A Jane Austen Education

by William Deresiewicz

  Learning this lesson was oddly liberating. Just because I thought that another person had done something to me, I was now forced to acknowledge, didn’t mean that I was right. I might be offended by something they had said, but maybe I’d misunderstood them. I might be mad because they were getting ugly with me, but maybe I had started it. Feelings are always about something, and that “something” is not itself a feeling. It’s an idea, a perception of a situation, just as Elizabeth’s feelings were based on her perceptions of certain situations. Everyone could see that Jane loved Bingley; Elizabeth’s family wasn’t really all that bad; Mr. Darcy was insufferably proud: these were the perceptions, the ideas, on which her feelings were based, and they all turned out to be wrong. And because ideas can be wrong, the emotions that are based on them can also be wrong. So now I had a way to let go of my feelings when they weren’t legitimate—when they weren’t correct. I could acknowledge my emotions, but I didn’t have to be controlled by them.

  Needless to say, not everybody wants to hear that their feelings aren’t necessarily valid. In fact, a lot of people hate Jane Austen for just that reason. They see her as cold and prudish, a schoolmarm and killjoy. In graduate school, we split into two camps over the question—Jane Austen, pro or con—and emotions ran high. At a certain point, we were each expected to teach a class that included one nineteenth-century novel. Now, there are a lot of great nineteenth-century novels, but almost all of us chose one of only two: Pride and Prejudice or Jane Eyre. It may seem like a small matter, but great issues were felt to be at stake (as they always are in graduate school). The decision wasn’t just a pedagogical choice, it was a statement of faith, a declaration of self, for the books represented the strongest possible expressions of two diametrically opposed views of life.

  In Pride and Prejudice, reason triumphs over feeling and will. In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë’s own typically Romantic coming-of-age story, emotion and ego overcome all obstacles. Those of us who chose Pride and Prejudice couldn’t imagine how you could stand to read anything as immature and overwrought as Jane Eyre. Those who chose Jane Eyre couldn’t believe that you would subject your students to something as stuffy and insipid as Pride and Prejudice. Our choices, of course, reflected our personalities. The Brontë people, we Austenites felt, tended to go in for self-dramatization and ideological extremism. We regarded ourselves as a cooler, more ironic bunch.

  Brontë herself, in a letter to a friend, articulated the indictment against her illustrious predecessor:She does her business of delineating the surface of the lives of genteel English people curiously well; she ruffles her reader by nothing vehement, disturbs him by nothing profound: the Passions are perfectly unknown to her; she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy Sisterhood; even to the feelings she vouchsafes no more than an occasional graceful but distant recognition. Her business is not half so much with the human heart as with the human eyes, mouth, hands and feet; what sees keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly, it suits her to study, but what throbs fast and full, though hidden, what the blood rushes through—this Miss Austen ignores.

  But Austen did not ignore the feelings—Elizabeth and her story were full of them—and she certainly knew about the passions. Lydia was nothing but the passions, and Elizabeth was tossed by her share as well. “How despicably I have acted!” was not the declaration of a passionless person. Austen valued the feelings and passions; she just didn’t think we should worship them.

  Yet my Brontëan peers rejected the older novelist for a deeper reason as well, one that Brontë herself would not have understood. To assert that reason should govern emotion is to defy the modern dogma that the two cannot be disentangled in the first place. In the past hundred years, Freud and others have brought us to the view that objectivity is an illusion, that our rational conclusions are merely manifestations of hidden impulses or covert expressions of self-interest—above all, when it comes to ideas regarding our own conduct and judgment, which is, of course, what Jane Austen’s novels are about.

  But Austen didn’t buy it. In the letter that changed Elizabeth’s mind about everything, her correspondent had this to say about whether Jane had seemed indifferent to Bingley’s attentions: “That I was desirous of believing her indifferent is certain—but I will venture to say that my investigations and decisions are not usually influenced by my hopes or fears. I did not believe her to be indifferent because I wished it;—I believed it on impartial conviction.” The first half of this, with its smug tone, might strike us as insufferable, and the second might strike us as improbable, but Austen meant us to accept it all. “Impartial conviction”—the ability to think our way above our limited point of view—was a real human possibility for her, and the person who wrote that letter was capable of it. For Elizabeth, growing up meant learning to become capable of it, too.

  By making mistakes, and recognizing her mistakes, and testing her impulses against the claims of logic, the heroine of Pride and Prejudice learned the most important lesson of all. She learned that she wasn’t the center of the universe. Growing up, for her creator, means coming to see yourself from the outside, as one very limited person. This was Austen’s vision of redemption, just as the moment of humiliation—that excruciating scene of exposure—was Austen’s vision of grace.

  In the terms in which both comedies and tragedies have been understood since the time of Aristotle, Pride and Prejudice pivoted on a pair of twinned events: a recognition and a reversal. The heroine saw something—about herself, about her actions—and as a result, her fortune changed. But Austen also altered the traditional pattern in an enormously profound way. In the classic comic plot, a pair of young lovers are kept apart by some external obstacle, some “blocking figure” that represents the eternal antagonism of age and youth: a possessive father, a jealous old husband, the laws and customs of an antiquated, repressive society. Austen changed everything by putting that obstacle on the inside. Now we ourselves are the blocking figures who are causing us so much trouble. We are the ones standing in the way of our own happiness. Once Elizabeth was ready to be happy, it didn’t matter what any of the grown-ups thought. For Austen, reason is liberation, and growing up is the truest freedom of all.

  So it was with me. Early that fall, after a summer spent reading like I had a gun to my head and a final night of sleepless terror, I crept into the examination room to face my inquisitors and staggered out two hours later having passed my qualifying exams. Afterward, one of the professors—that Clark Gable lookalike with the cigarette voice—asked me if I had plans to get started on my dissertation.

  “I think I need to take it easy for a while,” I said.

  “That’s a good idea,” he replied. “You should let your mind lie fallow.”

  “Lie fallow?” I said. “Lie prostrate.”

  But the truth is, I did have a plan. After reading my way through Jane Austen’s stories about growing up, I decided that the time had come for me to do a little growing up of my own. I could no longer stay in that dingy room, with those random roommates, in that neighborhood where I had spent almost all of my life since I was seventeen. Most importantly, I could no longer live in my father’s shadow. A lot of my friends had moved downtown by that point, or out to Brooklyn, and I decided I was going to join them. I would find my own place, I would get some real furniture, and I would finally learn how to live on my own.

  My father took me to lunch the next day—at the faculty club this time, by way of celebration. As we ate our baked salmon, I told him about the exam, but the mood turned sour when I explained what I planned to do next. He didn’t like it one bit. “It’s going to cost you a lot more!” he warned. That wasn’t really true. It was going to cost me more, but not a lot more. Besides, his answer was to pull some strings to get me a better place within university housing—rushing in to solve the problem once again, or what he wanted to think was the problem—which would have cost me just as much.

  In any case, money wasn’t the point. He sensed,
even if he couldn’t say it, what the real point was. By moving away from the neighborhood, I was moving away from him, and that’s exactly what he was trying to head off. Brooklyn? What was Brooklyn? Brooklyn was where he lived when he came over before the war. It was the place you got out of, not the one you went back to. Why would anyone want to move out there?

  But I knew why. Moving to Brooklyn might turn out to be a huge mistake, but if so, it was a mistake that I was going to make on my own. I was tired of being infantilized, tired of being afraid: afraid to fail, afraid to disappoint him by failing. I had had enough of our old drama of criticism and defiance, protection and rebellion. I was ready for a new chapter. Like Elizabeth Bennet, I had found my freedom.

  CHAPTER 3

  northanger abbey learning to learn

  From the beginning, my love for Jane Austen had been intertwined with my love for the professor with whom I had first encountered her. He was the one who had taught the seminar where I read Emma, he was the one who had shepherded me through my oral exams, and now he would be the one with whom I would undertake the inconceivable task of writing my dissertation.

  But first he did the impossible by helping me find a great, cheap New York apartment. I had been schlepping around the city for weeks on end trying to figure out somewhere to live—filling out forms in shady brokerage offices, answering ads for fifth-floor walk-ups, auditioning for spots as the fourth roommate in apartments the size of a decent bedroom, checking out places where the bathtub was in the kitchen, the kitchen was in the living room, and the living room reeked of rotting fish from the Chinese market downstairs—when he mentioned that his next-door neighbor was looking for someone to rent one of the floors in her brownstone.

  The place was a palace compared to the things I’d been looking at, and she was asking far less than she could have gotten on the open market, so it was way too sweet a deal for me to worry about the fact that I’d be living right next to the person who’d be supervising my work for the rest of my time in school. I did experience one little wave of panic, though. Smoking pot with some friends a few days after signing the lease, I stumbled into one of those moments of stoned clarity. Oh, my God! I thought. I’m moving in next to my professor! Could there be a more obvious way of telling the entire world—especially my professor—that I think of him as a father substitute? Nor was the irony of breaking free from one father only to go running into the arms of another in any way lost on me. I could practically feel the diapers growing on me as I sat there. But even in that state, something told me to calm down and stay with my first instinct. I had too much to learn from this man to back away from him now.

  He was the youngest old person I had ever met. He was already old enough to retire by the time I took his class, but he was still going stronger than anyone else in the department. He advised a huge number of graduate students, taught courses on a vast range of subjects (nineteenth-century fiction, Romantic poetry, Native American literature, children’s literature, science fiction, Great Books, etc., etc.), helped run about eight professional journals, published a new book every three years or so, and even took on extra classes—an unheard-of thing and a testament to his incredible devotion as a teacher. A houseguest of his—a medical student, no layabout herself—once told me that she’d hear him hustling down the stairs first thing in the morning, getting a running start on his workday before she’d even had a chance to climb out of bed.

  But it wasn’t just his energy. He had a young person’s ability to see the world with fresh eyes. His white hair shot up off his forehead like a jolt of discovery, and when he came across a new idea, all the lines in his face would stand at attention. He always wanted to hear what you had to say, no matter how much you stumbled while trying to say it, because he never missed an opportunity to learn something new.

  It took me a while to figure all this out. In fact, I wondered at first if I had made a mistake by taking his class. That first day, as he came bustling into the room with a stack of books under his arm, a little old man with a white beard, his manner seemed oddly abrupt, almost jumpy, his eyes kind of squirrelly, and he gave a sort of chuckle, as if he were enjoying a private joke that he didn’t plan to share with us. He came across as eccentric, to say the least, if not actually soft in the head, and the impression was not dispelled by the questions he proceeded to ask. They seemed absurdly simple—silly, really, almost stupid, too basic and obvious to ask a class of freshmen, let alone a graduate seminar.

  But when we tried to answer them, we discovered that they were not simple in the least. They were profound, because they were about all the things we had come to take for granted— about novels, about language, about reading. Questions like, what does it mean to identify with a literary character? I thought I knew, but did I really? Does it simply mean putting yourself in their place? Obviously not. Or approving of their actions? But we’re happy to identify with bad characters, given the right encouragement. No, the best I could come up with was that it seemed to be a kind of in-between state—you’re somehow them and not them at the same time—that can’t exactly be put into words. Which wasn’t really much of an answer at all.

  Or again, he observed that there is one part of Madame Bovary that no one ever translates into English. Huh? Well, he said, the title—why is that? That one really brought me up short, almost made me angry, it was so audacious. Were you even allowed to ask a thing like that? On the other hand, how would you translate it? Lady Bovary? But she’s not an aristocrat. Mrs. Bovary? But that’s much too plain. The answer seemed to be that there is no English equivalent for “Madame,” not even “Madam,” which said more than I really wanted to know about the differences between the two cultures, and, therefore, my ability to understand the novel altogether.

  Within about half an hour, I had started to get what the old man was doing, and I realized that I had never experienced anything like it before. He was stripping the paint off our brains. He was showing us that everything is open to question, especially the things we thought we already knew. He was teaching us to approach the world with curiosity and humility rather than the professional certainty we were all trying so hard to cultivate. In order to answer his questions, we had to forget everything and start over again from the beginning. “Answers are easy,” he would later say. “You can go out to the street and any fool will give you answers. The trick is to ask the right questions.”

  I knew a good thing when I saw one. I took a second class, in Romantic poetry, and became a regular at office hours. It felt like a privilege to be able to sit next to his desk and talk to him one-on-one. He never made us feel like anything less than his equals, even though we weren’t. He had an impish laugh, though, and he could be shifty. (When I found out that he also studied Native American literature, I decided that he must be Coyote, the trickster. But we had a tendency to mythologize him. An Indian friend saw him as the elephant-headed god Ganesh, remover of obstacles.) If you said something vague or half-formed, he’d pretend to misunderstand you, as if he were slightly dense, so that by fighting your way back to what you really meant, you’d have to figure out what you’d been trying to say in the first place. I’d catch myself walking out of his office backwards, as if I’d been in the presence of royalty.

  My dearest hope, once I started teaching myself, was to have the same kind of impact on my students. Starting our third year, the graduate program required us to teach three years of freshman English. The challenge thrilled me; I had always wanted to be a teacher, and now, after encountering my professor, I was more eager than ever to get into the classroom. But once I did, all the air went out of my balloon, and fast. Something was desperately wrong with what I was trying to do, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. I would come into class with long chains of questions that I had painstakingly designed to lead my students to the ideas I thought they needed to grasp, but they never managed to give me the answers I wanted, and the whole thing would deteriorate into a guessing game.

  Instead of
being receptive to what I had to tell them, they would fold their arms and sit back in their chairs and stare at me with those skeptical-teenager looks on their faces. The air in the room would go sour, like a bad smell. Time turned to jelly. By about ten minutes in, a little piece of my mind would detach itself and float up to the ceiling, watching me for the rest of the hour as I stood there flailing away. It was like one of those dreams where you find yourself onstage and realize that you’ve forgotten to learn the lines. I’d rush from class with a guilty feeling in my stomach, like a criminal making a getaway, or try to engage a student as we left the room, hoping for a last-minute reprieve. But of course they couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

  As for their writing—the thing I was supposed to be helping them get better at—they would hand in little essays twice a week, and I would spend hours covering them with red marks, pouncing on every dangling modifier and misplaced comma like an avenging angel. No matter how bad things were going in the classroom—this was my twisted logic—it was the one thing, I thought, that I could do for them. And then they would hand in the next set of papers, and all the same mistakes would still be there. I wanted to pull my teeth out. Shouldn’t they have learned this stuff already? Why weren’t they trying harder? Didn’t they appreciate what I was doing for them? I wanted to blame them for the way things were going, but I secretly knew that I wasn’t the teacher I thought I was going to be, and I certainly wasn’t anything like the one my professor was. I began to wonder if my whole desire to go into academia hadn’t been a terrible mistake.

  Under the circumstances, I was only too happy to turn back to my other work. The first chapter of my dissertation was going to be about Jane Austen, needless to say, and I started out by going back and rereading all of her novels, this time in chronological order. That meant beginning with Northanger Abbey, a short, light work whose playfulness and youthful charm had delighted me the first time around but that I hadn’t paid a lot of attention to otherwise.