Jane Austen vs. Samuel Richardson

Damn. It is Sept 18.

It has been a busy month so far. Chapter 18 has not written itself, and no one else has appeared to write it, so I suppose I have to. I got several thousand words into it and then was unavoidably detained.

I have been slowly reading Pamela, though, in my spare time, and what a piece of work it is! First published in 1740, more than 30 years before Jane Austen was born, and a literary sensation in its day, it inspired Henry Fielding to write at least two parodies of it, Shamela and Joseph Andrews. (Tom Jones is in some sense also an answer to Pamela, though also much more, so that might be considered a third one.)

At the outset, I have to agree with Samuel Johnson, who said that you would hang yourself if you read Richardson for story. Clarissa keeps the suspense alive through hundreds of pages with its shifting points of view and deepening sense of foreboding and doom, but the reader has no such luck with Pamela. Once she comes back to Mr. B and agrees to marry him, her former would-be rapist, she spends many pages rejoicing in how happy she is and praying that she will be worthy enough for him. Great for her, but tedious reading, except as a reminder of the important lesson that conflict is the engine of plot. Once you have a happy ending, it is time to stop telling the story.

On the other hand, there are many interesting elements scattered like bread crumbs along the way. I am struck by how in both Pamela and Clarissa so much discussion and energy is expended on writing itself:

On paper and ink and quills and wafers hidden in various locations so they will not be found and confiscated, on letters concealed under stones and in walls and sewn in clothing against discovery. On letters stolen and forged. On the notion of writing as an act of self-assertion and even defiance by women, highly intelligent women in a society that seemed to place little value on intelligent women. What can he mean by it, I wonder as I read. What sort of person was he, really, to be so interested in such questions?

Richardson is also clearly obsessed with confinement, power (including the power of beauty) and rape. Here again, I cannot help wondering what sort of person he was. His personal demons seem to be left like smeary fingerprints all over his works.

And that is the big difference between him and Jane Austen, never mind all the other differences, because as many times as I read her, I can't really seem to find her. The challenge of being a clever woman surrounded by dolts; yes, it is reasonable to suppose she must have faced that problem, and it is one experienced by Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, Elizabeth Bennet, Emma Woodhouse and Anne Elliot in their different ways.

But to suppose that Jane Austen felt she was smarter than many people around her is not really a brilliant piece of literary detective work. What else? You search and come up empty. And you return wistfully, to the words of Virginia Woolf:

Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. That was how Shakespeare wrote, I thought, looking at ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA; and when people compare Shakespeare and Jane Austen, they may mean that the minds of both had consumed all impediments; and for that reason we do not know Jane Austen and we do not know Shakespeare, and for that reason Jane Austen pervades every word that she wrote, and so does Shakespeare.

Jane Austen, Secret Revolutionary

To readers in 2009 coming to her for the first time, Jane Austen's style of telling a story seems old-fashioned and quaint, lacking many elements that we expect in modern fiction, featuring characters whose situations seem strikingly unlike situations we would ever find ourselves in. But we need only read a few of Austen's contemporaries to see how innovative she actually was, how consistently she rejected many of the cliches of fiction in her own era, and even of some eras to follow. It's probably because I have just finished reading The Italian, with a plot as creaky and sputtery as an old Fiat, but I feel compelled to take a brief survey of what is conspicuous by its absence:

Coincidence as a plot element. True, chance encounters sometimes advance the action, but, as in Anne Elliot running into Wentworth at a pastry shop in Bath, they are never incidents that seem particularly unlikely.

Orphans of unknown parentage who turn out to be the children of someone significant to the plot. There is Harriet Smith, but wonderfully, we never learn whose child she is.

Garrulous, comic servants who slow the action down by telling long tales. Though I associate this with Cervantes, you will also find them in Fielding, Radcliffe and Edgeworth. Not to mention Dickens. The closest we get to a garrulous servant in Austen is the manservant of the Dashwoods, who shares with his employers his news of encountering Mr. Ferrars and his new wife, Lucy. It's worth reviewing what a masterpiece of economy that scene is, and admiring how effectively it keeps the suspense alive in a way that is tricky without actually being deceptive.

Fainting. "Run mad, if you chuse, but do not faint!" is the advice one heroine of the Juvenilia gives to another, and it is advice the authoress seems to have followed. Marianne Dashwood comes close to swooning, in her dreadful encounter with Willoughby in London. But doesn't. No one else I can think of ever faints, despite much provocation.

Bondage. Not a single character, with the exception of the unfortunate Eliza, lost love of Colonel Brandon's youth, is ever forced into an unwanted marriage, or forced into a carriage and carried off to a convent or a brothel. No one is ever even urged into an unwanted marriage, except perhaps Elizabeth Bennet, to Mr. Collins, by her mother, and that is played for laughs.

Supernatural elements. There really aren't any, except in Catharine Morland's imagination. No ghosts. No ominous portents, no shadows, no sinister monks, haunted houses or groans in the night.

Lost and found. No one loses a fortune and regains it, unless we count the widowed Mrs. Smith, who with Wentworth's help manages to regain control of her previously encumbered West Indian properties and thus raise herself from penury to a modest condition of self-sufficiency. No one's child or parent, thought to be dead, re-emerges at the end of the book, to great dramatic effect.

Her readers in 1813 might be just as baffled by Jane Austen as her readers in 2009, but in a different way. To them, perhaps, all these missing elements might make the novels seem strangely stark, passionless and dry. Certainly their lack annoyed the heck out of Charlotte Bronte.

Thus, although Jane Austen was in her personal conduct, and apparently in her political views, to the extent that we know them, conservative with a small c, it is fair to say she was wild at heart where literary conventions were concerned. I cannot help wondering how she would have turned out if she had been born into Fanny Burney's family. Or Mary Wollestonecraft's.