Jane Austen and the didactic novel: 'Northanger Abbey', 'Sense and sensibility' and 'Pride and prejudice'

in wonder at Austen's ability to transcend such limitations. Linguistic and historical approaches to Austen share one great advantage: they do not encourage assertions of her limitations. Instead, they register even more fully than earlier criticism the depth of her moral seriousness. Formerly, to assert Austen's limitations had been so conventional among her critics that in 1963, Ian Watt could write that 'the enduring problem of Jane Austen criticism' is the problem of 'scale versus stature; the slightness of the matter and the authority of the manner' . 6 Recent critics reject this view of the 'matter' as slight, most convincingly by reaffirming that the world Austen describes is the one we live in, and that she makes this world 'luminous' with meaning. 7 My own view is similar: Austen's limits are those of ordinary life and thus render her work immediate, compelling, powerful, and significant to a degree unequalled elsewhere. Like the historical critics, I approach the literary techniques which shape Austen's early novels, and the artistic development visible in them, through eighteenth-century models which influence or are reflected in Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, and Pride and Prejudice. I differ from many modern critics in considering Austen's intentions primarily didactic. Nineteenth-century critics do speak of Austen as a didactic novelist, but in passing. The best of them rather assume than explicate Austen's intentions to instruct her readers. 8 Some modern critics also suggest that Austen intends to educate her audience. Among them is David Lodge, who asserts, in his fine study of the vocabulary in Mansfield Park, that 'she puts every generation of readers to school, and in learning her own subtle and exact vocabulary of discrimination and evaluation, we submit to the authority of her vision, and recognize its relevance to our own world of secularized spirituality' . 9 Austen's readers learn more, however, than a 'vocabulary of discrimination' from Mansfield Park or the other novels. Austen educates her readers' judgments and sympathies. to She intends to instruct and to refine the emotions along with the perceptions and the moral sense. This intention was shared by many of her predecessors in the novel, but none of them anticipates her success, partly because they lack her genius, but also because received ideas about literature, its function, and especially its effect on readers did not encourage the development in the novel of literary conventions which could genuinely delight and instruct. 11 J. M. S. Tompkins' excellent study of the popular novel in the late eighteenth century documents these received ideas about the functions of literature, ideas which were applied with special zeal to novels, and she concludes: 'The champions of the novel ... took up for the most part the old utile dulei line of defence that had served Sidney to vindicate Austen rejects perfect heroines because they create emotional and moral responses precisely the reverse of edifying, except, of course, when heroines are so lifeless and conventional as to evoke simply and automatically approving response. Austen is very conscious that an honest (not stock) response to perfection is likely to be annoyance and spite rather than emulation -unless the pictures of perfection are handled brilliantly, as she does Mr Knightley in Emma, her attractive and completely successful 'answer' to Richardson's inhumanly perfect Sir 'romantic' presUppOSitiOnS about emotion and its expression which permit Marianne to disregard Elinor's feelings are still prevalent enough to have encouraged many modern readers to be as unjust to Elinor as Marianne is. Their injustice fully attests the unruliness of judgment and sympathy, acknowledged and exposed by Austen in Sense and Sensibility even as she attempts to correct it in her readers. As responses to literature and to life, judgment and sympathy are not merely more significant than the suspense and distress examined in Northanger Abbey: they are immeasurably more complex and intractable. Recognizing this, Austen continues to refine and to extend her techniques for exercising the reader's responses. Pride and Prejudice therefore occupies an especially significant place in her development. It is a completely successful and even triumphant achievement in itself. It effects a transition between the concerns, themes and techniques of Austen's own early novels and the more difficult and subtle ones of Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion. And, finally, its relations to Burney's Cecilia and Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison show why Austen liked these novelists so well and what she learned from them. Austen's admiration for Cecilia and particularly for Grandison is well documented but largely unaccountable to most critics, who content themselves with a few remarks in passing. Yet Pride and Prejudice assimilates the design of Cecilia (an attempt to examine, in a comic, nonepistolary narrative, 'how differently pride ... operates upon different minds')21 and the central concern of Grandison (an attempt to manipulate and educate the reader's first impressions of character) to the theme first sounded in Sense and Sensibility: the attempt to educate judgment and sympathy. The intentions of Pride and Prejudice are far more complex than those of any previous Austen novel, and its techniques necessarily reflect this greater complexity. In Pride and Prejudice, Austen exploits even more fully the technique of contrast which sufficed for the themes of Sense and Sensibility, and she adopts or develops in addition certain other techniques visible in Cecilia and Grandison. One such technique deserves special consideration. Both Cecilia and Grandison show traces of an overall structural principle which I call 'linear irony': the action is organized so as to reverse or undercut the main characters' expectations or judgments and the reader's as well. 22 The importance of linear irony to the structure of Pride and Prejudice cannot be exaggerated. The reversal in Elizabeth's opinion of Darcy which provides the novel's obvious and overall structure also provides details in structure, for Elizabeth's judgments are reversed or undercut throughout. Elizabeth's wit and charm are so disarming, however, that the reader is characters talk about this process while it is actually occurring. These new techniques allow Austen a treatment of Elizabeth Bennet and of the reader which exposes the fallibility of judgment and humbles pride in it, while insisting that it be exercised nonetheless. Linear irony, especially, depends for its effect on engaged, not suspended, judgment, and all Austen's techniques deliberately make suspension of judgment difficult. The structures which contain the comedy of manners undermine those impressions and judgments which the comedy has invited. The reader's judgment is as chastened at the end as Elizabeth's. Yet this subversive treatment of judgment is not cynical. Elizabeth's pride of judgment is humbled, as is the reader's, but judgment is educated and refined in the process. And however serious the issues, the tone is genial. In Pride and Prejudice, Austen succeeds brilliantly (where her Jan Fergus's work examines Jane Austen's early novels, specifically *Northanger Abbey*, *Sense and Sensibility*, and *Pride and Prejudice*. The book argues that these novels are significant for understanding Austen's achievements, as they openly display their themes and draw from eighteenth-century literary models. Fergus contends that Austen's approach to emotional didacticism and her rejection of perfect characters set her apart from her predecessors, allowing her to educate readers' judgments and sympathies effectively. Front Matter....Pages i-ix Introduction....Pages 1-10 Northanger Abbey....Pages 11-38 Sense and Sensibility....Pages 39-60 Pride and Prejudice and its Predecessors....Pages 61-86 Pride and Prejudice....Pages 87-120 Conclusion The Later Novels....Pages 121-149 Back Matter....Pages 150-162