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.

The Secret of the Castle Rackrent

Daisy: Are you in love with me? [...] Or why did I have to come alone?"

Nick: "That's the secret of Castle Rackrent. Tell your chauffeur to go far away and spend an hour."

Daisy: "Come back in an hour, Ferdie." Then in a grave murmur, "His name is Ferdie."



Why does F. Scott Fitzgerald reference Maria Edgeworth's c.1800 work at the point when Nick invites his cousin to meet her long-lost love, Jay Gatsby? Had F.S.F. ever, in fact, read "Castle Rackrent," or did he just like the way it sounded? Not being an F.S.F. scholar, I have no idea.

I think I was riffing on F. Scott Fitzgerald, or just grasping at straws, at one point early in "The Jane Austen Project" when I needed Rachel and Liam to have something to read and I gave them "Castle Rackrent," as being of the era. I knew should go back and read it, since they had, but it took me a while to do so, probably because I was so busy with "Clarissa." Finally, I have.

It is, not to put too fine a point on it, God-awful. Trying to be funny (I guess) but failing. I don't think Liam would have tolerated it, since it is packed with insulting and stereotypical observations about the Irish, and we know he is sensitive about these things. For good measure, there is also an insulting, stereotypical portrait of a Jew (or a "Jewish," as the narrator refers to her) -- truly there is something to offend everyone in this brief work!

Being no stranger to literary irony, and informed by the introduction that Maria Edgeworth, though born British, lived much of her life in Ireland and apparently liked it. I have struggled to overcome my initial reaction to this work, but without success.

It is also, I learn from a cursory Google survey, one of the first works of fiction to feature an unreliable narrator, a device I am partial to and which ought to win me over, except it doesn't. A theme of the work that has struck some modern scholars is that of female imprisonment. A more prominent theme, though less academically fashionable, is the feckless nature of the Ango-Irish landowners, who squander their fortunes in drink, gambling, frivolous lawsuits and excessive entertainment, sucking their tenants dry while their estates fall into hopeless disrepair. Being in every way horribly un-British, in other words: The antithesis of restraint, order, duty, Empire, self-effacement and what Mr. Knightley would do.

Thinking about it this way, I find myself returning to "The Great Gatsby." Perhaps the reference is not so random. F. Scott Fitzgerald, of Irish descent himself and heir to the stereotypical Irish vices of drink and extravagance, is reminiscent of many characters in "Castle Rackrent." His eponymous Gatsby gives wild parties, much like Sir Patrick O'Shaughlin, the first of the doomed inhabitants of Castle Rackrent. A stereotypical Jew even wanders through the novel, too, in the person of Meyer Wolfsheim (whose human-molar cuff links have always stuck in my memory when so many more useful facts have been forgotten). Gatsby's mansion, like the Castle Rackrent, stands as a monument to hubris and excess even after its living residents have departed.