A certain kind of story (2)

If I am right, and, obviously, I think I am, then the people who say "What Would Jane Do?" are missing the point. For the real lesson Austen wants to teach us is not how to make particular moral decisions but how to live a certain kind of story. (I'd even say that one of the most satisfying things about reading Austen is that she shows us how we can expect to make bad moral decisions while still living the right sort of life.)

Elsewhere I have talked about being a certain kind of person but, I hope it is now clear, being a certain kind of person is the same thing as being the heroine of a certain kind of story.

And let me take you back:

No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be an heroine.

This is getting way ahead of the story but ...

A fairly obvious objection here is to say, "Well of course Catherine Morland and the other Austen heroines live a certain kind of life but that is because they have Jane Austen behind the curtain pulling the levers for them."

And Jane Austen would say, "Well yes but I do believe that Anne Eliot would have been the same heroine even if she'd not been able to marry in the end. That particular lever I pulled wouldn't change the person I tell this story about if I had left the lever unpulled." And Miss Austen is too modest to point it out but she herself is proof of this. Better to not marry at all, as she advised others, than to settle for any marriage but the right kind.

That, as long as I am going on about it, is why some of us think the last three books are so far superior to the first three. All of them allow for the vicissitudes of life. Jane Austen writes them out to their comedic finish but she lets us see enough that we can imagine a different ending; imagine an ending that is not so dramatically satisfying, and perhaps not as satisfying for the heroine either, but an ending that meets the moral requirements of a happy and well-lived life.

Are our feelings reliable? (2)

Here I think two threads cross. The question of whether our feelings, our taste, our sentiments are really reliable has something to do with beauty being an achievement.

We tend to think of beauty as being something that has an independent existence. Mont Blanc is not beautiful because I make an effort to see its beauty. It just is and most people would argue there was something wrong with me if I can't see it.

But if Mont Blanc is sublime rather than beautiful, what is beauty then? I mean, if the sublime is the word for the sort of thing that has power—something that just hits me when I see it and is even a little terrifying if I get right close to it—then how do I respond to beauty?

On this account the "beauty" of Ava Gardner is something more like the sublime.

The sort of beauty that Austen writes about is not something that just happens to people, it is something within human reach. And Austen reaches over a bit for the word "pretty" for Catherine Morland.) And we can reach from both sides. We can achieve beauty and we can see it, but only if we have properly developed taste.

The picturesque and the moral

There is an old photographers' joke that goes as follows:

One photographer tells another that his plane flew over a woman trapped on an ice floe on which she had written out the word "help" in her own blood. The second photographer asks the first what he did about it. The first replies by telling which camera he used, how he framed the shot and what f-stop and shutter speed he used.

Okay, it's an old joke and not very funny anymore. It does draw out an interesting issue about the picturesque. It matters what a picture is of. If, like Wordsworth, we construct a picture of a man whose son has died sitting all day long so consumed by grief that he is unaware of anything happening, we have to ask our self why exactly is this issue beautiful or even sublime.

In addition to the question of taste, there is a moral and pragmatic question. Austen doesn't touch on it here but she will in Sense and Sensibility.

Are our feelings reliable?

That is a pretty normal question for us moderns. We think of feelings as coming from inside, welling up uncontrollably in response to some outward stimulus. We might worry about controlling our feelings and we might worry about whether we can trust them; anyone who has seen children play will know that children have feelings of jealousy and anger that often work against their best interest.

We don't imagine feeling as being something we should cultivate, as something we have to learn to have in the first place. Some people in the last half of the 18th century, and first half of the 19th, thought we have to learn to cultivate our feelings. Others disagreed and thought all this sentimentalism was a bad thing, especially for men; they were a little more likely to tolerate it in women.

Some people have read Austen as belonging to the anti-sensibility camp (with some encouragement from her family who were very keen to associate her with anti-sentimental thinkers such as Samuel Johnson). Others have seen her as part of the modified sensibility camp; that is they see her as arguing that sense needs to be controlled or even subjugated by sense.

As I hope is clear, I think both those views are wrong. I think the character Isabella shows us what goes wrong when a character does not have sensibility and that Catherine shows us what the challenges a young woman learning to develop her sensibility faces.

But how can we trust these sensibilities? The answer to this is to develop the right kind of sensibility along with other virtues. And what is the right kind of sensibility? It is the sort of sensibility that a certain kind of heroine has?

Want to keep going?

Okay, how do we recognize this heroine? We will recognize her because her life is a certain kind of story.

Miseducation of Catherine Morland (4)

Last time for that sentence:

They were viewing the country with the eyes of persons accustomed to drawing, and decided on its capability of being formed into pictures, with all the eagerness of real taste.

We now can have no doubt, the crack about "real taste" is meant to be ironic and note who and what the irony is targeting.

First it is aimed at the Tilneys, particularly at Henry Tilney. Arch he may be but that won't get him off the hook here; he contributes to Catherine's miseducation. He will do more by building up the Gothic horrors of Northanger Abbey in Catherine's imagination in book 2.

Second, Austen is commenting on the way the picturesque can distort our feelings. More on this later but a devotion to the picturesque is often a sign of moral shallowness in Austen. For my purposes right now the important thing is that Austen is not picking on Ann Radcliffe here. The disconnection is not complete; the picturesque does play a part in Radcliffe, not surprisingly for, like Catherine Morland, she never had been to the places she discusses in her books. But it is not reading that book that is confusing Catherine here—it is learning about the picturesque from Henry that does the job.

Miseducation of Catherine Morland (3)

I want to stick with that sentence:

They [the Tilney's] were viewing the country with the eyes of persons accustomed to drawing, and decided on its capability of being formed into pictures, with all the eagerness of real taste.

That last phrase, "with all the eagerness of real taste" is intriguing. That wording suggests irony. Austen does not say, "with real taste"; what she says suggests that they are doing something that resembles real taste but is not.

One interesting, and simple example of picturesque principles is that the best view is up the hill. You can prove this for yourself by taking a picture up a hill and then from the top. No matter how wonderful the view from the top of the hill, the view up usually makes a better picture. And so Catherine's education requires her to learn this. Here she is before Henry's lectrure on the picturesque:

She knew nothing of drawing -- nothing of taste: and she listened to them with an attention which brought her little profit, for they talked in phrases which conveyed scarcely any idea to her. The little which she could understand, however, appeared to contradict the very few notions she had entertained on the matter before. It seemed as if a good view were no longer to be taken from the top of an high hill, and that a clear blue sky was no longer a proof of a fine day.

And here she is afterward:

Catherine was so hopeful a scholar that when they gained the top of Beechen Cliff, she voluntarily rejected the whole city of Bath as unworthy to make part of a landscape.

This entire section of the walk is recounted by the narrator so we can be clear that it is Jane Austen who is being arch here and not Henry Tilney.

Miseducation of Catherine Morland (2)

The next step in Catherine's miseducation comes courtesy of Henry Tilney who, along with his sister, has begun to analyze the landscape on their country walk in picturesque terms. Amd here we are on the edge of pretty deep water because the picturesque is a big subject generally and it is a big subject for Austen in particular.

A whole lot of speculation, much of it much more intelligent and well-informed than I could hope to be, has gone into determining where Miss Austen stood on big philosophical questions of her day. Was she opposed to romanticism or partly in line with and partly opposed? Was she a Burkean? Had she read Shaftesbury? All, as I say, interesting stuff but we can be absolutely certain that Austen had views about the picturesque as we find it discussed directly here in Northanger Abbey, again in Sense and Sensibility, in Pride and Prejudice, in Emma and in Mansfield Park. There may even be a passage in Persuasion that I have not found yet.

For now, let's just note one of the most wonderful sentences Austen wrote, and she wrote lots of wonderful sentences:

They [the Tilney's] were viewing the country with the eyes of persons accustomed to drawing, and decided on its capability of being formed into pictures, with all the eagerness of real taste.

Let's stop and teach ourselves to suck eggs for a bit. "Capability" is a fascinating word choice because its use in association with landscape would have had contemporary readers thinking of "Capability" Brown, a landscape architect famous or infamous, depending on your taste, for improving on nature. Among those who valued the picturesque or the sublime in nature, Capability Brown was despised. Austen linking him here with the picturesque is yoking two contradictory notions together.

Is she just playing with us or is she suggesting that the two are not that different and that the education Henry and Eleanor Tilney are giving Catherine is a distortion. That framing the sublime is to mold and falsify nature every bit as much as Brown's landscapes?

Miseducation of Catherine Morland (1)

Much, but not all (a point I will return to) of Catherine's sentimental miseducation come from reading the Mysteries of Udolpho. In the first half of the book, we see her beginning with real life experiences and then rethinking them in terms she has picked up from reading Gothic novels.

Chapter 11 of bk 1 for example. Catherine is hoping that the weather will clear up so she can take a country walk with Henry and Miss Tilney:

"There, it is twenty minutes after twelve, and now I shall give it up entirely. Oh! That we had such weather here as they had at Udolpho, or at least in Tuscany and the south of France! -- the night that poor St. Aubin died! -- such beautiful weather!"

Not surprisingly, just a few pages later she is seeing her visit to Blaize Castle as a chance to experience the fictional world she has just wished for:

To feel herself slighted by them was very painful. On the other hand, the delight of exploring an edifice like Udolpho, as her fancy represented Blaize Castle to be, was such a counterpoise of good as might console her for almost anything.

When she finally does get her country walk with Henry and his sister she compares the countryside with the landscape of Udolpho:

They determined on walking round Beechen Cliff, that noble hill whose beautiful verdure and hanging coppice render it so striking an object from almost every opening in Bath.

"I never look at it," said Catherine, as they walked along the side of the river, "without thinking of the south of France."

"You have been abroad then?" said Henry, a little surprised.

"Oh! No, I only mean what I have read about. It always puts me in mind of the country that Emily and her father travelled through, in The Mysteries of Udolpho. "

Her reading is changing teh way she looks at the world.

Sentimental education

One of the interesting things that is going on through this book is that Catherine Morland is getting a sentimental education. The books she is reading are teaching her how to respond. And sensibility is all about responsiveness.

Think about stress, which is a modern word we use to describe one kind of sensibility. Suppose I want to reduce my stress. What can I do? One approach would be to avoid stress causing situations. I'll give up driving, change my job to one with less pressure, avoid people whom I diasgree with &c.

Another approach is to treat the way I react. This approach says that stress is not the car that cuts me off on the road but the way I react to it. Now I can't just decide not to get upset. What I can do is train myself to respond differently. Every day I can slowly train myself not to shout at other drivers, not to get riled up. It will take work but it can be done.

Sentimental education works a lot like this and one of the things that is going on in the background is that Catherine's reading experiences are training her to respond in certain ways.

What is interesting in this book is that we learn far more about the sorts of sentimental education that are not helpful than the kind that are (we have to wait for Sense and Sensibility for the latter).

Sensibility

It took me a while to get this out because I don't have a whole lot that is new to say on the subject. A good modern word for sensibility might be "responsive".

And while sensibility is not a purely erotic phenomenon, a good way to get a handle on sensibility is to think of it as analogous to sexual responsiveness. You might say that a person incapable of sensibility has the same disadvantages in relating to the world as a person who is incapable of responding sexually has in relating to their spouse. Which is to say, it can be done and is done but not nearly as well as people who do have the ability to respond can do.

This analogy works because sexual responsiveness is part of sensibility and anyone who is paying attention to what goes on in Austen will see that this erotic responsiveness is a key part of the characters of Catherine Morland, Elinor and Mariann Dashwood and Elizabeth Bennett.

Sensibility is a virtue but it needs other virtues to balance it.

Although it is a virtue it can easily be characterized so that it looks like narcissism. For related reasons, what is only narcissism and nothing more (see Isabella Thorpe and Lydia Bennett) can be disguised so as to look like sensibility.

Meanwhile in another part of the conversation

At the same time that Austen is getting digs in at Richardson, we have a fair amount of "sensibility" going on. And when Catherine finally does meet a man who arouses her sensibility, it is interesting what exactly he does to arouse it. He speaks with her:

There was little leisure for speaking while they danced; but when they were seated at tea, she found him as agreeable as she had already given him credit for being. He talked with fluency and spirit — and there was an archness and pleasantry in his manner which interested, though it was hardly understood by her.

Catherine is seventeen, an age in which young women and young men are not really sure what they want but they do want it very badly whatever it is.

The cynic will say, what it's no mystery at all, they want sex. I don't think so. Sex is always avilable to a seventeen year old girl, of course, although it might mean having sex with some Roman Polanksi like creep, but most want something else. Love? Eros? Something we don't have a word for?

And speaking of sensibility

Lo and behold, after mentioning these rather old examples of poetry doesn't the issue of sensibility immediately come up:

She had reached the age of seventeen, without having seen one amiable youth who could call forth her sensibility; without having inspired one real passion, and without having excited even any admiration but what was very moderate and very transient.

And here I can't help pointing out that this, the very first reference to sensibility in all Austen, has a clear sexual connotation.

What is sensibility for Austen? The more I read, the more complex it seems. The only thing I'm (mostly) sure of is that sensibility is a virtue and all the Austen heroines seem to have it, although perhaps Emma a little less. But Catherine Morland, both Dashwood girls, Elizabeth, Fanny all have it.