled, by whomsoever it may concern, whether the tendency of this work be altogether to recommend parental tyranny, or reward filial disobedience.” Austen wrote this novel in her twenties; how she must have enjoyed the many ways this joke can land. It can be easy—and comfortable—to read Northanger Abbey as a great lark, whether as an extended parody of popular Gothic fiction, or as a proto-postmodern narrative experiment. But her final chapters show that even if we began in a larkish spirit, by the time we come to the end, we find we have some skin in the game too. There’s the reminder that we, with the power of standing outside the novel and now freed from the control of our narrator, can interpret it as we will. After all, we’re out of the book now and don’t need to accept either of her choices. Whatever our thoughts on these questions might be, the mind of the narrator continues to work on us after the end of the book.
In my tour through the last three chapters of Northanger Abbey, I’ve pointed out a few of the ways Austen yanks us out of a warm bath of lovey-doveyness into a cold shower of self-consciousness. Brodey, an excellent close reader, also pulls in other kinds of evidence, from biographical to structural. She is particularly good on varieties of apophasis (a.k.a. paralepsis for rhetorical term aficionados). Apophasis, where you say you won’t be saying something, is often snarkily passive-aggressive: “I won’t mention all those times you’ve failed to unload the dishwasher . . .” Austen extends this technique to bring to the forefront of our minds other possibilities and contingencies, what hasn’t happened, what could have been. What, asks Brodey, is Austen’s purpose in doing so?
Here we get to Brodey’s insight about “the price of happiness.” Love comes with a cost: suppressing a laugh so as not to hurt your beloved’s feelings, trying to care for both your father and your fiancé, or paying “the tax of quick alarm” when those you love are in danger. Thus, while the endings are happy, “Austen consistently holds utopia at arm’s length.” Furthermore, while marriage is important, Austen’s endings remind us it is not the only ending. That is, “The magic of her solution is to give us the happy ending, while also reminding us of its evitability—leaving the price tag attached.” Austen puts her heroines in positions where, for many chapters, they identify what they want as their happy ending but must also prepare themselves for the possibility that they won’t get it. And finally, since Austen has put us readers both inside our heroine’s desire and outside evaluating it, we’re part of the accounting too: she “subtly encourages her reader[s] to focus on forms of happiness that are more within our control, such as learning to be a better person or reconciling with friends or family. And in most of her novels, she works to give readers ‘resources for solitude’ in the likely case that they do not find the right partner at the right time.”
Brodey assumes Austen trusts in her “readers’ sagacity.” As Austen once wrote her sister Cassandra, “I do not write for such dull Elves / As have not a great deal of Ingenuity themselves.” One issue Brodey’s book has made me think about a little harder is how much Austen has made amending such ingenious readers an integral part of her art. Writers interested in both Austen and cognitive science, notably George Butte and Lisa Zunshine,[2] have illuminated how Austen’s narrative draws on what is now called Theory of Mind, that is, a person’s ability to recognize that other people have minds too and also that those minds might be different from ours. Some of Austen’s characters—Mr. Collins, say—might technically know that other people have minds, but they are terrible at interpreting behavior. Others, of course, do have more sophisticated understandings of the workings of other people’s minds—Mr. Bennet, for example, and his observant and clever daughter Elizabeth.
Butte in his book I Know That You Know That I Know identifies a particularly complicated version he calls “deep intersubjectivity”: “a web woven from elements of mutually exchanged consciousnesses.” Butte singles out a moment fairly late in Persuasion when our heroine Anne, standing in Molland’s bakery, sees the man she loves, the naval officer Frederick Wentworth, and her snooty older sister Elizabeth.
It did not surprise, but it grieved Anne to observe that Elizabeth would not know him. She saw that he saw Elizabeth, that Elizabeth saw him, that there was complete internal recognition on each side; she was convinced that he was ready to be acknowledged as an acquaintance, expecting it, and she had the pain of seeing her sister turn away with unalterable coldness.
Anne observes Elizabeth’s and Wentworth’s actions, but more importantly, based on applying her knowledge of their characters, she interprets their feelings and even intentions—and then, of course, she overlays her emotions based on her interpretations.
Anne’s ability to read other people is impressive. But what really interests me is how Austen trusts or trains her audience to follow the thoughts of her thoughtful characters. We are one more layer out, appreciating Anne’s accurate sensibility. By Zunshine’s count, an ingenious elf reading this passage needs to excavate five layers of intentionality: “Anne realizes that Wentworth understands that Elizabeth pretends not to recognize that he wants to be acknowledged as an acquaintance.” And that’s before Austen sets us up to realize our own further layer of intentionality, as we perceive that Anne realizes, etc. Why would Austen make her readers negotiate mazes of dense intersubjectivity? Zunshine wonders if we readers who “sail smoothly through a clearly demanding cognitive construction” are led to flatter ourselves with the “illusion” that “we will be all right out there in the real world, where our social survival depends on attributing states of mind and constantly negotiating among those bewildering, approximate, self-serving, partially wrong or plainly wrong attributions.” Maybe so. But Brodey’s work confirms my feeling that Austen is not interested in fostering illusion. Ultimately, Austen does us the honor of not flattering our vanity. She has designed the ends of her novels to push us out of her artificial world back out into a world that requires even more of us.
I have often wondered about how Austen’s father’s sermons influenced her. As far as I know none survive, so I’m left speculating. He encouraged her writing and tried to help her get it out into the world. Austen would have had a backstage view of his writing process and a front-row seat to his performances. Although, like many clergymen of the time, the Rev. George Austen sometimes delivered sermons written by other people, he also wrote his own. He would have tailored his perorations and parting exhortations to the various capabilities, needs, and personalities of his congregation whom both he and his daughter would have known well. Austen used the more private possibilities of the novel for her unpreachy lessons. But I wonder if she too felt the imperative to send people out the door examining not the frailties of others, but the devices and desires of their hearts in the knowledge that the world we temporarily inhabit is not the final one.
[1] Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness, by Inger Sigrun Bredkjær Brodey. Johns Hopkins University Press. $27.95.
[2] George Butte, I Know That You Know That I Know: Narrating Subjects from Moll Flanders to Marnie (Columbus, 2020). Lisa Zunshine, “Why Jane Austen Was Different, and Why We May Need Cognitive Science to See It,” Style 41, no. 3 (2007), pp. 275–98.
