A Jane Austen Education (10 page)

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.

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”:

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:

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:

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:

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 engage 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: