It Takes All Kinds; Jane Austen: The Cool
Artist
By Charles McGrath
There are only two known
likenesses of Jane Austen, both by her older sister, Cassandra. In one her back
is turned, so that we mostly see her bonnet; in the other she is poker-faced
and looking askance. ''Of events her life was singularly barren,'' her nephew
claimed, and her letters, or those that her family didn't burn, reveal almost
nothing of the person who wrote them. Yet the evidence suggests that Austen's
life was full of inner drama. She experienced maternal rejection and sibling
rivalry; she was unhappy in love and had trouble with relationships; she
suffered from writer's block and bouts of depression. And her novels powerfully
suggest both a world and a personality that now seems remarkably familiar.
Under that bonnet and behind those vacant hazel eyes there burns the first
modern sensibility.
It's a sensibility, for one
thing, that's fraught with our kind of financial anxiety. Unlike Defoe or
Dickens, Austen isn't concerned with extremes of wealth or poverty. What
interests her is the way that money underpins the social fabric of a middle
class that is otherwise precariously unstable. Money for Austen is both
necessary and vulgar, and for that reason it's also sexy. Austen's other great
insight is that in such a highly wrought society, the self is necessarily
self-conscious and provisional. In the novelists she grew up on, Fielding and
Richardson, character is fate: you are who you were born to be. In Austen, who
you are is a role you play. (Discomfort with this recognition may account for
why, in Austen's oddest and least popular novel, ''Mansfield Park,'' Fanny
Price gets so worked up over the issue of amateur theatricals; it's more
playacting than she can handle.) Austen's characters, even the most clearheaded
and authentic, like Elizabeth Bennet and Elinor Dashwood, are always acting,
saying less or other than they mean; and in such a treacherous arena, where a
single word or gesture can mean everything or nothing at all, it's not just
poor Emma Woodhouse but apparently sensible people like Anne Elliot who are
often clueless.
Austen's world (which is to
say our world) would be unendurable if she weren't so funny about it, and this,
of course, is her most essential invention of all -- her encompassing irony.
It's a matter not just of shrewd social observation but also of something
brand-new, an ability to stand apart from life even as it's being lived, and a
quicksilver narrative technique that puts us almost inside a character's head and
then in an instant, with just a word sometimes, darts away to someplace else.
Of herself, Austen gives away nothing directly; she's everywhere and nowhere.
She was the original master of what we now call ''cool.''
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