Transcription
[Music] What is a heroine? All Jane Austen's six novels have a heroine, but all of them also ask, teasingly, what a heroine might be.
Northanger Abbey, which in most ways, though published after Jane Austen's death, should be considered the earliest of her novels, starts with this sentence: "No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be a heroine." That's partly a joke about the novels that Catherine herself grows up to adore, the gothic novels of writers like Ann Radcliffe, that have heroines far removed from the ordinary background that Catherine Morland has. But it's also a sentence about Jane Austen's teasing tussle with the heroines of all the novels that she read as a girl and as a young woman. Because there are lots of heroines in the novels of the 18th and early 19th century, and they are heroines that Jane Austen clearly wanted to laugh at and get away from.
In 1816, just a year before her death, she wrote, as a *coup de grâce*, a sketch of what a typical novel that followed the formula of her day might be like. And amongst other things, in this "Plan of a Novel that she wrote," "Plan of a Novel according to Hints from Various Quarters," was this: "Heroine: A faultless character; perfectly good; with much tenderness and sentiment; and not the least which all the good will be unexceptionable in every respect; and there'll be no foibles or weaknesses. But with the wicked, who will be completely depraved and infamous."
I think what she's saying there is something that was true to fiction in her day and before her day, which is that although the heroines of English novels might not always know what was going on around them, they might be tricked or duped, morally they were and had to be impeccable. They had to be faultless. And it was those perfect heroines that Jane Austen wanted to get away from. And that's why, in all her novels, it is the faultiness of her heroines that is most interesting to her.
When her niece, her favorite niece Fanny Knight, wrote letters to her about a novel that she, Fanny, was herself writing, she also told Jane Austen that her aunt Jane, that she'd been reading Pride and Prejudice to a young man who had been courting her. And Fanny's admirer was rather shocked by the heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, of that novel, and not just her faultiness, her mischievousness, her irreverence. And Jane Austen wrote back to Fanny to discuss that. And amongst other all the other things she said, she said memorably to her: "Pictures of perfection, as you know, make me sick." "Wicked pictures of perfection make me sick." And with you, that's a good kind of guide to Jane Austen's characterization in all her novels.
It's useful, actually, to think of each heroine, as one novel follows another, being a sort of reaction to the previous one. Each of Jane Austen's heroines is a sort of risk, once to the heroine of the previous novel. It's as if, once Jane Austen gets going as a novelist, she's no longer influenced by those earlier novels by other novelists. She starts only being influenced by herself.
She begins, in Sense and Sensibility, the first of her published novels, with potentially two heroines, Marianne and Elinor. These two sisters. And indeed, for the first chapters of the novel, it won't be clear to the first-time reader which one's going to turn out to be the heroine. But then gradually, the focus concentrates all on Elinor, and we start seeing events through her eyes, through her consciousness. She's a remarkably self-possessed young woman. And her youth is very important. She's 19 years old. Many will have seen the beautifully made, but not always entirely accurate, Ang Lee film of Sense and Sensibility, scripted by Emma Thompson, in which Emma Thompson plays Elinor, the heroine. But she plays her at an age, she's in her late 30s, which actually would have been just about right for Elinor's mother. It's really important that Elinor herself is 19. She's a teenager. And her self-possession is really strange, given her youth. Her sister Marianne is two years younger than her. And Elinor is not exactly faulty, morally speaking. But she is forced into habits of repression and evasion, evasion that her own situation in the world that she lives in make unavoidable.
There's a very stark sentence quite early in the novel, where Marianne, Elinor, in the company, as they often are, of foolish, tactless, superficial people, and they're making conversation, or rather, Marianne's refusing to make conversation. Marianne was silent. "It was impossible for her to say what she did not feel, however trivial the occasion. And upon Elinor, therefore, the whole task of telling lies when politeness required it, always fell." Elinor has to tell lies. That's her life. That's her duty. And Marianne, whom we might at first think is admirable for refusing to do so, actually causes hurt, damage to others, as well as to herself, by her self-important integrity.
At the heroism of Elinor amounts sometimes to something close to dishonesty. In Jane Austen's next novel, Pride and Prejudice, it's as if she reacts against that. She now has a heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, one of the most famous of all heroines, who is distinguished by her irreverence, her willingness to say "boo" to any goose, her outspokenness, her teasing. This word that Jane Austen likes to use, "archness." And of course, that's really important and entertaining in her relationship with the man that we know she's destined to marry, but whom initially she believes she dislikes, Mr. Darcy. And she's the only woman in England who's ever mocked him, who's ever teased him. And no wonder, of course, he's attracted to her. He's attracted to her for that very reason.
And the first volume of this three-volume novel revolves around dances and invitations to dance. And famously, in the first of the dances, the assembly ball in Meryton, Mr. Darcy, who's been suggested to him that he ask her to dance, and he says, "No women here who had sense and handsome enough to dance." And Mr. Bingley says, "What about, what about Elizabeth Bennet?" And he says, in Elizabeth's hearing, "Not handsome enough for me." She gets her revenge at the next dance, which happens at the home of her friend Charlotte Lucas, when he's quite, Mr. Darcy now, he's being allured by Elizabeth, he's quite attracted to her. But she demonstrates the peculiar cast of her heroism in snubbing him, but much more wittily and archly than then he has snubbed her.
Mr. Darcy has already declared that he dislikes dancing. It's a primitive occupation. And Sir William Lucas, this blustering, bumbling man, tries to sort of pair them off, tries to pair off Mr. Darcy. He's got the two together. And he, Sir William Lucas, says, "You excel so much in the dance, Miss Eliza, but it's cruel to deny me the happiness of seeing you. And though this gentleman dislikes the amusement in general, as Mr. Darcy, he can have no objection, I'm sure, to oblige us for one half hour." "Mr. Darcy's all politeness," said Elizabeth, smiling, squashing him. She turns him down, of course. And it's only much later that Mr. Darcy succeeds in finally getting her, at a, at her third dance, the Netherfield ball, to dance with him.
This heroine is a heroine who is not just true to herself, but true to the self, herself in the style of her irony, her mockery, her mischievousness. And it's not surprising that the young man who was courting Fanny Knight, Jane Austen's niece, should have been taken aback by her. There's some evidence that several of Jane Austen's family and acquaintances were taken aback by Elizabeth Bennet, because she's complete, something completely new in fiction, something still bracing and and electrifying for first-time readers of Pride and Prejudice. A new kind of heroine.
But it's crucial that with all her intelligence, her resourcefulness, her wit, that thing that Jane Austen thinks heroines weren't conventionally allowed in novels, she gets things wrong. And she gets things utterly, utterly wrong. Early in the novel, Wickham tells her, deceitfully, the story of how his prospects have been throttled by Mr. Darcy. And he's a plausible and good-looking chap, unlike the initially proud and repellent, repulsive, as the word is used, Mr. Darcy. And Elizabeth believes Wickham. And then, eventually, sometime after turning down Mr. Darcy's first marriage proposal, Elizabeth gets a letter, is get handed a letter by Mr. Darcy, explaining the truth and explaining Wickham's true villainy.
"She grew absolutely ashamed of herself. Of neither Darcy nor Wickham could she think without feeling she had been blind, partial, prejudiced, absurd." As a brilliant, I mean, that last word of self-condemnation is a real Elizabeth Bennet word. Not only has she been wrong, she's got things wrong. Blind, partial, prejudiced. She's been ridiculous. And she now sees herself as ridiculous. And that capacity to see yourself as ridiculous, if it's, of course, you know, a special Jane Austen heroic capacity. She's got three things wrong, and she now knows it. And she knows that her very intelligence and her very confidence are what have misled her.
So Jane Austen has made this, the most, this heroine, this new kind of heroine, vivid and self-reliant and witty and ironical and funny and irreverent, and always willing to speak, always brave enough to speak, to say what she thinks, to tease others. And so what does Austen do next? In Mansfield Park, she makes her heroine who, by her situation as well as her planned personality, usually can't speak, who's doomed to be ignored or to have to remain silent. Fanny Price in Mansfield Park is heroic in a completely different way. As if Jane Austen is responding to her, her own previous novel.
And Fanny Price is heroic in a way that many intelligent readers have wrongly, I think, found exasperating. "I believe has ever found it possible to like the heroine of Mansfield Park," wrote a great critic and great Austen aficionado, Lionel Trilling. Well, I think he's wrong. I find it perfectly possible to like her. I'm sure lots of readers do. But he was saying something which has often been said by critics. Kingsley Amis called Fanny Price "a monster of complacency and pride concealed under a cloak of cringing self-abasement." But she's poor. She's the poor relation. She's forced into self-abnegation because she's adopted into this rich, proud, grand family. Her aunt and uncle, Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram, adopt her, in effect. And she lives with her incredibly privileged, but also incredibly unperceptive cousins, one of whom, Edmund, she falls in love with. And in their lives, their busy, self-deluding lives, often they hardly notice her. She keeps being forgotten.
And the novel itself brilliantly sort of mimics this. Early on, in the third chapter of the novel, the narrator sort of interrupts the busy lives of the Bertram family to say, "And Fanny, what was she doing and thinking all this while?" And and and that's a kind of artful self-interruption, because Fanny keeps indeed being forgotten, being not noticed. There's one wonderful moment when Edmund returns after having dinner with the the Crawfords and Dr. and Mrs. Grant, who who live in a rectory at the end of the park. This novel is set in Mansfield Park, grand house. And at the end of the park is the rectory. And one summer evening, he returns with one of his sisters, Julia. And we imagine it's dusk. And he comes into the drawing-room, the salon, one of his grand, big, grand rooms in Mansfield Park. And says, "Oh, where's Fanny?" And her aunt says, "Oh, she's not here. She's gone to bed." And Fanny says, "No, no, no. Here I am." She's she's in the darkness, in some pool of darkness, in this semi-candlelit room, ignored, not even noticed by her relations. And that's what her presence is like in the novel.
Yet, morally and psychologically, everything is filtered through her watching, our consciousness. She watches the errors, the terrible errors and bad behavior of her relations. And above all, she watches her cousin Edmund, whom she secretly loves. But she cannot tell her love. And he, the man that she adores, her one ally in this family, keeps getting her wrong.
So it's proposed that she goes to live with her widowed aunt, Mrs. Norris, who lives down in the village. And Mrs. Norris is an appalling, not just meddling, a sadist, actually. And we know that living with Mrs. Norris for Fanny, whom Mrs. Norris despises, would be a kind of torture. But Edmund, idiotically, says, "Mrs. Norris is much better fitted than my mother for having the charge of you." Now, he gets her wrong over and over again.
The glamorous brother and sister, Henry and Mary Crawford, arrive to stay with the Grants at the parsonage. And Mary Crawford looks like a potential marriage partner for Edmund. And he toys with this possibility. She is clever and funny and charming. And Fanny knows, but he doesn't, utterly a moral. But she spins her web, and Edmund walks into it. And even when he is apparently being kind or pleasant to Fanny, he keeps saying the wrong thing, because he keeps not realizing that she loves him. Fanny's heroism is the heroism of her persistent love, kept secret.
In the second volume of the novel, Sir Thomas Bertram, who had neglected Fanny, but now that she is getting older, reaching her late teens and blooming rather, changes his mind. And he gives her a ball. And a special, beautiful white dress is bought for her. And Edmund means to compliment her on her beauty. But even now, he gets it wrong. "Your gown seems very pretty. I like these glossy spots. Has not Miss Crawford again something the same?" No, absolute, puts his foot in it at the moment when he thinks he's being complimentary.
And just as Lionel Trilling and and Kingsley Amis don't comprehend Fanny, none of the characters comprehend her. And that's the point. Henry Crawford, who plans to flirt with her, doesn't understand her either. "I do not know quite what to make of Miss Fanny. I do not understand her. I could not tell what she would be at yesterday. What is her character? Is she solemn? Is she queer? Is she prudish?" No, she's not. She's not prudish. Hers is the heroine of a kind of secret fortitude, concealed passion, forced on her by circumstances. Having created Fanny, Jane Austen, it's as if she reads her own novel and thinks, "What do I do next?"
What I do next is Emma. Emma Woodhouse, in the only novel named after its heroine. Emma Woodhouse pushes her way into the very first sentence of the novel. "But 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." Well, obviously, distress and vexation are on their way. And that first sentence enacts her complacency, really, really. But she had reason to be complacent. Handsome, clever, and rich. As Fanny Price in Mansfield Park was powerless and therefore quiet, secretive, an observer, an unobserved observer of the goings-on in the novel, Emma Woodhouse is the opposite. The first of Jane Austen's heroines, the only one of Jane Austen's heroines who has something close to power. Her mother is dead, her sisters married off, her father is an enfeebled hypochondriac who depends totally on on her. And she can do what she wants. And the novel is a chronicle, indeed, of her meddling, her near-disastrous meddling in the lives of others.
Jane Austen famously said of Emma Woodhouse, "I've I've written a novel with a heroine who nobody will much like but myself." And it's a difficult thing to explain to somebody, if they haven't read the novel, how such a meddling protagonist, who is constantly wrong about everything, wrong about other people, can actually also be a heroine. But the extraordinary thing is that Jane Austen writes the novel from so within Emma's head that we inhabit her errors. Sometimes we spot them, in a balance, sometimes we don't. But we live within them. And so her fallibility, in some ways, becomes our fallibility. And we inhabit her efforts to kind of try and make up for the many mistakes that she makes, so that she can go on and make some more.
I mean, here, here is a little example. The context is that her protégé, Harriet Smith, whom Emma has convinced not to marry the man who really loves her, Mr. Robert Martin, has bumped into him again with his sister, whilst taking shelter from the rain in Ford's, the draper's shop in the village. And Harriet gives her a breathless, but also utterly truthful, account of this very embarrassing meeting, and the behavior of Robert Martin and his sister to the woman, the girl, really, she's only 17 years old, who has spurned his not just handsome, but loving proposal to her. And Emma listens to the account. "She was obliged to stop and think. She was not thoroughly comfortable herself. The young man's conduct and his sisters seemed the result of real feeling, and she could not but pity them." As Harriet described it, "There had been an interesting mixture of wounded affection and genuine delicacy in their behavior." But she had believed them to be well-meaning, worthy people before. And what difference did this make in the evils of the connection? It was folly to be disturbed by it. Of course, he must be sorry to lose her. They must all be sorry. Ambition, as well as love, had probably been mortified. They might well have hoped to rise by Harriet's a quick acquaintance. And besides, what was the value of Harriet's description, so easily pleased, so little discerning? What signified her praise?"
And you can perhaps hear in that the gradual transition from Emma's concession that actually the behavior of the Martins was evidence of of real, of real feeling and of some delicacy in their responses to Harriet, and her gradually having to talk herself back into self-delusion, to talk herself into the sense that their behavior was the result of ambition on their part, when in fact the reader knows that Harriet actually is socially much lower than them on the scale of things. And you can hear that Emma's consciousness is, as it were, warping the narrative. "Of course, he must be sorry to lose her. They must be all sorry." Those musings are part of Emma's successful effort to defeat her own scruples, her own better self. So you can see that Emma starts off being almost right. And we have to see that in order for herself delusions to work, all that effort is taken to overcome her own insights. And that capacity to self-delusion stretches even to her own heart.
There's a wonderful moment when she finally discovers that she's in love with Mr. Knightley, the man who loves her. And it's actually very late on in the novel. And it comes at the moment when she thinks he's actually gonna marry somebody else. She thinks he's going to marry Harriet Smith, the girl that she has schooled to have high ideas of her own attractions. You know, Harriet Smith is kind of Frankenstein's monster. She's made her into a creature who now promises to destroy Emma's own happiness. And at the moment where Emma thinks that Harriet Smith's gonna get Mr. Knightley, she realizes something. She touched. She admitted. She acknowledged the whole truth. "Why was it so much worse that Harriet should be in love with Mr. Knightley than with Frank Churchill? Why was the evil so dreadfully increased by Harriet's having some hope of a return?" It darted through her with the speed of an arrow, that Mr. Knightley must marry no one but herself. And that must, that's another of Emma's mus. And she does get him, because the heroine does get the man that she loves, of course she does. It's a, it's a comic novel. But her heroism is the heroism of having to learn through her own delusions and to learn to get past her own delusions. And and that leads Jane Austen into her final heroine of her final published novel, Persuasion.
Anne Elliot, having conjured the powerful, vivid, youthful Emma Woodhouse, she now has a heroine, her oldest heroine, Anne Elliot, who's 27 years old. Her bloom has gone. Eight years earlier, she rejected the man who she really loved. She's lost her chance. And he comes back into the novel. And there's an extraordinary moment when, having met him again for the first time for eight years, she hears from her inconsiderate sister, Mary, what he thinks of her now that he's seen her again. "Captain Wentworth is not very gallant by you, Anne, though he was so attentive to me. Henrietta asked him what he thought of you when they went away, and he said, 'You were so altered that he should not have known you again.'" So kind of lose of death sentence. That even though he looks to her as attractive, as sexy, as ever, he's a war hero now, and he's returned from the naval wars with the French, rich as well as honored. But she is so altered, he wouldn't have known her again.
And and then she, she thinks about that. And just as in Emma, in a different way, in Persuasion, the narrative follows her thoughts. It's shaped by her thought. "It's so altered that he should not have known her again." These were words which could not but dwell with her. Yet she soon began to rejoice that she'd heard them. They were of sobering tendency. They allayed agitation. They composed, and consequently must make her happier. And that's her thinking, "Oh, great. He doesn't fancy me. Oh, that's really, really good. That's really good. I won't have any foolish ideas about kind of reeling him in again." So the fact that he said these things must make me happier. That must is Anne's must. And of course, she's fooling herself. She's trying to persuade herself that it's not just a good thing, but it's a happy thing that the man she loves thinks that she is completely altered, that she's no longer the woman he once loved. And it's a kind of heroism that some readers, some critics have sort of thought it was almost masochism on her part. But also, it is, the reader hopes, and the reader will find, a different kind of self-trickery as the novel unfolds. We keep finding, in small ways, however hard she persuades herself that she's wrong about Wentworth, we keep seeing the evidence of his returning affection. Hers, her affection has never wavered. And it's a different kind of heroism. And Elliot's heroism, the heroism of what Jane Austen, in a phrase which catches Anne's own thoughts, calls "retentive feelings." Retentive feelings which, for the last of Jane Austen's heroines, triumph in the end.