Exposition

Okay, having whined about writers writing about writing, I'm about to do it myself.

There are two mitigating factors that I think amount to excuses. First, I'm not charging anyone twenty-four dollars a copy just to read my musings about what I do for a living and calling it fiction. Second, I promise I won't talk about the "process" of writing but only about technique.

I mentioned Mrs. Jennings a few posts back and talked about what a wonderful character she is. I also invoked Dickens. Thinking about how he might have handled Mrs. Jennings, I was hit by how much Austen relies on exposition. I haven't counted pages or anything but most of this novel is exposition. This is one of those things that they tell you not to do in creative writing classes.

Show don't tell, is the mantra. Well, Jane Austen always tells us first and then shows sometimes.

Consider Mrs.. Jennings. She tells us Mrs. Jennings talks too much. Dickens wouldn't have done that. He would simply have had her talk too much.

Why does Austen get away with this violation of the rule? Well, one possibility is that the rule is just wrong. And that is partly the answer I think. The other thing she does, however, is that her exposition becomes almost a character in the story itself. It shifts around.

If we think of the famous opening sentence from Pride and Prejudice for example. The irony is obvious, so obvious that we laugh. But the exposition itself doesn't seem to realize this. It's not in on the joke. So when batty Mrs. Bennet makes her appearance we glide rather smoothly from the exposition's point of view to hers. Her views are funny but not completely crazy after all.

The same with Mrs. Jennings. The exposition tells us that she talks too much such that when Elinor is looking for someone to talk to later—having been abandoned by Marianne who is completely consumed by Willoughby—her experiences of Mrs. Jennings talking too much merge with the exposition.

I think there is a very deep perception about human psychology at work here.

AD Nuttall said, and I think he was right, that characters in Shakespeare often act first and form convictions later. They pluck a red rose or a white one with no sense of deep motivation. But once they are standing there holding a rose of a particular colour and are revealed to others (and themselves) as belonging to a particular faction, their convictions begin to solidify.

This is, as I say, true, and we will see it happen in this novel. Both Elinor and Marianne are playing persons who represent opposing factions vis a vis sensibility as understood by the nascent movement of Romanticism. They are, as it were, picking a white rose or a red one.

They each assume their role—that is they act it a while—before it becomes part of their inner being. There is even a stage here at the beginning where we could imagine them reversing positions. (That I think is true of all the novels: there is a moment in Mansfield Park when it is very easy to imagine Mary Crawford becoming the heroine and Fanny Price devolving into another Lucy Steele.) It's not that what we do is more important than who we are; it's that what we do is who we become.

Jane Austen sets us up for this by having the exposition take positions that the characters will before they do. In Pride and Prejudice we laugh at Mrs. Bennet but promptly hop on board with her and so do Jane and Elizabeth Bennet. For the rest of the novel they will be firmly of the opinion that Mr. Bingley needs a wife. Likewise, we will promptly hop on board here with Elinor's judgment that Mrs. Jennings talks too much and it won't occur to us to wonder if just maybe some of the things that Mrs. Jennings is saying might be worth paying attention to.