Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel [Hardcover]

I generally avoid literary criticism, preferring to enhance my understanding of an author through history and biography, but I recently picked up three books on Jane Austen that have made me rethink my position.

This is a very readable look at Jane Austen as a female author during a time when the proper behavior of woman was a hotly debated issue. In this volume, Johnson considers the literary context in which Austen was writing, and then relates each of her novels to it. This book was nicely complemented by Margaret Kirkham's Jane Austen, Feminism and Fiction, which I read about the same time. The latter approaches the period from a slightly more historical, rather than literary perspective. The two are not repetitive, but rather mutually enriching. Johnson struck me as a little more politically doctrinaire, which is a minus for me, but a plus for some. A second book that may be of interest is Alison G. Sulloway's Jane Austen and the Province of Womanhood. Sulloway is discussing the same general topic, but she chiefly focuses on writings about proper female conduct, rather than literature.

I suppose that we chose our own Jane Austen, and I prefer the clear-eyed social critics whose lack of delusions have frightened some of her readers. This being the case, I particularly enjoyed Johnson's reading of Sense and Sensibility. Many critics, such as Claire Tomalin (Jane Austen: A Life), have complained because Austen describes Marianne as getting over Willoughby and going forward to thrive as Mrs. Brandon. Johnson notes that if Marianne had in fact died of her illness, or if the younger Eliza has conveniently died, it would have been a standard, patriarchal sentimental solution to the "problem" of women disappointed in love, permitting the eternal preservation of loyalty to a man who has meanwhile gone his merry way. One wonders what bit of sickly sentimentality the critics of Austen's ending would like: Marianne renounces love and devotes herself to good works? Mrs. Willoughby conveniently dies? Or, pulling out all the stops: Eliza dies giving birth to a second, stillborn child fathered by another man (thus vindicating Willoughby's assertion that she wasn't really innocent, so his abandonment of her is less serious); Marianne successfully begs Colonel Brandon to let her rear her beloved Willoughy's child (a girl, naturally); Mrs Willoughby elopes with a lover (thus making Willoughby an injured party and allowing him to keep her dowry); after the divorce, Marianne and Willoughby marry, he is redeemed by her love, and she bears his heir. Faugh - I congratulate Johnson for cutting through such nonsense.

I am somewhat less convinced by Johnson's analysis of Austen's portrayal of Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey, but she builds a good enough case that I will have to reread the novel. I think she goes a bit off track in Mansfield Park. I think that Mrs. Norris was more incitor than adjutant to Sir Thomas' less admirable notions, although she certainly was both. I can see why Johnson finds the relationship of Fanny and Edmund disturbingly incestuous, but this is reading 20th century attitudes back into earlier times. I don't think Jane Austen thought this, and since the book purports to be analysing what she intended to say, this should be roped off a bit more.

The notes are nicely done, with running titles of the pages on which the citations appear, so it is easy to match up cite with note. The notes contain additional factual information, so the reader may find that it pays to check on them while reading. There is an index, but no bibligraphy. While the notes serve the latter function, it would have been nice to have a list of contemporary writing that were discussed.

David Monaghan's Jane Austen: Structure and Social Vision deals with different aspects of the author's commentary and I found it to be a worthwhile complement to this work.

I have enjoyed Jane Austin's books for a long time. Claudia Johnson helped me see how the books would be seen in Austin's time which increased my understanding and love of the books. As an example, Elizabeth Bennett is an unconventional heroine. Her laughter and energy was extremely unusual and was the sort of behavior that conservative fiction and propriety books of the time saw as improper. It was easy for me to miss this point since Elizabeth is the sort of person that we are expected to admire today.

This book definately comes from a political and feminist viewpoint. At the time Austin was writing, the patriarchal society was considered an important part of England's defense against the ideas of the French Revolution. Johnson looks at how Austin examines and questions the assumptions of conservative thought while working within its accepted framework. She also highlights the irony that runs through Austin's work.

I have read other critisms of Jane Austin's books as this is the one that has had the most to say to me.

Here is a book chock-a-block with the intellectual universe of Jane Austen's time, a world shocked by dire French political experiments and radical thought. The major English writers and thinkers of Jane's own day, ideas 'in the air', as well as settled philosophy, come together in this densely argued study casting Jane as far more the serious artist and political thinker than her more popularized current role: the alter-ego of a Laura Ashley-costumed Elizabeth Bennett, simultaneously Cinderella and Harlequin Romance beauty, flitting hither and thither as she scribes the petty doings of village society like some chronicling cheeky gadfly, a teasing overseeing Queen of the May. As such, Ms Johnson's work helps us regain a truer sense for the genius of this most remarkable woman and artist.

Johnson's book is not an easy read; it does not attempt to 'explain' themes and characters so much as reveal how extremely subtle and charged with the potential for a second look Austen's writing can be. This study repays re-reading: its density is marked by a historically and politically informed revisiting of each of Austen's major works, within an enlightening and reinforcing close reading of not only the texts, but the texts as they existed in Austen's own day and age. Each chapter sets off a sharp and trenchantly political Austen: not a general view, and one gainsaying her current air-brushed image - see the beauteous Ms Hathaway -traduced by contemporary commerce. Johnson gives us an Austen as supreme intellect, working through complex plot gradations and extraordinarily finely shaded characterizations with the dedication and deliberation of a Flaubert. More and more it appears that Austen's true heir, the author who most fully enshrined the lessons of her provocative, highly enriched langauge, was neither her devoted admirer Sir Walter Scott, nor 19th century England's greatest novelist, Charles Dickens, but the much less popular, more rarefied Henry James.

Each chapter of "Jane Austen, Women, Politics, and the Novel" discusses and sets off Austen as a self-demanding writer of inner ambitions: Johnson shows Jane Austen an artist struggling with complex issues and achieving a range in her expression clearly far beyond the grasp of her contemporaries. Johnson's study helps us see Ms Austen as something a great deal larger and more magnificent in thought and art than we'd here-to-fore imagined.

To give but a single instance from what seems an ever-bifurcating example; in the fine chapter on "Sense and Sensibility" the double stories of the two Elizas are revealed by Professor Johnson as bright intense flocculus previously obscured by the overall glare of plot; far-reaching motifs powerfully integrating both plot and character:

"The most striking thing about the tales of the two Elizas is their insistent redunancy. One Eliza would have sufficed as far as the immediate narrative purpose...to discredit Willoughby...but the presence of two unfortunate heroines points to crimes beyond Willoughby's doing, AND THEIR COMMON NAME OPENS THE SINISTER POSSIBILITY THAT PLIGHTS SUCH AS THEIRS PROLIFERATE THROUGHOUT THE KINGDOM." (Italics mine.) Austen's niceties of touch in depicting the exacting differences and particular fates of the two Elizas comes out brilliantly, as in this capsualtion;

"Thus while (Willoughby's) Eliza's seduction is born of anomie, her abandonment is born of avarice, for when Willoughby's aunt vows to disinherit him unless he marries the girl, Willoughby simply states, "That could not be." The dread of poverty precludes this even more surely than does a marriage to Marianne."

Much of Austen's own inner soul-searching travail spews forth in "Mansfield Park". Whatever demons she unleashed, the novel demands of its readers a level of concentration never before seen in the English novel. For many readers the work disappoints; there is the sense that, like Preston Sturges' John L. Sullivan, disillusioned with the lack of social imprtance in making comedy movies, Ms Austen has decided she is tired of happy-ever-after Cinderella stories, such as "Pride and Prejudice"; serious no-theme-can be-too-dark-literary world's equivalent of Sullivan's popular hits "Hey Hey in the Hayloft!" and "Ants in Your Pants of 1939". Like director Sullivan, Austen with "Mansfield Park" is determined on creating a 'real' work with a strong social theme. Aisten sets up Fanny, the poor relation heroine of Mansfield Park, as an exact opposite of the captivating Elizabth of "Pride and Prejudice". Not until Rebecca Rebecca would a major novel dare push forth so seemingly utter milk-toast a heroine as Fanny, and Daphne du Maurier felt no need to carry things nearly as far as Austen. Where Fanny's speech is laced with cautions and simple prudery, Du Maurier suffers no artistic qualms at providing her narrator an intense poetic sensibility, leading right off with those wondrously evocative lines of blank verse, "Last night I dreamt I went to Mandalay again." Imagine Fanny dreaming in the language of Keats! Perhaps Austen missed the big chance here - picture the males of Mansfield Park vainly struggling with the comic havoc of a Zuleika Dobson! Zuleika Dobson (Modern Library Paperbacks)

Johnson does not write purely from one critical position, but borrows freely from several disciplines. She discusses the distinctiveness of "Mansfield Park" by acknowledging its deliberate discardings while carefully noting how Austen "adumbrates a phenomenon which has preoccupied modern feminists: the dependence of certain kinds of masculine discourse on feminine silence. Mansfield Park can run smoothly only so long as female dissent can be presumed not to exist...when women's defiance of patriarchal codes can no longer be ignored, men here are utterly stymied, and their confusion gives another, quite dizzying turn to the political sublime."

The book's chapters are as follows;

Introduction: The Female Novelist and the Critical Tradition
1. The Novel of Crisis
2. The Juvenalia and "Northanger Abbey": The Authority of Men and Books
3. "Sense and Sensibility": Opinions Too Common and Too Dangerous
4. "Pride and Prejudice" and the Pursuit of Happiness
5. "Mansfield Park": Confusions of Guilt and Revolutions of Mind
6. "Emma": "Woman, Lovely Woman Reigns Alone"
7. "Persausion": "The Unfeudal Tone of the Present Day"

For readers familiar with the Austen novels and wishing to delve deeper into these works, Claudia L. Johnson's "Jane Austen, Women and Politics and the Novel" is an excellent starting point.