Thursday
Apparently there’s a new book out by an 89-year-old, one Ruth Wilson, that is right up my line: The Jane Austen Remedy: It is a truth universally acknowledged that a book can change a life (Allen and Unwin, 2022). A recent article by Wilson in The Guardian (credit to Rebecca Adams for the alert) gives us some insight into her thinking. There she writes,
Thanks to a rereading of Jane Austen’s fiction I have experienced a rejuvenation of spirit and energy that has transformed my life. Re-reading for the sheer pleasure of Austen’s language and characters when I experienced some depression in my 60s initiated a process that became more serious as I continued to re-read the novels in my 70s and became more and more curious about the relationship between reading, learning and the imagination.
In the process of writing The Jane Austen Remedy, Wilson said that she experienced
waves of exhilaration while my level of wellbeing soared beyond anything I had previously known. While writing the memoir, reading, writing, and rereading occupied my days and gave them added meaning.
I love the way she sees reflecting on what she reads and rereads to be an integral part of the process. To be sure, Wilson wasn’t entirely surprised. She reports that she has been
a “reading and response reader” since childhood, feeling my way into books and emerging sometimes as a different person; often a happier one, having experienced the sweetness and usefulness of literature described by the Roman poet Horace.
She then quotes Louise Rosenblatt, an early reader response theorist with whom I should be more familiar. I totally buy what Wilson takes from Rosenblatt:
From the beginning I was reading in spirals, a concept devised by the reading theorist, Louise Rosenblatt. She imagines a series of arcs as readers shift their attention from the words on the page to their own reservoir of experiences and memories; then back to the words before continuing with a deeper sense of engagement.
In the literature assignments I give my students, I use a sandwich rather than a spiral analogy but the idea is the same: use the two slices of bread (the introduction and conclusion) to introduce and conclude the personal associations triggered by the work, I tell them, while using the ham and cheese portion to explore the work. It’s important to keep the parts of the sandwich somewhat separate, I add, because one needs to give each its own voice. One doesn’t want to make the work a subset of the life or the life a subset of the work; there must be a dialogue between the two. Once there is, however, remarkable insights almost always emerge.
Because a reader changes over time, that means the insights will also change upon rereading a work. Wilson shares some instances of this happening. For example:
Vivian Gornick, novelist and literary critic, recalls her responses to the novel Sons and Lovers at different ages: reading D. H. Lawrence’s coming-of-age story in her late teens she identified with Miriam, young Paul Morel’s virginal girlfriend. In her thirties, following a failed marriage and the discovery of her own sexuality, she identified with Paul’s erotic mistress. And later still she identified with a more mature Paul, the male protagonist who learns the value of self-scrutiny and embarks on a quest for self-knowledge.
Wilson notes that this has happened with her as well. As a result of reading and rereading Jane Austen’s novels, she reports that they
have offered me the richness and complexity required to help me re-assess where I am in my life, the quality of my relationships past and present, and the values at stake in my life choices.
For instance, here’s how the meaning of Pride and Prejudice has changed for Wilson over time:
When I read Pride and Prejudice at the age of 15, I read it as a domestic comedy; I loved the Bennet sisters because they were lively and, for all their bickering, they were having fun. The girls bore with their mother’s nerves and tolerated their father’s sarcasm without giving way to resentment. That helped me as an adolescent.
Rereading the same novel in my 30s when I was assailed by ambivalent feelings about where I was in my life I put my attention elsewhere. I paid serious attention to the nature of intimacy, considering whether prudence should override passion as Mrs Gardner counsels her niece Elizabeth; or whether I could reconcile myself to Charlotte Lucas’s view that happiness in marriage is a matter of chance.
At the age of 90 (almost!) I reread, ponder and console myself with Elizabeth Bennet’s words, “till this moment I never knew myself.” This is the moment I have been waiting for.
In my case, my favorite Jane Austen novel keeps changing. Early on, it was Pride and Prejudice and then it was Persuasion. Currently it is Emma, partly because I find it a more profound exploration than, say, Pride and Prejudice of how, even when (in our arrogance) we screw up, we can recover if we remain in integrity.
While I don’t think I’ll ever list Mansfield Park as my favorite, my appreciation for Fanny Price has steadily grown over the years.
One reason I love Continuing Education courses is that elderly students have a far different take on works than do young adults of college age. As a result, I too learn new things from the works.
And then there is the way that works mean different things to readers from different epochs. Reception theorist Hans Robert Jauss eloquently captures this phenomenon in the following passage:
A literary work is not an object which stands by itself and which offers the same face to each reader in each period. It is not a monument which reveals its timeless essence in a monologue. It is much more like an orchestration which strikes ever new chords among its readers and which frees the text from the substance of the words and makes it meaningful for the time…A literary work must be understood as creating a dialogue…
The dialogue, we learn from Wilson, can have you feeling young at 89.