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.''
Photo: (Pierpont Morgan Library/Art Resource)
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