A Jane Austen Education

by William Deresiewicz

  Now I understood why the novel had to begin in the odd way that it did. “No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy,” the first sentence read, “would have supposed her born to be an heroine.” The line was a joke about the conventions of gothic fiction, one that the rest of the first chapter went on to elaborate. Catherine’s father “was not in the least addicted to locking up his daughters,” “there was not one family among their acquaintance who had reared and supported a boy accidentally found at their door,” and so forth. That much was obvious. But now I realized that the first sentence was also a way of calling attention to the fact that this novel, too, would necessarily trade in conventions. A heroine and a romance, a Mr. Wrong and a Mr. Right, perils and misunderstandings, conflicts and complications, revelations and reversals, and at last, a happy ending: these were the conventions that Austen herself employed in every one of her novels, and she could not have done without them any more than a detective novelist can do without a corpse. Yet she didn’t want us to get sucked in by her conventions, either—didn’t want us to let ourselves be lulled into the trance of gullibility that readers are always falling into, mistaking an artificial version of reality for the genuine article. Stay awake, Austen was telling us. Don’t take things for granted, not even the things I’m telling you myself.

  In other words, pay attention. And pay attention, above all, to your own feelings, because the world is always trying to get you to lie to yourself about them. “‘Very agreeable indeed,’ she replied, vainly endeavouring to hide a great yawn.” Our feelings, Austen was saying, are sometimes impolite and often inconvenient for the people around us. Friends and relatives are apt to tell us, instead, what we should be feeling—what we supposedly are feeling—if only to make their own lives easier or more exciting. This was Isabella, talking to Catherine about Henry, whom at that point the heroine had met only once:“Nay, I cannot blame you. . . . Where the heart is really attached, I know very well how little one can be pleased with the attention of anybody else. Everything is so insipid, so uninteresting, that does not relate to the beloved object! I can perfectly comprehend your feelings.”

  “But you should not persuade me that I think so very much about Mr. Tilney, for perhaps I may never see him again.”

  “Not see him again! My dearest creature, do not talk of it. I am sure you would be miserable if you thought so!”

  Isabella, remember, was the one who had introduced the heroine to all those romantic novels. She wanted her friend’s life (her own, in other words, by proxy) to be full of the same extravagant emotions she had been reading about, even if they ended up making Catherine unhappy—or rather, especially if they did.

  But Henry behaved in exactly the opposite fashion. In a scene much later in the novel that Austen made a point of pairing with this one, Henry and Catherine conducted the same kind of dialogue about Isabella herself. By this time, Isabella had shown her true colors as the false schemer she really was, and the girls’ friendship was at an end:“You feel, I suppose, that in losing Isabella, you lose half yourself: you feel a void in your heart which nothing else can occupy. . . . You feel that you have no longer any friend to whom you can speak with unreserve, on whose regard you can place dependence, or whose counsel, in any difficulty, you could rely on. You feel all this?”

  “No,” said Catherine, after a few moments’ reflection, “I do not—ought I? To say the truth, though I am hurt and grieved, that I cannot still love her, that I am never to hear from her, perhaps never to see her again, I do not feel so very, very much afflicted as one would have thought.”

  Henry was drawing on the same pool of emotional clichés that Isabella had—for there were clichés about friendship as well as romance then, in life as in art, in life because of art, just as there are today (the “frenemy,” the “bromance,” the “BFF”). But instead of telling Catherine what she must have been feeling, he simply asked her to pay attention to what she actually was feeling. And by that point in the novel, with his help, she had learned to do exactly that.

  “You feel, as you always do,” he now replied, “what is most to the credit of human nature. Such feelings ought to be investigated, that they may know themselves.” In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth had learned to put thinking above feeling, and so did I, by reading about her. Now I learned a more complex idea about the relationship between the two. It is good to be in touch with your feelings, but it is even better if you also think about them. Feelings, Austen was saying, are the primary way we know about the world—the human world, anyway, the social world, the people around us. They are what we start with, when it comes to making our ethical judgments and choices.

  Catherine had registered a new understanding of Isabella, but she had registered it, at first, deep down in her gut. Now, by investigating those feelings, she brought that recognition to the level of consciousness. A few pages later, when Isabella tried, with a fawning letter, to crawl back into her friend’s good graces, the heroine was ready. “Such a strain of shallow artifice could not impose even upon Catherine,” Austen told us. “Its inconsistencies, contradictions, and falsehood struck her from the very first. She was ashamed of Isabella, and ashamed of having ever loved her.”

  All this chimed with something that my professor had been trying to teach me ever since I had first encountered him, though he had never come right out and said it. One of the most shocking things about his courses was what they didn’t involve. The rituals of the graduate seminar, all of them devised to turn us into professional scholars, were entirely absent. No lists of secondary sources or packets of supplemental reading, no theoretical frameworks or critical jargon. No seminar papers, either, even though they were supposed to be the principal means by which we received our training: twenty-page essays, complete with footnotes and a bibliography, our first baby steps in writing for professional publication. Instead, he simply wanted us to write a one-page paper every week. One page, with no citations and no outside reading. Just you and the book and one of those fiendishly simple questions he liked to ask.

  Literary study, he was trying to tell us, was not about learning a secret language or mastering a bag of theoretical tricks. It was not about inventing a new, professional personality, either. It was about getting back in touch with the ways we used to read—the ways people read when they’re reading for fun—but also about intensifying them, making them more thoughtful and deeply informed. “Such feelings ought to be investigated, that they may know themselves.” It was about trusting our responses, but examining them, too.

  Feelings are also the primary way we know about novels—which, after all, are training grounds for responding to the world, imaginative sanctuaries in which to hone and test our ethical judgments and choices. Our feelings are what novelists work with, the colors on their palette. What was it if not my feelings that Austen had been working with in Emma, when she taught me about boredom, or Pride and Prejudice, when she taught me about certainty? Curiosity, perplexity, exhilaration; the buzz in the brain, the tumult in the soul—that, my professor was telling me, was what I had to work with; that was where my scholarship should start. With the love of reading that had gotten me to graduate school in the first place.

  The ways we used to read. One of the things that Northanger Abbey taught me, one of the things that both my professor and Austen understood, is how hard it is to see what’s right in front of us, even when we think we’re looking. Catherine was not uneducated before Henry got to her; she was something worse: thanks to Isabella and Mrs. Allen and everyone else, she was miseducated.

  That was the point of the scene on Beechen Cliff, Henry’s own moment as a bad teacher. There, Catherine really did begin in a state of ignorance, uneducated (“She knew nothing of drawing—nothing of taste”), and by the time her teacher was done, she couldn’t see a thing. She could see foregrounds and distances and second distances, side-screens, perspectives, lights, and shades—everything the theory of the picturesque told her she was supposed to
see—but she missed the entire city of Bath, couldn’t recognize what might be beautiful about it.

  That was just a warm-up, though, for the heroine’s visit, later in the novel, to Northanger Abbey itself, the Tilney family’s rambling old Gothic estate. Having read all those novels with Isabella—The Castle of Wolfenbach and The Necromancer of the Black Forest, Horrid Mysteries and The Midnight Bell—Catherine thought she knew what she was going to find there. Sure enough, alone in her room on her first, blustery night, nerves on edge for every sign of a secret door, every sound of a creaking board or rattling chain, she came upon a strange old cabinet that looked like just the kind of thing to conceal a few horrid mysteries of its own: Catherine’s heart beat quick, but her courage did not fail her. With a cheek flushed by hope, and an eye straining with curiosity, her fingers grasped the handle of a drawer and drew it forth. It was entirely empty. With less alarm and greater eagerness she seized a second, a third, a fourth; each was equally empty. . . . The place in the middle alone remained now unexplored. . . . It was some time however before she could unfasten the door . . . but at length it did open; and not vain, as hitherto, was her search; her quick eyes directly fell on a roll of paper pushed back into the further part of the cavity, apparently for concealment, and her feelings at that moment were indescribable. Her heart fluttered, her knees trembled, and her cheeks grew pale. She seized, with an unsteady hand, the precious manuscript.

  A dark house, a stormy night, a cryptic roll of paper—all her expectations seemed to be coming true:The manuscript so wonderfully found, . . . how was it to be accounted for? What could it contain? To whom could it relate? By what means could it have been so long concealed? And how singularly strange that it should fall to her lot to discover it! Her greedy eye glanced rapidly over a page. She started at its import. Could it be possible, or did not her senses play her false? No, they did not. The precious manuscript turned out to be nothing other than—a laundry list.

  And that was only the beginning. One dose of reality was not enough to cure Catherine of her imaginative projections, and before she knew it, she had concocted an elaborate fantasy about buried secrets and violent crimes in the Tilney household. In fact, something scary truly was going on at Northanger Abbey—Catherine was right to detect a dark cloud hanging over the family—but the violence was emotional, not physical. Catherine missed it—until, before long, she was blindsided by it—because she was looking, all too zealously, in the wrong direction. Her fantasies were not just foolish, they were dangerous. Long passageways and old cabinets notwithstanding, there really was nothing remotely mysterious about Northanger Abbey. The only thing separating Catherine from the truth was her own mind.

  We may be born with an untrained eye, Austen was telling us, but by the time we get to be Catherine’s age—by the time we’re old enough for college, let alone graduate school—our eyes have been trained only too well. That, I now understood, was why my professor needed to ask us all those “irritating” questions, as he liked to put it. It wasn’t enough for him to be receptive to what we had to say, or to treat us like equals. In fact, that kind of teaching has been very much in vogue of late: encourage students to express themselves, validate their ideas, pass out the positive comments like lollipops.

  But students don’t come to school with open minds, they come with all the concepts they’ve already acquired (“foregrounds, distances, and second distances . . .”), and they can’t wait to project them onto everything they read. If you’re in college, you go hunting for “symbolism” or “foreshadowing” or “Christ figures.” If you’re in graduate school, it’s “constructions of otherness” or “discourses of sexuality” or “the circulation of power.” Either way, you end up like Catherine, with a very elaborate theory that bears no relationship to what’s actually going on in front of you. Henry challenged Catherine; my professor challenged his students; Austen challenged all of us. The job of a teacher, I now understood, is neither to affirm your students’ notions nor to fill them with your own. The job is to free them from both.

  My professor taught novels, and Catherine was mistaught by them, but neither he nor Austen was finally concerned with novels as such. Learning to read, they both knew, means learning to live. Keeping your eyes open when you’re looking at a book is just a way of teaching yourself to keep them open all the time. Now I understood how my professor had managed to stay so young. He never settled into certainty, never stopped challenging himself—and getting us to challenge him—as hard as he challenged us. There was a paradox, I realized, at the heart of Austen’s work. She showed us how to grow up, but she also wanted us to remain young. Her heroines became adults, but her adults, by and large, did not look very good at all. Here was Catherine and her chaperone on a slow morning in Bath:She sat quietly down to her book after breakfast; . . . from habitude very little incommoded by the remarks and ejaculations of Mrs. Allen, whose vacancy of mind and incapacity for thinking were such, that as she never talked a great deal, so she could never be entirely silent.

  Mrs. Allen was a warning to Catherine, sitting there all too absorbed in her book, but even more, she was a warning to us. Be careful, Austen was saying. Don’t end up like that.

  Austen loved youth, precisely because it is the time of life when we are most open to new experiences. Her great subject was change, and young people still retain the capacity for change. Her novels, charged with the energy of youth, quicksighted and playful, were full of young people and their concerns—the adults often relegated, like parents in a Peanuts cartoon (or Mrs. Allen on that morning in Bath), to the inaudible margins. Pride and Prejudice, I realized, had only eight adult characters and fully twenty-one younger ones, starting with the five Bennet girls. Northanger Abbey, a story on a smaller scale, had seven young people and only two adults who played any kind of significant role. Adults are boring, Austen seemed to feel—or at least, they all too often let themselves become so.

  As her letters to her nieces and nephews make clear, Austen celebrated youth in her life as well as in her books. She was always looking to entertain and engage her young relations, always interested in what they had to say. When her brother Frank took his new bride to visit their older brother Edward’s estate, Austen composed a poem for Edward’s daughter Fanny, then thirteen, imagining how the exciting new experience must have felt from her perspective.When her brother James’s daughter Caroline acquired a niece of her own at the ripe old age of ten, Aunt Jane entered into her feelings, too. “Now that you are become an Aunt,” she wrote, “you are a person of some consequence & must excite great Interest whatever You do. I have always maintained the importance of Aunts as much as possible, & I am sure of your doing the same now.”

  She encouraged, but she never condescended. Three of her brothers’ children tried their hands at writing novels—inspired, no doubt, by their famous aunt’s success—and Austen would return their drafts with detailed criticism as well as praise. Even one of Caroline’s stories, sent when she was nine, was taken seriously enough to critique:I wish I could finish Stories as fast as you can.—I am much obliged to you for the sight of Olivia, & think you have done for her very well; but the good for nothing Father, who was the real author of all her Faults & Sufferings, should not escape unpunished.

  Fanny and Anna, her oldest nieces, became her closest correspondents in the last years of her life (both were twenty-four at the time of Austen’s death), but little Caroline, only twelve when her aunt passed away, became a regular one, too, and the letters Austen sent her during those last months were remarkable for the maturity they grant their recipient and the genuine pleasure their writer obviously took in the relationship. As for Fanny, around the same time, a series of personal reflections she’d sent her aunt elicited this:You are inimitable, irresistible. You are the delight of my Life. Such Letters, such entertaining Letters as you have lately sent!—Such a description of your queer little heart! . . . You are the Paragon of all that is Silly & Sensible, commonplace & eccentric,
Sad & Lively, Provoking & Interesting.

  She might have been talking about Catherine Morland, and the same vitality, and joy in vitality, shines through her responses to both young women. Finally, there was the letter she sent one January to her brother Charles’s daughter Cassy, also nine at the time, in which every word was spelled backwards, a missive that began, “Ym raed Yssac, I hsiw uoy a yppah wen raey,” and ended, “Ruoy Etanoitceffa Tnua, Enaj Netsua.” No wonder Tnua Enaj was the favorite of her many nieces and nephews.

  Austen’s work contained a paradox, yet it didn’t have to be a tragedy. You can get older, she was telling me, but still remain young. That, I started to realize, was part of what had been keeping me from growing up for all those years, the fear of foreclosing possibilities, of turning into another boring adult with a spouse and a house. Now I was getting a new idea about what life can have in store.

  Once I moved in next to my professor, I found myself running into him from time to time outside our buildings. He had a long-term project to repaint the railings in front of his house (he and his wife would go away for the summers, so the progress was slow), and we would stand there now and then—I’d have a backpack, he’d be holding a brush—and talk about whatever happened to be on my mind. One day it was Northanger Abbey, and he called my attention to a scene I hadn’t thought about before.

  “It’s the one where Catherine tells Henry, ‘I have just learnt to love a hyacinth’,” he said. “Now that’s exceedingly interesting, don’t you think?”

  “Uh, I guess so,” I said—not an unusual response on my part.