"... so convinced that women need wiles and arts ..."

That is from Le Divorce as quoted in my post from last week. There I repeated a claim I make often, that seeking to be loved for yourself is empty and narcissistic. That is the opposite of what is usually claimed. And that usual claim is at least credible. Isn't being loved for who I really am more honest than being loved for what I can do? To which I reply, only if you think what you really are is so darned good that you are entitled to love.

Suppose we flip it around and ask what we should give others. And here we return to the subject of Isabel lying to herself. She sees all these cultural treasures of French womanhood as mere "wiles and arts" as opposed to ways of becoming someone better, someone who can give attention, approval and acceptance to others that those others will think worth having.

And, surely, we wouldn't want to respond by saying something like, "What about the attention, approval and acceptance that I need?"

After this remark, Isabel starts sharing scenes. That is, she tells the story as if it were a series of scenes from a movie. Isabel, of course, could not have been present for some of these scenes. She tells us how she imagines the scene would be presented in film based on what she was told and what she assumes must have been the case, supplemented, perhaps, with a few educated guesses. The very first scene is Isabel's sister Roxy discovering that her husband is leaving her. And the obvious question, one that Isabel doesn't answer directly, is why?

Roxy we are told, is very American, going about dressed in jeans or "those awful flower-child clothes". But it's more than clothing. Roxy is someone who seeks to be loved for herself.

At first glance, we might think that the issue is whether Charles-Henri is leaving Roxy because she wasn't a good enough wife. It seems likely that this is a question that troubles Roxy herself, although she doesn't have the courage to ask it directly. It soon becomes obvious, however, that Charles-Henri has acted in an indefensible manner. He is an empty man, no one we need take seriously. And yet the question remains, did Roxy fail as a woman? (After all, she married him in the first place; why didn't she see his weakness?)

What does this mean? I think we can approach the issue of "wiles and arts" in two ways.  At first glance we might, along with Isabel, assume these wiles and arts only about pursuing a man. But at a second glance they are really about the art of living rather than the art of seduction. And here we have the real theme of the novel: Isabel, faced with French culture, has to treat the art of living as a serious moral issue and she has somehow avoided that before coming to France.

Revisiting an old favourite

Le Divorce is a good novel that is a little frustrating because it could have been a great novel. The New York Times review when the book first came out 20 years ago sums it up nicely:

As the tension mounts, more and more people get things backward until the plot veers into melodrama that seems a bit outsize for the scale of the events that lead to it. The novel's other minor flaws are too many loose ends and too many false portents, although these may be a part of the paranoia that prevails when two cultures misunderstand each other.

Where Ms. Johnson never loses her touch is in tracking Isabel's romance with the French.

And that is why you might want to read it. The events of the novel are interesting at the beginning but too too much at the end. But Isabel, well, she's a gem.

It's easy to romanticize France all out of proportion. You can even do it with Quebec that is a lot closer to home. The thing that is wonderful about them is an attitude towards sexuality, an atitude towards women's sexuality.

Isabel starts off by not getting it. Here is how it comes up. She meets a woman named Janet Hollingsworth, "a ruined-looking American beauty who told me she was writing a book about French women." And what Isabel thinks Janet is interested in is this, "I gathered she meant things about fascination, sex, arts of seduction, but she did not say so, may have been talking about culinary secrets, or perhaps all of the above." And then follows Isabel's judgment on Janet:

To tell the truth, I was sorry to see an Anglo-Saxon so convinced that women need wiles and arts, and that the only quarry worth hunting was men. I told myself that she had spent too much time on the Continent, and had thus missed the modern mood of self-sufficiency and of being loved for yourself, or not—of being in any case without duplicity.

Johnson has given us plenty of reason not to trust this judgment. That it starts with "to tell the truth" is the first hint and "I told myself" the second. Isabel is no piker when it comes to duplicity. As we shall soon, Isabel definitely thinks men are a quarry worth hunting even if not the only. "Only" only set up a false dichotomy.

The deeper issue, I think, is the notion of being "loved for yourself". That strikes me as an empty and mildly narcissistic pursuit.

More to come ...

John Thorpe's taste in novels

Predictably, John Thorpe claims no interest in novels except as an opportunity to brag. He cannot bring himself to care about anything but guy stuff and has so little sensibility about his companion's interests as to miss everything that signifies to her, to use an Austen expression.

Equally predictably, what he does say about novels is shown to be ignorant bluster.

Still, what happens here is not random:

Catherine, humbled and ashamed, was going to apologize for her question, but he prevented her by saying, “Novels are all so full of nonsense and stuff; there has not been a tolerably decent one come out since Tom Jones, except The Monk; I read that t’other day; but as for all the others, they are the stupidest things in creation.”

(Note the introductory sentence that shows us Thorpe's complete lack of sensibility for Catherine's feelings.)

Now look at the two examples Thorpe gives of what he does like and one he gives of what he does not.

First, there is Tom Jones, a book Austen has lightly mocked earlier in the text and, more importantly, not Richardson. The Fielding-Richardson rivalry was a hot one at this time and Thorpe takes what is, for Austen and, my bias, any perceptive reader, the wrong side.

Second there is The Monk and this is also interesting because Ann Radcliffe despised The Monk. She believed it to be a travesty of everything the Gothic novel was supposed to be and went so far as to write The Italian to demonstrate what ought to be done. Can it be a coincidence that, of all the Gothic novels Mr. Thorpe might have singled out as a favourite, it would be this one? If Austen has such a very negative opinion of Radcliffe, how odd that she would have a character as repulsive as John Thorpe like the book that Radcliffe hated so.

And then what Thorpe does not like:

“No sure; was it? Aye, I remember, so it was; I was thinking of that other stupid book, written by that woman they make such a fuss about, she who married the French emigrant.”

“I suppose you mean Camilla?”

“Yes, that’s the book; such unnatural stuff! An old man playing at see–saw, I took up the first volume once and looked it over, but I soon found it would not do; indeed I guessed what sort of stuff it must be before I saw it: as soon as I heard she had married an emigrant, I was sure I should never be able to get through it.”

“I have never read it.”

“You had no loss, I assure you; it is the horridest nonsense you can imagine; there is nothing in the world in it but an old man’s playing at see–saw and learning Latin; upon my soul there is not.

Camilla is not any Frances Burney novel, it is the Frances Burney novel in which she bows to the growing fashion and incorpoartes a little mystery and terror. Again, this is a rather funny choice for Thorpe to mock.

The days of the week

Carol Burnett used to do a parody of the soap opera Days of our Lives that she called The Days of the Week. It was a parody driven by pure love. Burnett loved the show and even appeared on it.

If Northanger Abbey is a burlesque of anything it is a burlesque by someone who loved novels, even somewhat dubious novels. I'm only the 9 millionth person to cite this I'm sure but here goes anyway:

“And what are you reading, Miss — ?” “Oh! It is only a novel!” replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. “It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda”; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.

Austen didn't think all novels met this standard but she thought a lot of them did, including a few we don't hold in such high regard today. Such as, for example, Sir Charles Grandison, the least read of Richardson's works but a favourite of both Catherine Morland's mother and her creator.

Yes, novels

Back to Northanger Abbey and to chapter five where Miss Austen writes:

... they were still resolute in meeting in defiance of wet and dirt, and shut themselves up, to read novels together. Yes, novels; for I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel–writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding — joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust. Alas! If the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard?

For a long time television worked the same way. Characters on television shows in my youth never watched television themselves and there was never any evidence that they even owned one. Nowadays, of course, we regard novels as a higher form of art than television (although there is a growing dissent on this) but they were often-criticized for being base and corrupting at the time Austen was writing.

And God bless Jane Austen, she read a lot of trash. I like her for that; and not just because I started on Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys myself.

Janet Todd called Austen's reading habits promiscuous* and that is a good way to put it.



* She actually described Austen as "reading promiscuously".