“She makes me detest all her people, without reserve. Is that her intention? It is not believable. Then is it her purpose to make the reader detest her people up to the middle of the book and like them the rest of the chapters? That could be. That would be high art. It would be worth while, too. Some day I will examine the other end of her books and see.”— Mark Twain
“I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen’s novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow . . . suicide is more respectable.”—R. W. Emerson
“Whatever ‘Bloomsbury’ may think of Jane Austen, she is not by any means one of my favourites. I’d give all she ever wrote for half what the Brontës wrote—if my reason did not compel me to see that she is a magnificent artist.”—V. Woolf
It was recalling Mark Twain’s loathing of Jane Austen that recently inspired me to re-read Emma. I hadn’t read any Jane Austen since college, and remembered Emma as the one I’d enjoyed the most.
So I picked it up and found it anything but a breezy read: the dense prose—labyrinthine sentences, prodigious paragraphs. I’m not saying they’re not worth it—just bring a machete. And of course the intricate portrayal of that mostly interior, constricted world: a few families of landed gentry in Regency England. I made it a ways in, then set it aside, then came back to it and read what Mark Twain never did: the second half.
All in all, I enjoyed it. I won’t say I’m captivated by Austen’s subject matter, but I do deeply admire her skill.
* * *
It seems to be her subject matter that her haters hate the most. And those include not just the above, but many others such as the Brontës, D. H. Lawrence, Madame de Staël, and maybe you. People who desire a bit wider canvas, and above all, some passion. How invested can you really be in a society in which the worst imaginable sin is indelicacy? The book has plenty of ultra-feminine women who share a lethal fear of draughts—but where are the manly men? Here’s the narrator setting up Mr. Knightley in Emma’s mind as she appraises Mr. Weston: “She liked his open manners, but a little less of open-heartedness would have made him a higher character.—General benevolence, but not general friendship, made a man what he ought to be.—She could fancy such a man.” And what kind of man is that god-like figure, Mr. Knightley? A mansplainer of the highest order. One who has the code of the cultural straightjacket down pat. Except for a hissy fit of jealousy towards the end, including a weasely flight to London to avoid Frank Churchill, a man of perfect self-control well in his thirties who stews through three-quarters of the book when you know good and well what he really wants to do is bend young Emma over the billiard table.
You would think more women would dislike Emma, which is a feminine book (about women, with men as supporting characters)—but certainly not a feminist book. I guess you can’t go wrong with a good clean romance. With a female author, you would expect the novel to pass the Bechdel test (at least one conversation between two women not about a man). I guess it does—there are instances of two women talking about another woman—but it certainly fails the opposite: I don’t think there’s a conversation between two men about anything anywhere in it. Maybe because the author didn’t know anything about men. Of course they would just be comparing carriages, so who cares? But it is a truth universally acknowledged in this world that women have limited choices of destiny—for higher echelon types like Emma, basically one. Yes, in the early going she claims she will never marry, partly out of devotion to her sweet, neurotic father, but mostly just out of immaturity, as if it weren’t obvious that wife/mother/grande dame was what she was meant to be, as if she could be happy spending the rest of her life in drawing rooms, avoiding draughts, and approving or disapproving of what the same old people around her do or don’t do.
As a character, Emma is interesting because she’s not perfect. She misjudges people, jumps to conclusions, and can get a little spicy in her dislike of certain people—who deserve it! Fortunately she has a narrator to make us aware of all this because Emma uses all her energy stifling it. But she learns her lesson. She comes to realize that her presumption of superiority doesn’t give her the right to manipulate other people, or take a scalpel to Miss Bates’ vulnerable self-esteem, and she resolves to be humbler about her superiority. But of course her greatest fault is failing for so long to realize that the man was right all along.
And then, at some point as you absorb these people’s micro-tragedies, you remember: they are rich, entitled, and don’t work. I mean, there’s that.
* * *
However, if your interest in “how it’s made” extends to novels, you could find worse ways to use your time than in studying Jane Austen’s narrative and characterization skills.
Austen died in 1817 at the age of forty-one, author of six novels and a ton of juvenile and unfinished novels and plays. She was a prolific, and obviously a natural, writer from a very early age. She brought an edge to her domestic stories, departing from the sentimental tone of the time and moving in a more sophisticated and realistic direction. I think of her as one of the first really psychological writers. To read her novels is to spend intimate time not only with what happened, but in the complex emotional web behind what happened. She was a master of an artful form of omniscient narration. As for her “edge,” it brought a note of ironic and satiric wit into her work, and, in herself, probably inspired the destruction of many of her letters by her older sister. Her world may have been limited, but she knew it thoroughly. She is aware, and makes the reader aware, of the coded performative nature of her milieu, and she shares with her reader the fun of decoding the reality behind the performance, and what people are not saying by what they are, and are by what they aren’t. Love her world or hate it, she brings it to dramatic life—the primary task of any novelist.
One of my favorite scenes in the novel is a visit Emma and Harriet pay to Mrs. and Miss Bates. The garrulous Miss Bates is a vivid comic, later pathetic, character who has received a letter from her niece, Jane Fairfax, an accomplished young woman whose threatened visit has irked Emma. Austen can, and does, get pages out of Miss Bates’ torrential monologue—with all the stops and starts, the leaps and lapses, the non-sequiturs, the truncated sentences abandoned when she decides not to say what she was about to say. In this scene she is building up to the joy of a promised oral reading of the letter for her visitors. Emma, courteously hostile to the idea, and Miss Bates conduct a chapter-long fencing match which ends in a final parry from Emma who, deftly evading the would-be reading, really must be going, leaving Miss Bates robbed of her glory. I doubt Mark Twain survived it, but it really is a brilliant comic scene.
There is also a chapter devoted to selecting a (draught-free) site for a ball proposed by long-anticipated, recently arrived Frank Churchill, whose enthusiasm is not universally shared. The absurdly intricate debate about every microscopic detail is wonderfully satiric. A typical passage: “Mrs. Weston proposed having no regular supper; merely sandwiches &c. set out in the little room; but that was scouted as a wretched suggestion. A private dance, without sitting down to supper, was pronounced an infamous fraud upon the rights of men and women; and Mrs. Weston must not speak of it again.”
I might also mention Austen’s handling of the novel’s antagonists: the Eltons. The narrator doesn’t lower herself to explicate the vulgarity of these two (especially the cluelessly conceited, exquisitely drawn Mrs. Elton, but her whirlwind-marriage husband, the vicar, as well), but in vivid scenes and brief eavesdropping lets them hang themselves. Early in the book, Emma had tried to engineer a match between Mr. Elton and her manufactured friend Harriet Smith, but after Mr. Elton’s rather nasty rejection of the, to him, demeaning idea, necessitating the revelation of his over-reaching designs toward the affections of Emma herself, Emma had soured on him. He bolts off to Bath where without delay he becomes engaged to the renowned Miss Hawkins. On his brief visit to Highbury at this point, Emma tries to, but can’t, avoid him; their meeting leaves her with “the impression of his not being improved by the mixture of pique and pretension, now spread over his air.” We are told: “She wished him very well”—with typical narrative ambivalence, clearer in what comes next: “but he gave her pain, and his welfare twenty miles off would administer most satisfaction.” The characterization of the Eltons is one of the wonders of the novel.
Just as the primary bond for the reader is not with the protagonist but with the narrator, the real theme is less about concern for the personal outcome of the characters than for the outcome of the social order. There has been a disruption to the order of things, and the goal of the story is to restore that order. It should be no surprise that, in such a repressively staged world, the key virtue is genuineness. Perhaps because of the inability to know another being, the purest sort of attitude about life they can fantasize is one without artifice, deceit, guile, affectation, anything consciously ulterior, anything withheld or mis-stated. In his jealousy-fueled, unsparing critique of Frank Churchill’s penitent letter toward the end of the book, Mr. Knightley, by way of condemning the lack in Mr. Churchill, pauses to observe: “My Emma, does not every thing serve to prove more and more the beauty of truth and sincerity in all our dealings with each other?”
I would call that the narrator’s last word. But I don’t think the narrator sees the innate snobbery of her characters. They earn her chastisement only when they stray from that ideal, never for the inbred snobbery that inspires it. And the more they are blind to their own snobbery, the more snobbish they become. And they confuse their longed-for true-heartedness with self indulgence. The happiness that floods Emma at the end is made possible by the removal of two key blockages: the problem of the father she can’t abandon, and the problem of the “friend” she tried to marionette, but whom she so boldly misled and misunderstood, Harriet Smith. When Harriet realizes the inappropriateness and impossibility of her attraction to Mr. Knightley, in a nice ironic twist she precipitates Emma’s realization of where her own heart rightly belongs. And when Harriet proves to be greater than the distorted creature created by Emma, and finds her own happiness with Robert Martin, Emma’s euphoria is less for the happy fate of her friend than for her own release from the burden of having to keep up a secret front with the person who is the epitome of all the graces she admires and whom she longs to trust in a picture-perfect marriage.
Matching misunderstandings dispensed with, the engagement of Emma and Mr. Knightley brings the suspense, and hence the narrative, to an end. Frank Churchill? Jane Fairfax? Why would two A characters each be going after B’s? Ain’t going to happen. Let the B’s have each other, and then we just need to get Mr. Woodhouse and Harriet situated, and that’s a wrap. In fact, the wrap has been there from the first sentence, where we learn that Emma is “handsome, clever, and rich”—a trifecta. Her fate is foreordained, with Mr. Knightley along for the ride.
* * *
If Jane Austen’s novels are about preserving the status quo (stasis), Mark Twain’s are about creating a new one (flux). You could hardly find two more opposite writers.
They weren’t from widely different times—Twain (Clemens) was born only eighteen years after Austen died—but were from vastly different worlds, geographically and culturally.
Twain was two years old when Emerson gave his address “The American Scholar” (the “intellectual Declaration of American Independence”) at Harvard in 1837, arguing against European influence and for originality, American themes, and a reliance on nature; and six when “Self-Reliance” was published in Emerson’s first volume of essays in 1841. Call it the Age of Self-Reliance. Poe was already publishing in the 1840s, and challenging the accusation of “Germanism.” The period would culminate in the twilight before the rupture of the union, in the 1850s—the first golden age of American literature.
Moby-Dick, The Scarlet Letter, Walden, Leaves of Grass were true American books that could not have come from anywhere else. The authors weren’t aping European literature like Cooper or Irving; they were unapologetically pursuing American themes and settings. Twain’s great works were after the Civil War, but no more authentically American, anti-European writer ever lived. Who but an American in that time and place could have written Roughing It (1872), Old Times on the Mississippi (1876), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)? He wrote about people creating the world they live in rather than being “bred” to live in a pre-made one.
Far from a psychological writer, or one trying to maintain a social order, Twain was heir to a political, cultural, and literary revolution. It is civilization that is the enemy in his world—a fruitful world for a writer, as long as the frontier lasts. From its inception, America was defined by the feeling that there was always somewhere else to go. It is precisely when there is nowhere else to go and Huck and Jim leave the river (flux) and return to “civilization” (stasis) that the energy of the novel wanes and decays into tedious shenanigans. One could argue that the roots of American dysfunction lie in the loss of the frontier, the sense of somewhere else to go, someone else to be. Countries falter like novels. And I would say, not just the ending of Huckleberry Finn, but elsewhere when he was writing about more manufactured territory— The Prince and the Pauper (1881), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894)—he was not at his best. He used up his territory. He didn’t have the storehouse of, say, Faulkner, who got a postage stamp-sized lifetime of stories from the veranda of his absorbent youth.
What would Jane Austen have thought of Huckleberry Finn? Certainly that it was barbaric, and maybe something like Virginia Woolf’s take on Ulysses: “An illiterate, underbred book, it seems to me; the book of a self-taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, & ultimately nauseating. When one can have the cooked flesh, why have the raw?”
Why a raft on a river when you can have a drawing room? Which, since Virginia Woolf is one of my favorite writers, I say with all due respect.
* * *
Mark Twain couldn’t have written a Jane Austen novel if he had tried—but, for fun, if he had tried, what might he have come up with?
No doubt his hero would have been Robert Martin, the deserving young man stiffed by Jane Austen/Emma—obviously not only the best man for Harriet, but the best man in the book. As for the counter Bechdel test, he couldn’t have had a real conversation with any of the other men in the novel because they were all above him. Twain would have to give him some friends, along with Harriet.
Martin was a respectable, upwardly moving farmer on land owned by Mr. Knightley, and lived with his mother and sisters. He was a working man, not a gentleman—but no peasant either. He couldn’t have been because an actual peasant wouldn’t have been allowed within 100 miles of that book, beyond providing the occasional touch of color. In Austen’s novel, he is hardly depicted at all—no face, no voice, only a slot in the women’s narrative. He is not interesting to her.
But for Twain, Martin would be interesting indeed: in his prime, vigorous and charismatic—smarting from what he read, and Harriet/Emma presented, as rejection, but smelling the hand of Emma in the business, unconvinced that he had misread the girl, and left with a most unresolved feeling. Still, he has to navigate that snobbish world—but free of resentment or any sulking emotions. He was a self-respecting, straightforward fellow.
Robert and Harriet—what a match! Oh, the adventures they would have in Twain’s hand. Of course, they couldn’t exactly light out for the territories—that’s the problem, there were none. Plus, running a farm and all, and no doubt soon with a passel of children. The only way out of that mess was on a ship. But if early 19th century farm life in England could have adventures, the bard of Hannibal would find them. Of course, he would have his usual—every novelist’s usual—problem: ending it. The only way the story could end would be for the adventurous pair to become what their adventures had only postponed.
But with zest.
Such is life.