What Matters in Jane Austen?: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved (24 page)

TWELVE

What Do Characters Say When the Heroine Is Not There?

And Fanny, what was
she
doing and thinking all this while?

Mansfield Park
, I. v

Charlotte Lucas’s decision to marry Mr Collins is justly famous. Here, it seems, Jane Austen shows you what courtship and marriage really meant in the early nineteenth century. A respectable man needs a wife; a woman of ‘small fortune’ needs ‘an establishment’ (
Pride and Prejudice
, I. xxii). For those readers down the years who have looked for feminist inclinations in Austen’s fiction, this is the evidence: a chasteningly unsentimental picture of the compromises that an intelligent woman has to make for material reasons. Yet Charlotte Lucas’s decision is not memorable for reasons of sexual politics. Her acceptance of Mr Collins gets its power from a narrative trick: Austen’s removal of the novel’s heroine. Charlotte Lucas makes her life choice in one of the very few scenes in
Pride and Prejudice
from which Elizabeth Bennet is absent. In the embarrassing wake of Elizabeth’s rejection of Mr Collins’s proposal, her best friend has taken on the burden of conversing with him. Elizabeth is grateful to Charlotte, but she is not exactly being selfless. ‘Charlotte’s kindness extended farther than Elizabeth had any conception of; —its object was nothing else than to secure her from any return of Mr. Collins’s addresses, by engaging them towards herself’ (I. xxii). She knows her game. Suitably encouraged, Mr Collins is soon hastening over to Lucas Lodge to make his offer, and as he does so the narrative switches its attention to Charlotte and leaves the unsuspecting Elizabeth behind. There is Charlotte, expectant, watching for her suitor ‘from an upper window’ and setting out ‘to meet him accidentally in the lane’. We do not get Mr Collins’s words, or Charlotte’s, but we do get her thoughts as she reflects with satisfaction on her decision. Austen has decided to let us see the world from Charlotte’s point of view. Elizabeth’s absence is emphasised by her friend’s one reason for feeling some discomfort: ‘The least agreeable circumstance in the business was the surprise it must occasion to Elizabeth Bennet.’

Austen’s heroines are vivid to us because her novels are narrated from their points of view and suffused by their consciousnesses. Yet one of Austen’s devices is to leave her heroine behind, to give us a glimpse of what the world is like in her absence. In all her novels except
Mansfield Park
this is done only occasionally, so that we receive a peculiar jolt when it happens. Charlotte Lucas’s encounter in the lane with Mr Collins is only the third scene in
Pride and Prejudice
where Elizabeth is left behind. It has happened before, when Elizabeth is visiting Netherfield, where Jane is ill in bed. After dinner she retires to attend to her sister and we, surprisingly, stay in the drawing room where we hear Miss Bingley and Mrs Hurst deplore Elizabeth’s walk across the fields and the Bennets’ ‘low connections’ (I. viii). They are performing for Mr Darcy and Mr Bingley. We are suddenly to feel their determination to prevent either man’s attachment to either Bennet sister, to realise what Jane and Elizabeth are up against. In a second, much briefer, exchange, we hear Miss Bingley needling Mr Darcy about the prospect of acquiring Mrs Bennet as a mother-in-law, but succeeding only in reminding him of Elizabeth’s ‘beautiful eyes’ (I. x). The device of such an exchange is used again much later when Elizabeth is invited to Pemberley to visit Georgiana Darcy, who is accompanied by those malign Bingley sisters (III. iii). After Elizabeth’s visit, we stay behind to hear Miss Bingley deride Elizabeth’s supposed beauty for the benefit of Mr Darcy, who is finally forced to silence her by declaring Elizabeth ‘one of the handsomest women of my acquaintance’. This time the threat of Miss Bingley is utterly deflated. We see that Elizabeth still has her hold on Mr Darcy. Her absence means, however, that she does not know this as we do. She must discover their love for each other as a surprise.

The most continually present of Austen’s heroines is the least knowing: Catherine Morland. Until the penultimate chapter of
Northanger Abbey
, she is there at every moment, in every line – with only a moment’s exception. She first meets, dances with and talks to Henry Tilney in the third chapter of the novel. At the end of that chapter, Austen wonders facetiously whether her heroine dreamed about him that night, before reassuring us that the sensible Mr Allen had discreetly looked into things.

How proper Mr. Tilney might be as a dreamer or a lover had not yet perhaps entered Mr. Allen’s head, but that he was not objectionable as a common acquaintance for his young charge he was on inquiry satisfied; for he had early in the evening taken pains to know who her partner was, and had been assured of Mr. Tilney’s being a clergyman, and of a very respectable family in Gloucestershire (I. iii).

The naive Catherine is not left to her own instincts. For a sentence we glimpse conversations that take place out of her hearing, but we do not actually leave her company until the penultimate chapter of the novel, just before Henry Tilney arrives unannounced at the Morlands’ home. Suddenly Austen leaves Catherine to her own devices. Mrs Morland, worried about her daughter’s ‘loss of spirits’, recommends an essay ‘about young girls that have been spoilt for home by great acquaintance’ and leaves the room to fetch the book in question.

It was some time before she could find what she looked for; and other family matters occurring to detain her, a quarter of an hour had elapsed ere she returned downstairs with the volume from which so much was hoped. Her avocations above having shut out all noise but what she created herself, she knew not that a visitor had arrived within the last few minutes, till, on entering the room, the first object she beheld was a young man whom she had never seen before (II. xv).

In its quiet way it is an extraordinary abandonment of her heroine. We return downstairs to see the nervous young man and awkward young woman with Mrs Morland’s eyes, and we suddenly know that betrothal is imminent. For at last Catherine has been trusted to live beyond the novelist’s monitoring of her.

Northanger Abbey
begins with Catherine – ‘No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine’ – but only one other Austen novel starts with the heroine: ‘Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.’ Emma bustles straight in to take over. All Austen’s other novels begin at a tangent to their heroines.
Sense and Sensibility
starts a long way away from Elinor Dashwood, the first chapter giving a family history of the Dashwoods and the extraordinary second chapter consisting almost entirely of a conversation between John Dashwood and his wife in which they agree not to give his stepmother and half-sisters any money. In the third chapter, we find out about the attachment between Elinor and Edward Ferrars, in order to hear Marianne and her mother discuss Edward in Elinor’s absence, Marianne declaring, ‘His eyes want all that spirit, that fire, which at once announce virtue and intelligence. And besides all this, I am afraid, mama, he has no real taste’ (I. iii). The novel appears to be dividing our interest between the two sisters. We accompany Marianne as she wanders around Norland saying farewell to its trees. Once arrived in Devon, we follow Marianne and Margaret on their foolish walk on the downs. Elinor is left behind as the two younger sisters relish ‘the animating gales’ and jointly pity ‘the fears which had prevented their mother and Elinor from sharing such delightful sensations’ (I. ix). Yet any impression that we are sharing our sympathies between Elinor and Marianne – between sense and sensibility – is soon corrected. Once we have tasted Marianne’s folly we abandon her point of view, slowly occupying Elinor’s pained consciousness.

If Catherine Morland is the most present of Austen’s heroines, Fanny Price is the most absent.
Mansfield Park
is the one Austen novel in which conversations commonly take place without the heroine. There is a characteristic moment early in the novel when Edmund and his sister Julia arrive back, late on a summer evening, after dinner at the Parsonage with the Crawfords. They enter the drawing room, ‘glowing and cheerful, the very reverse of what they found in the three ladies sitting there’ (I. vii): Maria is reading sulkily, Lady Bertram is comatose and Mrs Norris is cross and uncommunicative. But where is Fanny? asks Edmund. Has she gone to bed? Mrs Norris does not know, but then Fanny’s ‘gentle voice’ is heard from the other end of the big room. She was there all the time; the ‘three ladies’ were in fact four. The narrative merely behaved for a little while as though Fanny were absent, picking up the habit from the Bertrams. ‘She does not fully participate in the world but as a result she sees things more clearly and accurately than those who do.’
¹
Her non-participation is realised by Austen in a sequence of absences. From the first chapter, where Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram discuss with Mrs Norris the scheme for taking charge of one of Mrs Price’s children, Fanny is subject to plans made in her absence. Whether Lady Bertram and Mrs Norris are deciding where she will live – ‘Good heaven! what could I do with Fanny?’ – or Sir Thomas is talking about having a ball for Fanny and her brother, she is often off stage while decisions are made on her behalf. Her fate is always to be decided by others.

The ease with which Fanny is ignored is emphasised by the number of exchanges that take place without her. These even include some featuring only men. It is often said that women are present in every scene in Austen’s fiction, but this is not true.
²
There is a fleeting example of male-only exchange in
Pride and Prejudice
, where Mr Bingley comes to Longbourn to shoot with Mr Bennet (but in fact to propose to his daughter).

Bingley was punctual to his appointment; and he and Mr. Bennet spent the morning together, as had been agreed on. The latter was much more agreeable than his companion expected. There was nothing of presumption or folly in Bingley that could provoke his ridicule, or disgust him into silence; and he was more communicative, and less eccentric, than the other had ever seen him. (III. xiii).

This hint as to Mr Bennet’s behaviour in rational male company takes us for a moment out of the world of his wife and daughters – but awkwardly, as if the author wanted to give another chance to a character whose paternal failings have been so thoroughly illuminated. In
Mansfield Park
the male-only scenes are much clearer and more important. The first is where Sir Thomas Bertram, unexpectedly returned from the West Indies, finds a strange young man, Mr Yates, rehearsing theatrical speeches in the billiard room of his own house (II. i). As they meet, Tom Bertram also enters the room, and attempts to appease his father’s irritated feelings. The second scene without a woman occurs in the next chapter, when Edmund seeks out his father to give an account of ‘the whole acting scheme’.

He was anxious, while vindicating himself, to say nothing unkind of the others: but there was only one amongst them whose conduct he could mention without some necessity of defence or palliation. ‘We have all been more or less to blame,’ said he, ‘every one of us, excepting Fanny. Fanny is the only one who has judged rightly throughout; who has been consistent.
Her
feelings have been steadily against it from first to last. She never ceased to think of what was due to you. You will find Fanny everything you could wish.’ (II. ii)

Much later in the novel we hear, in direct speech again, a snatch of conversation between Edmund and Sir Thomas on the subject of Fanny’s resistance to Henry Crawford’s proposal of marriage. ‘I will speak to her, Sir; I will take the first opportunity of speaking to her alone’ (III. iv). Sir Thomas responds by telling his son that Fanny is, at that moment, ‘walking alone in the shrubbery’. Here are father and son, man-to-man, conspiring together to further the match, both utterly ignorant as to the major impediment: Fanny’s love for Edmund. Later, in indirect speech, we have Edmund reporting back to his father that Mr Crawford had been ‘too hasty’ but that a ‘return of affection’ might eventually be hoped for. He believes himself ‘perfectly acquainted’ with Fanny’s ‘sentiments’, and speaks confidently to Sir Thomas. And he is as ignorant of her true feelings as ever.

It is in
Mansfield Park
alone that Austen gives us these accumulated glimpses of men together, as if respecting the Bertrams’ aristocratic delusion that all important decisions are made by a father and his sons. Another kind of scene in the novel, from which the Bertrams and Fanny are absent, shows us that power lies elsewhere. There is a sequence of five conversations at the Parsonage among the Crawfords and Mrs Grant that are cumulatively perhaps the most shocking exchanges in all Austen’s fiction. The first occurs soon after the Crawfords have arrived. They have not yet met the Bertrams, but Mrs Grant has plans: ‘“Henry, you shall marry the youngest Miss Bertram, a nice, handsome, good-humoured, accomplished girl, who will make you very happy.” Henry bowed and thanked her’ (I. iv). Mary warns her sister that she is wasting her thoughts and efforts: ‘He is the most horrible flirt that can be imagined. If your Miss Bertrams do not like to have their hearts broke, let them avoid Henry.’ It is a pretty accurate prediction of what is to come. Henry assures Mrs Grant that he thinks highly of marriage, quoting
Paradise Lost
(the only Austen character to do so) with a mischievous emphasis: ‘“I consider the blessing of a wife as most justly described in those discreet lines of the poet—‘Heaven’s
last
best gift.’” “There, Mrs. Grant, you see how he dwells on one word, and only look at his smile. I assure you he is very detestable; the Admiral’s lessons have quite spoiled him.”’ There is something chilling in the jesting of brother and sister. Mary Crawford’s mock-condemnation (‘horrible’, ‘detestable’) measures her distance from any real disapproval of his habitual behaviour.