Tuesday
Yesterday I wrote about how Angus Fletcher, in his work about literature’s “greatest inventions,” argues that Fielding invented romantic irony as a way to “ward off heartbreak.” Fletcher then claims that Jane Austen took romantic irony to a new level.
The problem with Fielding’s literary solution, Fletcher says, is that alternating back and forth “had yielded a half romance and a half dose of medicine.” That’s why, he believes, Tom Jones was only half as popular as Samuel Richardson’s heart-breaking Clarissa. What he needed, if he wanted to stay with his brand of irony, was a style that would allow him to be “entirely romantic and entirely ironic.” While this sounds impossible, Fletcher says that Austen pulled it off.
Her solution was “free indirect discourse,” what the French call “le style indirect libre.” Such a style involves entering into the minds of characters without the author directly signaling he or she is doing so (thus the “indirect”). An example from Madame Bovary is famous because it was used in a public indecency trial. Emma Bovary is reflecting on her adulterous liaison:
But when she saw herself in the glass she wondered at her face. Never had her eyes been so large, so black, of so profound a depth. Something subtle about her being transfigured her. She repeated, “I have a lover! a lover!” delighting at the idea as if a second puberty had come to her. So at last she was to know those joys of love, that fever of happiness of which she had despaired! She was entering upon marvels where all would be passion, ecstasy, delirium.
The prosecution argued that the passage is Flaubert celebrating adultery. The defense, in response, said that these are Emma’s thoughts, not Flaubert’s. The court acquitted Flaubert but found the style guilty of misleading people.
Of course we, who are well familiar with this style now (think Hemingway), have no difficulty in sorting things out.
Fletcher admits that Austen didn’t invent free indirect discourse. He cites an instance of it 2000 years ago in the Roman author Horace. Chaucer, meanwhile, uses indirect irony to masterful comic effect in Canterbury Tales. Fletcher, however, claims that Austen was the first to write “ironic romance that inspires us to care about its characters. Or in other words, a satiric love story that genuinely touches our heart.”
(Actually, Chaucer gets me to care for the Wife of Bath. But, okay, not in a love story way.)
Austen uses the free indirect style most extensively in Emma. Check out the following example (cited by Fletcher) where we are informed that Emma’s beloved governess has just gotten married:
Sorrow came—a gentle sorrow—but not at all in the shape of any disagreeable consciousness.—Miss Taylor married. It was Miss Taylor’s loss which first brought grief.
Of course, it is only Emma who is sorrowful. Fletcher notes that, in the novel, there are “hundreds of these light pivots toward Emma’s personal sentiments.”
As always, Fletcher provides us with the neurological effects of this new literary technique:
[A]s Austen discovered, we’re perfectly capable of experiencing irony and love simultaneously. That’s because irony and love exist in different parts of our brain. Irony occurs in the perspective-taking circuitry of our outer cortex…, while love dwells in the inner emotion zones of our amygdala. So by focusing our cortex and our amygdala on different narrative objects, literature can inspire a neural mix of wry perspective and romantic feeling.
This, Fletcher contends, is very healthy for us:
The resulting cortex-amygdala blend draws us into experiencing an intimate human connection alongside a wry detachment from the greater world. Which is to say: it opens our heart to other people without duping us into mistaking our own desires for the laws of reality.
The ultimate result of reading Austen, Fletcher goes on to say, is that doing so eliminates
the friction and resentment that come from expecting our loved ones to be perfectly in sync with our own desires. And you might even say that it carries us a step closer to true love. Because isn’t that what true love is? Forgetting our self-involved fantasies to embrace a different heart?
I have two things to add to Fletcher’s literary history. First, he reports that, early in life when she was being courted by Tom Lefroy, both she and Tom loved Tom Jones. It was this love of a satiric romance that prompted Austen to innovate with indirect style. Yet I have always understood that Austen far preferred Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison, which isn’t ironic at all. Indeed, in Northanger Abbey, she makes the loutish John Thorpe a Tom Jones fan while both the heroine and her sensible mother prefer Grandison.
Thorpe undoubtedly likes Tom’s drinking, womanizing, and possibly dueling whereas Grandison does none of these things. And in fact, the heroes in Jane Austen’s novels are generally more like Grandison, the villains more like Tom (only without Tom’s good heart). Thus, we see a preference for Tilney over Thorpe, Darcy over Wickham, Brandon over Willoughby, and Edmund Bertram over Henry Crawford. Maybe Austen’s own heartbreak over Lefroy led her to treat romance somewhat satirically. And if she and Lefroy, like Marianne and Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility, read Cowper and Sir Walter Scott together, maybe that’s she satirizes those poets later in her fiction. Maybe Jane Austen was Marianne until she had her heart broken.
And speaking of romance without a hint of satire, Fletcher says that one of the most famous instances of “Samuel Richardson’s swoon-inducing offspring” is Jane Eyre. With this in mind, Charlotte Bronte’s comments on Austen are revealing. When an admirer of both Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice persuaded Bronte to read P&P, she got back the comment, “A carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden with neat borders and delicate flowers. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen in their elegant but confined houses.”
In Bronte’s mind, Austen plays it too safe. Ironic distance allows one to do that. At the same time, I can imagine Austen shuddering at Jane’s unbridled passion, how she at one point turns Rochester into her god. (How Austen would respond to Catherine Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights, meanwhile, is beyond imagining.) At times, Jane Eyre and Catherine Earnshaw are reckless in the way the way that Marianne Dashwood is reckless. Catherine dies and Marianne and Jane almost do.
So yes, Austen could well have invented “valentine armor” as a way to stave off a broken heart. Perhaps it’s even a way to have love and protection at the same time. But one loses something when one guards the heart, which may be why Charlotte Bronte doesn’t care for Austen.
I, on the other hand, feel blessed that I can turn to both authors. It all depends on whether I’m more in the mood for all-out romance or romantic comedy.
Bonus example of Austen’s free indirect style: My favorite line in all of Jane Austen provides us with a great example. In Sense and Sensibility, by getting disinherited, Edward Ferrars and Elinor Dashwood are able to escape having to live “on the best terms imaginable” with Mrs. Ferrars, John and Fanny Dashwood, and Lucy (Steele) and Robert Ferrars, all of them execrable people. Telling us what happens to them all in the future, Austen simultaneously takes us into their perspective and provides us with a satiric laugh:
They settled in town, received very liberal assistance from Mrs. Ferrars, were on the best terms imaginable with the Dashwoods; and setting aside the jealousies and ill-will continually subsisting between Fanny and Lucy, in which their husbands of course took a part, as well as the frequent domestic disagreements between Robert and Lucy themselves, nothing could exceed the harmony in which they all lived together.
I can hear more than one of the characters saying that “nothing can exceed the harmony of how we live together.” Of course, “setting aside” is doing some heavy lifting here.
