What Matters in Jane Austen?_Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved

by John Mullan

  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 gr
ows 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)

  All this, like much of the novel, is in free indirect style, where the narrative takes on the habits of thought and the vocabulary of the character. That opening repetition – ‘very elegant, remarkably elegant’ – lets us hear Emma thinking to herself, complimenting Jane Fairfax but also her known judgement. For a moment she can admire Jane Fairfax, whom she does not like, as a compliment to her own discernment. She likes to see ‘elegance’ because of its rarity, and because, by implication, so few in Highbury are qualified, like her, to recognise it.

  The habit of one character looking at another with disinterested aesthetic regard is the more peculiar as looking can be charged with such significant feeling in Austen’s fiction. Rarely is this sense stronger than in the scene at the concert in Bath in Persuasion, staged as Anne has begun to believe that Captain Wentworth still loves her. The singers sing, or Mr Elliot talks on, while in every interval of the two Anne looks for Wentworth, and tries to catch a look from him. For nothing more is possible. When speech is difficult, characters become so sensitive to looks that they feel them without looking themselves. Or they think they do so. In Emma, Frank Churchill takes his leave of Highbury after having stopped short of giving Emma a proper explanation of the state of his feelings. ‘I think you can hardly be without suspicion,’ he says, and she naturally misunderstands (II. xii). He is on the point of confessing his attachment to Jane Fairfax; Emma believes he is about to declare his love for her. ‘She believed he was looking at her; probably reflecting on what she had said, and trying to understand the manner. She heard him sigh.’ Most important of all are the occasions when characters will not look back when looked at. Thus the peculiar passage in Emma, shortly after Frank Churchill has blunderingly revealed his knowledge of Mr Perry’s coach, where the narrative unfolds from Mr Knightley’s perspective. ‘Mr. Knightley’s eyes had preceded Miss Bates’s in a glance at Jane. From Frank Churchill’s face, where he thought he saw confusion suppressed or laughed away, he had involuntarily turned to her’s; but she was indeed behind, and too busy with her shawl’ (III. v). Jane Fairfax is adept at turning her looks from others.

  In Persuasion, it is the heroine who avoids meeting another’s eyes. When Anne Elliot encounters Wentworth again after almost eight years the narrative mimics her own looking aside.

  Her eye half met Captain Wentworth’s, a bow, a curtsey passed; she heard his voice; he talked to Mary, said all that was right; said something to the Miss Musgroves, enough to mark an easy footing; the room seemed full, full of persons and voices, but a few minutes ended it. Charles shewed himself at the window, all was ready, their visitor had bowed and was gone. (I. vii)

  She looks down and away, only confusedly sensing what is happening. She sees only enough to mortify her the more, to notice that the years have given him ‘a more glowing, manly, open look’. When she plays the piano as he dances with the Musgrove and Hayter girls she can look at the music or the keys, though not without an acute sensitivity to his glances. ‘Once she felt that he was looking at herself – observing her altered features, perhaps, trying to trace in them the ruins of the face which had once charmed him.’ Only in the crisis of Louisa Musgrove’s fall at Lyme is such painful restraint abandoned. In desperation, Wentworth does look at – and look for – Anne. ‘Captain Wentworth’s eyes were also turned towards her’ (I. xii). The manoeuvres of looking and not looking are set aside. And then when, in Bath, she senses that his feelings for her are fully re-awakened, she and we discover a different kind of not-looking, seeing Wentworth in the street and looking and then ‘not daring to look again’ (I. vii).

  This emotionally charged evasion of looks contrasts with the strange licensed looking that we have seen with Mr Darcy’s inspection of Elizabeth Bennet or Emma’s of Jane Fairfax. When Emma Woodhouse visits Jane Fairfax after the latter’s two-year absence from Highbury, we are told first of her ‘dislike’ of the woman, and second of her admiration of her person. She looks at her with a ‘sense of pleasure’. The next day she tells Mr Knightley, ‘She is a sort of elegant creature that one cannot keep one’s eyes from. I am always watching her to admire’ (II. iii). This is not a confession, but a declaration that is supposed to exhibit her good taste. When Frank Churchill attempts to pre-empt suspicions of his relationship with Jane by commenting on her ‘most deplorable want of complexion’, Emma enters into the debate with ‘a warm defence of Miss Fairfax’s complexion’ – as if the matter were not charged with significance. Emma says, ‘there is no disputing about taste’. Even more cunningly, Frank Churchill confidentially mocks Jane’s hairstyle:

  she saw Frank Churchill looking intently across the room at Miss Fairfax, who was sitting exactly opposite.

  ‘What is the matter?’ said she.

  He started. ‘Thank you for rousing me,’ he replied. ‘I believe I have been very rude; but really Miss Fairfax has done her hair in so odd a way—so very odd a way—that I cannot keep my eyes from her. I never saw any thing so outré! Those curls! This must be a fancy of her own. I see nobody else looking like her! I must go and ask her whether it is a
n Irish fashion. Shall I? Yes, I will—I declare I will— and you shall see how she takes it;— whether she colours.’

  He was gone immediately; and Emma soon saw him standing before Miss Fairfax, and talking to her; but as to its effect on the young lady, as he had improvidently placed himself exactly between them, exactly in front of Miss Fairfax, she could absolutely distinguish nothing. (II. viii)

  Frank Churchill’s sotto voce comments to Emma are an improvised excuse for being caught in a lover’s gaze. When he goes to speak to Jane he naturally (‘improvidently’, Emma mistakenly thinks) blocks Emma’s view of Jane’s face.

  It still surprises some readers to find that looks in Austen’s novels can so openly express what we might call sexual attraction.

  Mr Darcy’s aesthetic appreciation of Elizabeth Bennet’s eyes is amusing self-delusion, but this way of looking at women can be more uncertain in its effects on us. For the modern reader, there is, I think, something disconcerting about Mr Knightley’s appreciative discussion of Emma’s ‘person’ in the fifth chapter of Emma. ‘How well she looked last night!’ exclaims Mrs Weston.