A Jane Austen Education

by William Deresiewicz

  Catherine Morland, the figure at the center of the story, was only seventeen—one of the youngest and certainly the most naïve of Austen’s heroines. In fact, she may have been the novelist’s own mocking self-portrait. If Austen resembled Elizabeth Bennet as a young woman, Catherine may well have been what she was like as a girl. Both were daughters of clergymen in sleepy country villages. Both came from big families—eight kids in Austen’s case, ten in Catherine’s—and both had a bunch of older brothers. Catherine, at ten, was a tomboy: “she was moreover noisy and wild, hated confinement and cleanliness, and loved nothing so well in the world as rolling down the green slope at the back of the house”—just the kind of slope the Austens had at the back of their own house.

  At fourteen, Catherine preferred “cricket, base ball”—yes, baseball, and how marvelous it is to imagine the young Jane Austen playing shortstop—“riding on horseback, and running about the country” to reading books. Or at least, serious books. Catherine loved reading novels but hated having to study history—just like her creator, who composed a satirical “History of England” (“by a partial, prejudiced, & ignorant Historian”) when she was just about the same age.

  But at fifteen, “appearances were mending.” Catherine began to curl her hair, long to dance, read love poems, and wear pretty clothes. Her looks improved, and by seventeen she had become an attractive girl. But one thing was missing: her little country neighborhood afforded no young men to arouse her heart. At last, her moment came when she was taken on holiday to Bath, the most fashionable resort in England—a town of theaters and balls, shopping and gossip, grand houses and beautiful views, a place to see and be seen, and the Austen family’s favorite vacation spot. Just as the Austens used to stay with Jane’s rich aunt and uncle, who went so he could “take the waters” for his gout, Catherine accompanied her neighbors the Allens, the wealthiest family in the district, who went for the same reason.

  In Bath, Catherine fell in with two pairs of siblings, each of whom decided to take her in hand and teach her, in very different ways, about life. One pair was John and Isabella Thorpe, vain and knowing young people who stuffed Catherine’s head full of false ideas. John was the kind of garrulous, shallow young man that people in Austen’s day referred to as a “rattle”:I defy any man in England to make my horse go less than ten miles an hour in harness. . . . Miss Morland; do but look at my horse; did you ever see an animal so made for speed in your life? . . . Such true blood! . . .

  Look at his forehand; look at his loins; only see how he moves; that horse cannot go less than ten miles an hour: tie his legs and he will get on.

  John was clearly a fool, but Catherine was so green, and John was so impressed with himself—she listened to his palaver “with all the civility and deference of the youthful female mind, fearful of hazarding an opinion of its own in opposition to that of a self-assured man”—that she couldn’t help letting herself be taken in.

  John, however, was nothing compared to Isabella. He was merely silly; she was selfish, hypocritical, and cunning. (“‘This is my favourite place,’ said she as they sat down on a bench between the doors, which commanded a tolerable view of everybody entering at either; ‘it is so out of the way.’”) Isabella, four years older than Catherine, introduced her protégée to all the arts of insincerity: how to flirt, how to lie, how to be a tease. Manipulating her new friend for John’s benefit, she did everything she could to throw Catherine into her brother’s arms. When John offered to take the heroine out alone for a drive, a highly improper suggestion in those days, his sister chimed in as if on cue. “‘How delightful that will be!’ cried Isabella, turning round. ‘My dearest Catherine, I quite envy you; but I am afraid, brother, you will not have room for a third.’”

  Some of the worst parts of Isabella’s influence came from the kind of books to which she introduced her younger friend. Northanger Abbey was a satire of the gothic fiction so popular in Austen’s day—the exact same stuff she had taken off so raucously in her juvenile sketches. The name was a parody of highflown titles like The Mysteries of Udolpho or The Castle of Otranto. (Northanger would have been the equivalent of something like New Jersey.) Austen herself must have loved those books, in a perverse, guilty-pleasure sort of way. She could never have lampooned them as brilliantly as she did if she hadn’t been reading them by the bucketful—and you don’t keep reading what you simply despise. But the joke on Catherine was that she believed what she read. Like Isabella’s artificial behavior, the extravagant stories of wicked noblemen and haunted castles that the two girls read together—and that Catherine, at least, was innocent enough to take as realistic—gave the heroine all the wrong ideas about the world.

  Yet it wasn’t just the Thorpes. Catherine’s whole environment—a world of polite falsehoods, faked emotions, and empty social rituals—conspired to miseducate her. The night of their arrival in Bath, Mrs. Allen took her young ward to a ball, but since they failed to run into anyone they knew, Catherine was forced to remain without a partner:“How uncomfortable it is,” whispered Catherine, “not to have a single acquaintance here!”

  “Yes, my dear,” replied Mrs. Allen, with perfect serenity, “it is very uncomfortable indeed.”

  James, Catherine’s older brother and John Thorpe’s friend from college, showed up in town in time to hear his sister gush about how impressed she was with Isabella. “I am very glad to hear you say so,” he responded, having been taken in by her as thoroughly as Catherine had, “she is just the kind of young woman I could wish to see you attached to; she has so much good sense, and is so thoroughly unaffected and amiable.” Catherine didn’t seem to stand a chance amid this company, and she was soon aping the people around her without even realizing it. Mr. Allen came to collect his wife and charge at the end of that first, disappointing evening:“Well, Miss Morland,” said he, directly, “I hope you have had an agreeable ball.”

  “Very agreeable indeed,” she replied, vainly endeavouring to hide a great yawn.

  Fortunately, Catherine was also befriended by a second brother and sister, Henry and Eleanor Tilney. Henry, who like Isabella Thorpe was a good bit older than the heroine, went about educating her in a completely different way. Clever and animated, he was also so quirky and silly that Catherine did not know what to make of him initially. This was their very first dialogue, after they’d been dancing with each other for a little while:“I have hitherto been very remiss, madam, in the proper attentions of a partner here; I have not yet asked you how long you have been in Bath; whether you were ever here before; whether you have been at the Upper Rooms, the theatre, and the concert; and how you like the place altogether. I have been very negligent—but are you now at leisure to satisfy me in these particulars? If you are I will begin directly.”

  “You need not give yourself that trouble, sir.”

  “No trouble, I assure you, madam.” Then forming his features into a set smile, and affectedly softening his voice, he added, with a simpering air, “Have you been long in Bath, madam?”

  “About a week, sir,” replied Catherine, trying not to laugh.

  “Really!” with affected astonishment.

  “Why should you be surprised, sir?”

  “Why, indeed!” said he, in his natural tone. “But some emotion must appear to be raised by your reply, and surprise is more easily assumed, and not less reasonable than any other. Now let us go on. . . .”

  Instead of training Catherine to follow the conventions of life in her society, like Isabella or Mrs. Allen—training her unconsciously, to follow them unconsciously—Henry was trying to wake her up to them by showing her how absurd they were. But he didn’t do it by being didactic. He did it by provoking her, taking her by surprise, making her laugh, throwing her off balance, forcing her to figure out what was going on and what it meant—getting her to think, not telling her how.

  A few days later, the two were dancing together again. John Thorpe, idly observing the proceedings, sauntered over to Catherine to en
gage her attention for a couple of minutes of horserelated prattle (partners would separate and come back together in the kind of dancing people did in Austen’s day), and when Henry rejoined her, he lodged the following protest: “I consider a country-dance as an emblem of marriage. Fidelity and complaisance are the principal duties of both; and those men who do not choose to dance or marry themselves, have no business with the partners or wives of their neighbours.”

  “But they are such very different things!”

  “—That you think they cannot be compared together.”

  “To be sure not. People that marry can never part, but must go and keep house together. People that dance only stand opposite each other in a long room for half an hour.” . . .

  “In one respect, there certainly is a difference. In marriage, the man is supposed to provide for the support of the woman, the woman to make the home agreeable to the man. . . . But in dancing, their duties are exactly changed; the agreeableness, the compliance are expected from him, while she furnishes the fan and the lavender water. That, I suppose, was the difference of duties which struck you, as rendering the conditions incapable of comparison.”

  “No, indeed, I never thought of that.”

  “Then I am quite at a loss.”

  Now Henry was coming at Catherine from a different direction, and for a different reason. He was still using humor, but it was a humor of paradox, not imitation, and instead of provoking Catherine to question social conventions, he was asking her to examine her mental categories, rethink her conceptual boxes. Marriage is one thing, dancing something else, but are they really so different? Sort of and sort of not—and Henry was challenging her to sort out how. The earlier scene had been a performance: he mimicked, she laughed. This one was a dialogue. Now he was inciting her to speak, then pretending to misunderstand her, even at the risk of looking like a dunce, in order to force her to fight her way back to what she meant—and thus, to figure out what she really thought in the first place.

  And that’s when I realized what I had been looking at the whole time, and what I was doing wrong as a teacher. Sly, impish, ironic, willing to play the fool for the sake of getting someone to think—a little quirky, a little abrupt, but always exciting to talk to: that was Henry Tilney, but it was also my professor. What made my professor such a great teacher was not that he was brilliant, or that he had read everything—though he was, and he had—but that he forced us to think for ourselves, just as Henry did to Catherine, and provoked us to reconsider our assumptions, just as he did to her: all the conventions about what you were supposed to say about a work of literature, all our mental categories for understanding novels and characters and language.

  We were ourselves a bunch of Catherines, after all, we graduate students, stepping uncertainly into a new phase of life. No, that actually gives us too much credit. At least Catherine knew that she was naïve, even if she didn’t understand just how naïve she was. We were really a bunch of Thorpes, young people coping with feelings of insecurity in an intimidating new world by pretending to know more than we really did, and being rather competitive about it, to boot. My professor was the opposite. He pretended to know less than he did, refused to play the role of wise man or sage. Or rather, he knew that he knew less than he did, because he recognized that everything he knew—all his own assumptions and conceptions—was subject to constant reappraisal.

  He taught by asking questions, and so did I, but only now did I see how utterly different our questions were. Mine were really only answers in disguise, as if I were hosting some sadistic form of Jeopardy! I wasn’t a teacher, I was a bully. My students were the Catherines, coming to the marvelous world of college, bustling with new sights and possibilities, just as she had come, wide-eyed, to Bath. But I wasn’t Henry; I was Isabella. I wasn’t helping them; I was manipulating them—and doing so, to a far greater extent than I wanted to admit, in order to gratify my own ego. I was telling them what to think, even if, by trying to get them to say it first—that is, by putting words in their mouths—I was pretending not to. I was trying to turn them into little versions of me, instead of better versions of themselves.

  When my professor asked a question, it wasn’t because he wanted us to get or guess “the” answer; it was because he hadn’t figured out an answer yet himself, and genuinely wanted to hear what we had to say. Just so, Henry’s whole “dancing equals marriage” thing didn’t really have a point, a specific lesson or message. He simply wanted to get Catherine’s mind moving so the two of them could have an interesting conversation—a conversation more stimulating than, “Yes, my dear, it is very uncomfortable indeed,” or “This is my favourite place; it is so out of the way,” or “I defy any man in England to make my horse go less than ten miles an hour.” A conversation in which both he and she had a chance to actually learn something, and so in which a real mental—and therefore emotional—connection between them could be made.

  My professor was like Henry, but of course, as I quickly realized, they were both like Henry’s creator. Playful, impish, provoking: this was Austen exactly, and never more so than in Northanger Abbey. Austen used the novel to make us her students. Henry was her surrogate, and Catherine was ours, and she went about teaching just the way that he did. In fact, she taught, in part, through him. Everything he said to Catherine she was also necessarily saying to us. When Henry ridiculed the conventions of polite chatter, it was the empty gestures of our own conversations that we inevitably thought of. When he rearranged Catherine’s mental categories, it was our sluggish ideas that started to wake up and stir.

  But she also did far more than that. Henry taught, in that first scene, through impersonation. He pretended to become someone else—set smile, softened voice, simpering air—and proceeded to act that character out in a way that revealed the character’s folly to Catherine, his audience. Austen did not pretend to become someone else, but she certainly did impersonate any number of characters. “Yes, my dear” and “This is my favourite place” and “I defy any man in England”: these were the equivalents of Henry’s “Have you been long in Bath, madam?”—satiric performances meant to call our attention to behavior we normally take for granted. Austen, like Henry, taught by showing—which means, by arousing. By putting something in front of us and expecting us to think about it.

  She wrote novels, not essays, and more than just about any other author, she refused to mar her novels by putting essays into them. She never lectured, never explained: never interrupted her stories to hold forth on what she wanted us to think they meant, or deliver her opinions on the state of the world. She also never tampered with her characters by putting her own ideas into their mouths. Writing to her sister, Cassandra, upon the publication of Pride and Prejudice, she sketched out her philosophy about these matters, albeit in the ironically inverted way in which her letters often spoke of serious things. “The work is rather too light & bright & sparkling,” she now professed to think about the novel, “—it wants to be stretched out here & there with a long Chapter—of sense if it could be had, if not of solemn specious nonsense—about something unconnected with the story; an Essay on Writing, a critique on Walter Scott, or the history of Buonaparte.” A cackle of authorial delight, followed by a glance at the degenerate practices of lesser novelists.

  Austen was never didactic, and she didn’t like didactic people, either. In Pride and Prejudice, Mary Bennet was fond of quoting heavy books, and Mr. Collins was fond of reading them aloud, and both of them were held up as fools. Henry never “told” Catherine anything—except once, and then Austen gently laughed at him, too. He and Catherine and his sister, Eleanor, who had also befriended the heroine, were taking a walk to the top of a hill overlooking the town of Bath. The Tilneys, “viewing the country with the eyes of persons accustomed to drawing,” were soon deciding “on its capability of being formed into pictures.” Austen was referring here to the contemporary vogue for the “picturesque,” landscapes that conformed to a certain idea of visual beau
ty: moody skies, gnarled trees, ruined shacks, and so forth, all arranged according to the laws of pictorial art. But Catherine knew nothing of this, so Henry was only too happy to fill her in:She confessed and lamented her want of knowledge, declared that she would give anything in the world to be able to draw; and a lecture on the picturesque immediately followed, in which his instructions were so clear that she soon began to see beauty in everything admired by him, and her attention was so earnest that he became perfectly satisfied of her having a great deal of natural taste. He talked of foregrounds, distances, and second distances—side-screens and perspectives—lights and shades; and Catherine was so hopeful a scholar that when they gained the top of Beechen Cliff, she voluntarily rejected the whole city of Bath as unworthy to make part of a landscape.

  In fact, as we know from her family, Austen was a great devotee of the picturesque herself, just as she loved the gothic novel. But she understood that any art or idea or pattern of behavior, left unexamined, hardens into cliché. Once you begin taking it too seriously, you’re only a step away from taking yourself too seriously, and before you know it, you start to sound like Mr. Collins, “lecturing” and “instructing” instead of laughing and surprising. Your students, in turn, their minds improved by your enlightened guidance—“she voluntarily rejected the whole city of Bath as unworthy to make part of a landscape”—start talking nonsense.